PROPORTION IN rESTHETICS, the relative size and form of the several parts of any object which conveys the most pleasing effect to the eye and satisfies the mind as to its adaptedness to its evident use: also, applicable to groups of associated objects in their harmonious juxtapositions. The effort to find some invariable law of proportion for all objects, like those which are used in the exact sciences, is not likely to succeed, and springs rather from the desire to have a creed iu art than a principle. The snow flake crystal is an illustration of perfect proportion and perfect symmetry; but snow forms an infinitude of utterly dissimilar crystals, so that, were we to endeavor to fix upon the perfect snoW-crystal, or the law of proportion in the perfect snow-crystal, we should meet the difficulty that runs through all nature—that the laws will be as numer ous as the subjects which they govern. Therefore, each subject is "a law unto itself." An approximation to a principle of proportion may be made in many things by our experience in comparing the pleasure we receive from one series of proportion rather than another, and the evidence which we have that one proportion is better adapted to its work than another. It is a branch, therefore, of comparative anatomy in which all the things of the universe are to be analytically examined to find the reason for the sensations which they produce in the mind. A German writer, A. Zeising, has assumed a principle of proportion as of universal applicability, viz., that the several parts of objects must be to each other in proportions like a line divided into two parts, of which the shorter shall be to the longer as the longer is to the whole; or, stated in another way, so that the larger part of any body shall be a mean between its smaller part and its entirety. The application is made to the human form, and it is not difficult to fix upon points of division so as to make the parts conform to the rule and seem to show its invariability. The rule may be of value in the arts, but it falls far short of being a general law of beauty of proportion. Observe the wide diversity of tree' forms. We derive lively sensations of beauty from all their diveise variety of proportions. By what stretch of ingenuity can we apply that law to govern their proportions that will not be contra dicted by half of those forms which give equal pleasure? A broad-beaded low elm full of grace, symmetry, and strength; a palm in the tropics, with a slender tuft of waving leaves near its lolly summit; the young elm of the forest border, tall and picturesque and as unlike its mature type as possible; evergreen trees that sweep the ground with great breadth of pendant branches diminishing to a spiry top; and trees of the same family that rear columnal trunks of immense magnitude to carry a small top.— in all these wide diversities of proportion the mind is impressed equally with the beauty of proportion of each separate type. Our esthetic perceptions of proportion
are intellectual. They exact that the thing which we admire must be proportioned to its use. The broad-branching elm has grace and beauty not derived from the value of its shade, yet we instinctively recognize the merit of its breadth of shade and credit it with better proportions as it fulfills this use. The young elm of the forest border, with its straggling thrifty shoots pushing wildly about as what form of tree they were created to make, affording little shade and less symmetry, is never theless pleasing by its picturesqueness. "It is out of all proportion" some might say. But, more intelligently viewed, it is animate with the growth peculiar to its youth. The student and lover of trees finds it a charming specimen; a perfectly proportioned young elm,—much as a physician speaks of a child at birth as a perfectly proportioned child, though the proportions would be hideous if maintained to maturity. The statue of Hercules in the garden of the Tuileries is a marvelously well-proportioned, but abnormal development of the muscular system; but it is a monstrosity if made to repre sent a normal man. Take, for instance, the figure of a dancing-girl with the vigor of life and action rendered by modern sculptors. The combination of grace, muscular force, and mental nerve exhibited are such that any ordinary observer will be struck with its beauty of proportion, its supreme life-fullness. But what is the instinct in the unreason ing man which tells him, at a glance, that that work is perfect in its proportion? It is that there is concentrated in one figure before him all the possibilities of beauty and power and activity which he has seen now and then around him all his life, but not in one form before. Let a savage stand before a statue of a muscular Hercules and lie will he at once and powerfully impressed with its perfection, and would he very worship it as a god. But place him before a spiritual conception in sculpture of some high moral attribute only, and he will show little sense of its beauty of proportion. proportion is not a fixed rule of form, but an impression on the mind according to the quality of the mind itself, and to the objects whose impression the mind has been educated to take. The machinist who studies the mechanism of pumps will see beau ties of proportion in the parts of a machine that the sewing-machine man could not see, and vice versa. Outside of our own kind no animal interests so much by its beauty and proportions as the horse. Ask a London dray-man to select the most finely proportioned horse, and he will in all probability select for his model a dray horse. Ask the hunter to .d(:) the same, it will be the finest hunting-horse; the turfman, a racer; and the highland boy will choose a shaggy pony. This again shows that our education molds the rule of proportion in every case.