The Unit Of The World

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Title:     The Unit Of The World
Author: Alice Meynell [More Titles by Meynell]

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. 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. Oscar Wilde remarks with truth: Nature is not man's lacquey, and has no preoccupation about his more commonplace comforts. These he gives himself indoors; and who prizes, with any self-respect, the things carefully provided by self-love? But when that _farouche_ Nature, who has never spoken to him, and to whom he has never had the opportunity of hinting his wishes or his tastes--when she reveals the suggestions of his form and the desire of his eyes, and amongst her numberless purposes lets him surprise in her the purpose to accord with him, and lets him suspect further harmonies which he has not yet learnt to understand--then man becomes conscious of having received a token from her lowliness, and a favour from her loveliness, compared with which the care wherewith his tailor himself has fitted him might leave his gratitude cool.

[The end]
Alice Meynell's essay: The Unit Of The World

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