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.
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