The Rhythm of Life and other Essays | Page 9

body, springing, poised, upon its fine ankles and narrow feet, never
stands without implying and expressing life. It is the leg that first
suggested the phantasy of flight. We imagine wings to the figure that is
erect upon the vital and tense legs of man; and the herald Mercury,
because of his station, looks new-lighted. All this is true of the best leg,
and the best leg is the man's. That of the young child, in which the
Italian schools of painting delighted, has neither movement nor
supporting strength. In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot,
with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives the precious
instability, the spring and balance that are so organic. But man should
no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths of
piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid. Inexpressive
of what they clothe as no kind of concealing drapery could ever be,
they are neither implicitly nor explicitly good raiment. It is hardly
possible to err by violence in denouncing them. Why, when a bad
writer is praised for 'clothing his thought,' it is to modern raiment that
one's nimble fancy flies--fain of completing the beautiful metaphor!

The human scenery: yes, costume could make a crowd something other
than the mass of sooty colour--dark without depth--and the
multiplication of undignified forms that fill the streets, and demonstrate,
and strike, and listen to the democrat. For the undistinguished are very
important by their numbers. These are they who make the look of the
artificial world. They are man generalised; as units they inevitably lack
something of interest; all the more have they cumulative effect. It
would be well if we could persuade the average man to take on a
certain human dignity in the clothing of his average body.
Unfortunately he will be slow to be changed. And as to the poorer part
of the mass, so wretched are their national customs--and the
wretchedest of them all the wearing of other men's old raiment--that
they must wait for reform until the reformed dress, which the reformers
have not yet put on, shall have turned second-hand.

THE UNIT OF THE WORLD

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