CH. IV THE LAMP OF BEAUTY 179

I am quite sure that any person familiar with natural objects will never be surprised at any appearance of care or finish in them. That is the condition of the Universe. But there is cause both for surprise and inquiry whenever we see anything like carelessness or incompletion: that is not a common condition; it must be one appointed for some singular purpose. I believe that such surprise will be forcibly felt by any one who, after studying carefully the lines of some variegated organic form, will set himself to copy with similar diligence those of its colours. The boundaries of the forms he will assuredly, whatever the object, have found drawn with a delicacy and precision which no human hand can follow. Those of its colours he will find in many cases, though governed always by a certain rude symmetry, yet irregular, blotched, imperfect, liable to all kinds of accidents and awkwardnesses. Look at the tracery of the lines on a camp shell, and see how oddly and awkwardly its tents are pitched. It is not indeed always so: there is occasionally, as in the eye of the peacock’s plume, an apparent precision, but still a precision far inferior to that of the drawing of the filaments which bear that lovely stain; and in the plurality of cases a degree of looseness and variation, and, still more singularly, of harshness and violence in arrangement, is admitted in colour which would be monstrous in form. Observe the difference in the precision of a fish’s scales and of the spots on them.

§ 38. Now, why it should be that colour is best seen under these circumstances I will not here endeavour to determine; nor whether the lesson we are to learn from it be that it is God’s will that all manner of delights should never be combined in one thing. But the fact is certain, that colour is

admiring it or understanding it must be a comprehension of the laws of formation and of the forces to be resisted; that all forms are thus either indicative of lines of energy or pressure or motion, variously impressed or resisted, and are therefore exquisitely abstract and precise. Variegation, on the contrary, is the arbitrary presence or absence of colouring matter, and the beauty is more in the colour than the outline. Hence stains, blotchings, cloudings, etc., in marble, on skins, and so on, and their beauty of irregularity. Impossibility of imitation, even in this bizarrerie, except by great freedom of hand, and then imperfectly.”

With the last sentence, cf. the passage from the MS. on p. 181 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]