days about a perfect type as was the fashion at one time; and certainly 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 much the perfect regularity of shape and balance in the features that charms us, not the things that belong to an ideal type, but rather the subtle variations from this type that are individual to the particular head we are admiring.  A perfect type of head, if such could exist, might excite our wonder, but would leave us cold.  But it can never exist in life; the slightest movement of the features, which must always accompany life and expression, will mar it.  And the influence of these habitual movements on the form of the features themselves will invariably mould them into individual shapes away from the so-called perfect type, whatever may have been nature’s intention in the first instance.