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 arc