Proportion

Proportion is the governing principle of the interior, the face, the musical phrase, and the well-set paragraph. It is the relation of parts to the whole that produces the sense of rightness — the recognition that things are as they should be.

Wharton and Codman make proportion the first concern of interior design: proportion is the good breeding of architecture. A room's proportions — ceiling height, window placement, the ratio of wall to opening — determine what the room can hold. Decoration that violates these proportions cannot be rescued by the excellence of the individual pieces. The room must be proportioned correctly before anything else can be decided.

The practical implication: a large room can carry large ornament; a small room cannot. Scale is a discipline, not a preference. The failure to observe proportion produces the common suburban error: the large sofa in the small sitting room, the small lamp on the large table, the curtains that do not reach the floor. Each is a violation of proportion that no quality of material can correct.

Proportion in dress is the relation of garment to body, and of the elements of an outfit to one another. The well-proportioned outfit has nothing to add and nothing to subtract. The addition of the wrong accessory — the third accent in a composition that required two — violates proportion as surely as the wrong ornament in the wrong room.

Dariaux's principle of discretion — one accent before eight, never three — is a principle of proportion applied to the dressed body.

Musical proportion is the relation of phrase to phrase, section to section, the duration of tension to the duration of its resolution. Scruton's argument that tonal music is not a convention but a natural extension of the harmonic series is, in part, an argument about proportion: tonality provides the scaffolding within which musical proportion can be perceived.

Scruton's aesthetic philosophy treats proportion as one of the primary sources of the experience of beauty. The beautiful thing has been got right — its parts are in the right relation to one another and to the whole. This is why the experience of beauty often carries a sense of necessity: not that it could not have been otherwise, but that, having been seen, it could not be improved.

Proportion is what restraint produces over time. The disciplined wardrobe, the resolved room, the educated ear — all are arriving, through practice, at a sense of proportion: the recognition of when something is right, and when it is not, and why.