hitecture 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 u