The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

of a second pleasure.  One of these swift and fruitful experiences
visited him with the saying--grown popular through him--that an architect
should have a knowledge of anatomy.  There is assuredly a germ and a
promise in the phrase.  It delights us, first, because it seems to
recognise the organic, as distinct from the merely constructive,
character of finely civilised architecture; and next, it persuades us
that Vitruvius had in truth discovered the key to size--the unit that is
sometimes so obscurely, yet always so absolutely, the measure of what is
great and small among things animate and inanimate.  And in spite of
themselves the architects of St. Peter's were constrained to take
something from man; they refused his height for their scale, but they
tried to use his shape for their ornament.  And so in the blankest dearth
of fancy that ever befel architect or builder they imagined human beings
bigger than the human beings of experience; and by means of these, carved
in stone and inlaid in mosaic, they set up a relation of their own.  The
basilica was related to the colossal figure (as a church more wisely
measured would have been to living man), and so ceased to be large; and
nothing more important was finally achieved than transposal of the whole
work into another scale of proportions--a scale in which the body of man
was not the unit.  The pile of stones that make St. Peter's is a very
little thing in comparison with Soracte; but man, and man's wife, and the
unequal statures of his children, are in touch with the structure of the
mountain rather than with that of the church which has been conceived
without reference to the vital and fundamental rule of his inches.
Is there no egotism, ministering to his dignity, that man, having the law
of the organism of the world written in his members, can take with him,
out of the room that has been built to accord with him, into the
landscape that stands only a little further away?  He has deliberately
made the smoking chair and the table; there is nothing to surprise him in
their ministrations.  But what profounder homage is rendered by the
multitudinous Nature going about the interests and the business of which
he knows so little, and yet throughout confessing him!  His eyes have
seen her and his ears have heard, but it would never have entered into
his heart to conceive her.  His is not the fancy that could have achieved
these woods, this little flush of summer from the innumerable flowering
of grasses, the cyclic recreation of seasons.  And yet he knows that he
is imposed upon all he sees.  His stature gives laws.  His labour only is
needful--not a greater strength.  And the sun and the showers are made
sufficient for him.  His furniture must surely be adjudged to pay him but
a coarse flattery in comparison with the subjection, yet the aloofness,
of all this wild world.  This is no flattery.  The grass is lumpy, as Mr.