The quarrel of Art with Nature goes on apace.The painters have long been talking of selecting, then of rejecting, or even, with Mr.
Whistler, of supplanting.And then Mr.Oscar Wilde, in the witty and delicate series of inversions which he headed 'The Decay of Lying,' declared war 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 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.
