Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/21

 their highest models? In those discolored and broken marbles chiselled nigh three thousand years ago in Greece. All that we have since learned does but teach us the more forcibly that these illustrate the eternal laws of beauty.

These laws are those of geometry.

"You don't mean to make this a treatise on the higher mathematics?"

Heaven forbid. There is no such matter in our thoughts. But we do want to say in reply to those stupid philosophizers who can see nothing absolute in the ideal of beauty, that the curves and outlines of perfect human figures can be geometrically constructed by the rule of harmonic ratio; that they can be derived from the laws of the vibration of a monochord; that they are, therefore, as much in a strait-jacket of mathematics as are the notes of a musical instrument; that all this and a great deal more to the purpose has been proven by the researches of an English writer whose name is D. R. Hay, and that—

But enough, or we shall strike the very rock we are steering to avoid, and overwhelm ourselves in a sea of technicalities. Let it only be remembered that personal beauty is a harmony of form and color quite as severely regulated by mathematical formulæ, yet capable of quite as infinite variations as that other harmony we call music.

"What is Beauty?" someone once asked Goethe.