ise the tints of the rainbow to produce a dingy grey, as a
medium or central colour; why, then, should he neutralise all features,
forms, etc., to produce an insipid monotony? He does not indeed consider
his theory of beauty as applicable to colour, which he well understood,
but insists upon and literally enforces it as to form and ideal
conceptions, of which he knew comparatively little, and where his
authority is more questionable. I will not in this place undertake to
show that his theory of a middle form (as the standard of taste and
beauty) is not true of the outline of the human face and figure or other
organic bodies, though I think that even there it is only one principle
or condition of beauty; but I do say that it has little or nothing to
do with those other capital parts of painting, colour, character,
expression, and grandeur of conception. Sir Joshua himself contends that
'beauty in creatures of the same species is the medium or centre of
all its various forms'; and he maintains that grandeur is the same
abstraction of the species in the individual. Therefore beauty and
grandeur must be the same thing, which they are not; so that this
definition must be faulty. Grandeur I should suppose to imply something
that elevates and expands the mind, which is chiefly power or magnitude.
Beauty is that which soothes and melts it; and its source, I apprehend,
is a certain harmony, softness, and gradation of form, within the limits
of our customary associations, no doubt, or of what we expect of certain
species, but not independent of every other consideration. Our critic
himself confesses of Michael Angelo, whom he regards as the pattern of
the great or sublime style, that 'his people are a superior order of
beings: there is nothing about them, nothing in the air of their actions
or their attitudes, or the style or cast of their limbs or features,
that reminds us of their belonging to our own species. Raffaelle's
imagination is not so elevated; his figures are not so much disjoined
from our own diminutive race of beings, though his ideas are chaste,
noble, and of great conformity to their subjects. Michael Angelo's works
have a strong, peculiar, and marked character: they seem to proceed from
his own mind entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant that he
never needed, or seemed to disdain to look abroad for foreign help.
Raffaelle's materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure
is his own.(1) How does a