The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

with all the irresponsibility naturally attending an act so serious.  He
seems to affirm that Nature is less proportionate to man than is
architecture; that the house is built and the sofa is made measurable by
the unit measure of the body; but that the landscape is set to some other
scale.  'I prefer houses to the open air.  In a house we all feel of the
proper proportions.  Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper
sense of human dignity, is absolutely the result of indoor life.'
Nevertheless, before it is too late, let me assert that though nature is
not always clearly and obviously made to man's measure, he is yet the
unit by which she is measurable.  The proportion may be far to seek at
times, but the proportion is there.  Man's farms about the lower Alps,
his summer pastures aloft, have their relation to the whole construction
of the range; and the range is great because it is great in regard to the
village lodged in a steep valley in the foot hills.  The relation of
flower and fruit to his hands and mouth, to his capacity and senses (I am
dealing with size, and nothing else), is a very commonplace of our
conditions in the world.  The arm of man is sufficient to dig just as
deep as the harvest is to be sown.  And if some of the cheerful little
evidences of the more popular forms of teleology are apt to be baffled,
or indefinitely postponed, by the retorts that suggest themselves to the
modern child, there remains the subtle and indisputable witness borne by
art itself: the body of man composes with the mass and the detail of the
world.  The picture is irrefutable, and the picture arranges the figure
amongst its natural accessories in the landscape, and would not have them
otherwise.
But there is one conspicuous thing in the world to which man has not
served as a unit of proportion, and that one thing is a popularly revered
triumph of that very art of architecture in which Mr. Oscar Wilde has
confidence for keeping things in scale.  Human ingenuity in designing St.
Peter's on the Vatican, has achieved this one exception to the universal
harmony--a harmony enriched by discords, but always on one certain scale
of notes--which the body makes with the details of the earth.  It is not
in the landscape, where Mr. Oscar Wilde has too rashly looked for
contempt and contumely, but in the art he holds precious as the minister
to man's egotism, that man's Ego is defied.  St. Peter's is not
necessarily too large (though on other grounds its size might be liable
to correction); it is simply out of relation to the most vital thing on
the earth--the thing which has supplied some secret rod to measure the
waves withal, and the whales, the sea-wall cliffs, the ears of wheat, the
cedar-branches, pines and diamonds and apples.  Now, Emerson would
certainly not have felt the soft shock and stimulus of delight to which
he confesses himself to be liable at the first touch of certain phrases,
had not the words in every case enclosed a promise of further truth and