Great buildings often have great doors; but great doors are heavy to
swing, and if left open they may let in too much cold or glare; so that
we sometimes observe a small postern cut into one leaf of the large
door for more convenient entrance and exit, and it is seldom or never
that the monumental gates yawn in their somnolence. Here is the modest
human scale reasserting itself in the midst of a titanic structure, but
it reasserts itself with an ill grace and in the interests of frailty;
the patch it makes seems unintended and ignominious.
Yet the human scale is not essentially petty; when it does not slip
in as a sort of interloper it has nothing to apologize for. Between
the infinite and the infinitesimal all sizes are equally central.
The Greeks, the Saracens, the English, the Chinese, and Japanese
instinctively retain the human scale in all that part of their work
which is most characteristic of them and nearest to their affections.
A Greek temple or the hall of an English mansion can be spacious and
dignified enough, but they do not outrun familiar uses, and they lend
their spaciousness and dignity to the mind, instead of crushing it.
Everything about them has an air of friendliness and sufficiency; their
elegance is not pompous, and if they are noble they are certainly not
vast, cold, nor gilded.
The Saracens, Chinese, and Japanese in their various ways use the
human scale with even greater refinement, for they apply it also in a
sensuous and psychological direction. Not only is the size of their
works moderate by preference, like their brief lyrics, but they exactly
meet human sensibility by a great delicacy and concentration in design
and a fragrant simplicity in workmanship. Everything they make is
economical in its beauty and seems to say to us: "I exist only to be
enjoyed; there is nothing in me not merely delightful," Here the human
scale is not drawn from the human body so much as from the human soul;
its faculties are treated with deference--I mean the faculties it
really has, not those, like reason, which a flattering philosophy may
impute to it.
An English country house which is a cottage in appearance may turn
out on examination to be almost a palace in extent and appointments;
there is no parade, yet there is great profusion--too much furniture,
too many ornaments, too much food, too many flowers, too many people.
Everything there is on the human scale except the quantity of things,
which is oppressive. The Orientals are poorer, more voluptuous, and
more sensitive to calligraphy; they leave empty spaces about them and
enjoy one thing at a time and enjoy it longer.
One reason for this greater subtlety and mercifulness in the art of
Orientals is perhaps the fiercer assault made on their senses by
nature. The Englishman lives in a country which is itself on the human
scale, clement at all seasons, charming with a gently inconstant
atmospheric charm. The rare humanity of nature in his island permeates
his being from boyhood up with a delight that is half sentimental,
half physical and sporting. In his fields and moors he grows keen
and fond of exertion; there too his friendships and his estimates of
men are shaped unawares, as if under some silent superior influence.
There he imbibes the impressions that make him tender to poetry. He
may not require great subtlety in his poets, but he insists that their
sentiment shall have been felt and their images seen, and while the
obvious, even the shamelessly obvious, does not irritate him, he hates
cheap sublimity and false notes. He respects experience and is master
of it in his own field.
Thus the empty spaces with which a delicate art likes to surround
itself are supplied for the Englishman by his comradeship with nature,
his ranging habits, and the reticence of his imagination. There the
unexpressed dimension, the background of pregnant silence, exists for
him in all its power. For the Saracen, on the contrary, nature is an
abyss: parched deserts, hard mountains, night with its overwhelming
moon. Here the human scale is altogether transgressed; nature is cruel,
alien, excessive, to be fled from with a veiled face. For a relief and
solace he builds his house without windows; he makes his life simple,
his religion a single phrase, his art exquisite and slight, like the
jet of his fountain. It is sweet and necessary that the works of man
should respect the human scale when everything in nature so infinitely
transcends it.
Why the Egyptians loved things colossal I do not know, but the taste
of the Romans for the grandiose is easier to understand. It seems to
have been part and parcel of that yearning for the super-human which
filled late antiquity. This yearning took two distinct directions.
Among the worldly it fostered imperialism, organization, rhetoric,
portentous works, belief in the universality and eternity of Rome,
and actual deification of emperors. Among the spiritually-minded it
led to a violent abstraction from the world, so that the soul in its
inward solitude might feel itself inviolate and divine. The Christians
at first belonged of course to the latter party; they detested the
inflation of the empire, with its cold veneer of marble and of
optimism; they were nothing if not humble and dead to the world. Their
catacombs were perforce on the human scale, as a coffin is; but even
when they emerged to the surface, they reduced rather than enlarged
the temples and basilicas bequeathed to them by the pagans. Apart
from a few imperial structures at Constantinople or Ravenna their
churches for a thousand years kept to the human scale; often they were
diminutive; when necessary they were spread out to hold multitudes,
but remained low and in the nature of avenues to a tomb or a shrine.
The centre was some sombre precinct, often subterranean, where the
inward man might commune with the other world. The sacraments were
received with a bowed head; they did not call for architectural vistas.
The sumptuousness that in time encrusted these sanctuaries was that
of a jewel--the Oriental, interior, concentrated sumptuousness of the
cloistered arts. Yet the open-air pagan tradition was not dead. Roman
works were everywhere, and not all in ruins, and love of display and
of plastic grandiloquence lay hardly dormant in the breast of many.
It required only a little prosperity to dispel the mystical humility
and detachment which Christianity had brought with it at first; and the
human scale of the Christian Greeks yielded at the first opportunity
to the gigantic scale of the Romans. Spaces were cleared, vaults were
raised, arches were made pointed in order that they might be wider and
be poised higher, towers and spires were aimed at the clouds, usually
getting only half way, porches became immense caverns. Brunelleschi
accomplished a _tour de force_ in his dome and Michelangelo another in
his, even more stupendous. These various strained models, straining in
divergent directions, have kept artists uneasy and impotent ever since,
except when under some benign influence they have recovered the human
scale, and in domestic architecture or portrait painting have forgotten
to be grand and have become felicitous.
The same movement is perhaps easier to survey in philosophy than in
architecture. Scarcely had Socrates brought investigation down from
the heavens and limited it to morals--a realm essentially on the human
scale--when his pupils hastened to undo his work by projecting their
moral system again into the sky, denaturalizing both morals and nature.
They imagined a universe circling about man, tempering the light for
his eyes and making absolute his childlike wishes and judgements. This
was humanism out of scale and out of place, an attempt to cut not the
works of man but the universe to human measure. It was the nemesis that
overtook the Greeks for having become too complacently human. Earlier
the monstrous had played a great part in their religion; henceforth
that surrounding immensity having been falsely humanized, their modest
humanity itself had to be made monstrous to fill its place.
Hence we see the temples growing larger and larger, the dome
introduced, things on the human scale piled on one another to make a
sublime fabric, like Saint Sophia, triumphal arches on pedestals not
to be passed through, vain columns like towers, with a statue poised
on the summit like a weathercock, and finally doors so large that they
could not be opened and little doors had to be cut in them for men to
use. So the human scale turned up again irrepressibly, but for the
moment without its native dignity, because it had been stretched to
compass a lifeless dignity quite other than its own.
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