There is however another character of artificial productions, to which
these terms have partial reference, which it is of some importance to
note, that of finish, exactness, or refinement, which are commonly
desired in the works of men, owing both to their difficulty of
accomplishment and consequent expression of care and power (compare
Chapter on Ideas of Power, Part I. Sect, i.,) and from their greater
resemblance to the working of God, whose "absolute exactness," says
Hooker, "all things imitate, by tending to that which is most exquisite
in every particular." And there is not a greater sign of the
imperfection of general taste, than its capability of contentment with
forms and things which, professing completion, are yet not exact nor
complete, as in the vulgar with wax and clay and china figures, and in
bad sculptors with an unfinished and clay-like modelling of surface, and
curves and angles of no precision or delicacy; and in general, in all
common and unthinking persons with an imperfect rendering of that which
might be pure and fine, as church-wardens are content to lose the sharp
lines of stone carving under clogging obliterations of whitewash, and as
the modern Italians scrape away and polish white all the sharpness and
glory of the carvings on their old churches, as most miserably and
pitifully on St. Mark's at Venice, and the Baptisteries of Pistoja and
Pisa, and many others; so also the delight of vulgar painters in coarse
and slurred painting, merely for the sake of its coarseness,[29] as of
Spagnoletto, Salvator, or Murillo, opposed to the divine finish which
the greatest and mightiest of men disdained not, but rather wrought out
with painfulness and life spending; as Leonardo and Michael Angelo, (for
the latter, however many things he left unfinished, did finish, if at
all, with a refinement that the eye cannot follow, but the feeling only,
as in the Pieta of Genoa,) and Perugino always, even to the gilding of
single hairs among his angel tresses, and the young Raffaelle, when he
was heaven taught, and Angelico, and Pinturicchio, and John Bellini, and
all other such serious and loving men. Only it is to be observed that
this finish is not a part or constituent of beauty, but the full and
ultimate rendering of it, so that it is an idea only connected with the
works of men, for all the works of the Deity are finished with the same,
that is, infinite care and completion: and so what degrees of beauty
exist among them can in no way be dependent upon this source, inasmuch
as there are between them no degrees of care. And therefore, as there
certainly is admitted a difference of degree in what we call chasteness,
even in Divine work, (compare the hollyhock or the sunflower with the
vale lily,) we must seek for it some other explanation and source than
this.
Sec. 5. Moderation, its nature and value
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