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Intentions

by Oscar Wilde · English · Gutenberg #887 · 353,294 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Intentions

Author: Oscar Wilde


        
Release date: April 1, 1997 [eBook #887]
                Most recently updated: October 26, 2014

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/887

Credits: Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen and Co edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTENTIONS ***


Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen and Co edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                                INTENTIONS


                                    BY
                               OSCAR WILDE

                                * * * * *

                            METHUEN & CO. LTD.
                           36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
                                  LONDON

                                * * * * *

                _First Published_, _at 1s. net_, _in 1913_

                                * * * * *

_This Book was First Published_                        _1891_
_Second Edition_                                       _1894_
_First Published_ (_Third Edition_) _by Methuen        _1908_
and Co._
_Fourth Edition_                                       _1909_
_Fifth Edition_                                        _1911_

                                * * * * *

                                DEDICATED
                                    TO
                                MRS. CAREW
                                    BY
                      THE AUTHOR’S LITERARY EXECUTOR

                                * * * * *




CONTENTS

                                 PAGE
THE DECAY OF LYING                  1
PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON            57
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST               95
THE TRUTH OF MASKS                221




THE DECAY OF LYING:
AN OBSERVATION


                  _A DIALOGUE_.  _Persons_: _Cyril and_
              _Vivian_.  _Scene_: _the Library of a country_
                       _house in Nottinghamshire_.

CYRIL (_coming in through the open window from the terrace_).  My dear
Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library.  It is a perfectly
lovely afternoon.  The air is exquisite.  There is a mist upon the woods,
like the purple bloom upon a plum.  Let us go and lie on the grass and
smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.

VIVIAN.  Enjoy Nature!  I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that
faculty.  People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved
her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful
study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our
observation.  My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less
we care for Nature.  What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of
design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely
unfinished condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as
Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.  When I look at a
landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects.  It is fortunate for us,
however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art
at all.  Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature
her proper place.  As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure
myth.  It is not to be found in Nature herself.  It resides in the
imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at
her.

CYRIL.  Well, you need not look at the landscape.  You can lie on the
grass and smoke and talk.

VIVIAN.  But Nature is so uncomfortable.  Grass is hard and lumpy and
damp, and full of dreadful black insects.  Why, even Morris’s poorest
workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature
can.  Nature pales before the furniture of ‘the street which from Oxford
has borrowed its name,’ as the poet you love so much once vilely phrased
it.  I don’t complain.  If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would
never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.
In a house we all feel of the proper proportions.  Everything is
subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.  Egotism
itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is
entirely the result of indoor life.  Out of doors one becomes abstract
and impersonal.  One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.  And then
Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative.  Whenever I am walking in
the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle
that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch.
Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.  Thinking is the
most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die
of any other disease.  Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is
not catching.  Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our
national stupidity.  I only hope we shall be able to keep this great
historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid
that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is
incapable of learning has taken to teaching—that is really what our
enthusiasm for education has come to.  In the meantime, you had better go
back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave me to correct my
proofs.

CYRIL.  Writing an article!  That is not very consistent after what you
have just said.

VIVIAN.  Who wants to be consistent?  The dullard and the doctrinaire,
the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of
action, to the _reductio ad absurdum_ of practice.  Not I.  Like Emerson,
I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’  Besides, my article
is really a most salutary and valuable warning.  If it is attended to,
there may be a new Renaissance of Art.

CYRIL.  What is the subject?

VIVIAN.  I intend to call it ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest.’

CYRIL.  Lying!  I should have thought that our politicians kept up that
habit.

VIVIAN.  I assure you that they do not.  They never rise beyond the level
of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to
argue.  How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank,
fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural
disdain of proof of any kind!  After all, what is a fine lie?  Simply
that which is its own evidence.  If a man is sufficiently unimaginative
to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the
truth at once.  No, the politicians won’t do.  Something may, perhaps, be
urged on behalf of the Bar.  The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its
members.  Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful.  They
can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh
from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries
triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those
clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakeably innocent.  But
they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to
precedent.  In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out.
Newspapers, even, have degenerated.  They may now be absolutely relied
upon.  One feels it as one wades through their columns.  It is always the
unreadable that occurs.  I am afraid that there is not much to be said in
favour of either the lawyer or the journalist.  Besides, what I am
pleading for is Lying in art.  Shall I read you what I have written?  It
might do you a great deal of good.

CYRIL.  Certainly, if you give me a cigarette.  Thanks.  By the way, what
magazine do you intend it for?

VIVIAN.  For the _Retrospective Review_.  I think I told you that the
elect had revived it.

CYRIL.  Whom do you mean by ‘the elect’?

VIVIAN.  Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course.  It is a club to which I
belong.  We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we
meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian.  I am afraid you are not
eligible.  You are too fond of simple pleasures.

CYRIL.  I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits, I
suppose?

VIVIAN.  Probably.  Besides, you are a little too old.  We don’t admit
anybody who is of the usual age.

CYRIL.  Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with each
other.

VIVIAN.  We are.  This is one of the objects of the club.  Now, if you
promise not to interrupt too often, I will read you my article.

CYRIL.  You will find me all attention.

VIVIAN (_reading in a very clear_, _musical voice_).  THE DECAY OF LYING:
A PROTEST.—One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously
commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly
the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.  The
ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the
modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner.
He has his tedious _document humain_, his miserable little _coin de la
création_, into which he peers with his microscope.  He is to be found at
the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up
his subject.  He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but
insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between
encyclopædias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having
drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman,
and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never,
even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself.

‘The lose that results to literature in general from this false ideal of
our time can hardly be overestimated.  People have a careless way of
talking about a “born liar,” just as they talk about a “born poet.”  But
in both cases they are wrong.  Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Pinto
saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the most careful
study, the most disinterested devotion.  Indeed, they have their
technique, just as the more material arts of painting and sculpture have,
their subtle secrets of form and colour, their craft-mysteries, their
deliberate artistic methods.  As one knows the poet by his fine music, so
one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither
case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice.  Here, as
elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection.  But in modern days while
the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if
possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into
disrepute.  Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for
exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic
surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into
something really great and wonderful.  But, as a rule, he comes to
nothing.  He either falls into careless habits of accuracy—’

CYRIL.  My dear fellow!

VIVIAN.  Please don’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence.  ‘He either
falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the
society of the aged and the well-informed.  Both things are equally fatal
to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of
anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty
of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence,
has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than
himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no
one can possibly believe in their probability.  This is no isolated
instance that we are giving.  It is simply one example out of many; and
if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our
monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass
away from the land.

‘Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and
fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively
no other name for it.  There is such a thing as robbing a story of its
reality by trying to make it too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so
inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the
transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of
the _Lancet_.  As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the
makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being
suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he
feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a
footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.  Nor are our other
novelists much better.  Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a
painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of
view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and
caustic satire.  Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but
then he writes at the top of his voice.  He is so loud that one cannot
bear what he says.  Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing
what is not worth finding.  He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm
of a short-sighted detective.  As one turns over the pages, the suspense
of the author becomes almost unbearable.  The horses of Mr. William
Black’s phaeton do not soar towards the sun.  They merely frighten the
sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.  On seeing them
approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect.  Mrs. Oliphant prattles
pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other
wearisome things.  Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the
altar of local colour.  He is like the lady in the French comedy who
keeps talking about “le beau ciel d’Italie.”  Besides, he has fallen into
the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes.  He is always telling us that
to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked.  At times
he is almost edifying.  _Robert Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece—a
masterpiece of the “genre ennuyeux,” the one form of literature that the
English people seems thoroughly to enjoy.  A thoughtful young friend of
ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that
goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and
we can quite believe it.  Indeed it is only in England that such a book
could be produced.  England is the home of lost ideas.  As for that great
and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in
the East-End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they
find life crude, and leave it raw.

‘In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as _Robert Elsmere_
has been produced, things are not much better.  M. Guy de Maupassant,
with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the
few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering
wound.  He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is
ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears.  M.
Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his
pronunciamientos on literature, “L’homme de génie n’a jamais d’esprit,”
is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be
dull.  And how well he succeeds!  He is not without power.  Indeed at
times, as in _Germinal_, there is something almost epic in his work.  But
his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the
ground of morals, but on the ground of art.  From any ethical standpoint
it is just what it should be.  The author is perfectly truthful, and
describes things exactly as they happen.  What more can any moralist
desire?  We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our
time against M. Zola.  It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being
exposed.  But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of
the author of _L’Assommoir_, _Nana_ and _Pot-Bouille_?  Nothing.  Mr.
Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being
like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola’s characters are
much worse.  They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues.
The record of their lives is absolutely without interest.  Who cares what
happens to them?  In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and
imaginative power.  We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an
account of the doings of the lower orders.  M. Daudet is better.  He has
wit, a light touch and an amusing style.  But he has lately committed
literary suicide.  Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle with his “Il
faut lutter pour l’art,” or for Valmajour with his eternal refrain about
the nightingale, or for the poet in _Jack_ with his “mots cruels,” now
that we have learned from _Vingt Ans de ma Vie littéraire_ that these
characters were taken directly from life.  To us they seem to have
suddenly lost all their vitality, all the few qualities they ever
possessed.  The only real people are the people who never existed, and if
a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at
least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.
The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are
what they are, but that the author is what he is.  Otherwise the novel is
not a work of art.  As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the _roman
psychologique_, he commits the error of imagining that the men and women
of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for an
innumerable series of chapters.  In point of fact what is interesting
about people in good society—and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the
Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,—is the mask that each one
of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.  It is a
humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.
In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little
of Falstaff.  The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young
prince his moments of coarse humour.  Where we differ from each other is
purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious
opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like.  The more
one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear.  Sooner
or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too
well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most
depressing and humiliating reality; and if a writer insists upon
analysing the upper classes, he might just as well write of match-girls
and costermongers at once.’  However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain
you any further just here.  I quite admit that modern novels have many
good points.  All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite
unreadable.

CYRIL.  That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I must say that
I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures.  I like _The
Deemster_, and _The Daughter of Heth_, and _Le Disciple_, and _Mr.
Isaacs_, and as for _Robert Elsmere_, I am quite devoted to it.  Not that
I can look upon it as a serious work.  As a statement of the problems
that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated.  It
is simply Arnold’s _Literature and Dogma_ with the literature left out.
It is as much behind the age as Paley’s _Evidences_, or Colenso’s method
of Biblical exegesis.  Nor could anything be less impressive than the
unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so
completely missing its true significance that he proposes to carry on the
business of the old firm under the new name.  On the other hand, it
contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful quotations,
and Green’s philosophy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitter pill of
the author’s fiction.  I also cannot help expressing my surprise that you
have said nothing about the two novelists whom you are always reading,
Balzac and George Meredith.  Surely they are realists, both of them?

VIVIAN.  Ah!  Meredith!  Who can define him?  His style is chaos
illumined by flashes of lightning.  As a writer he has mastered
everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except
tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate.  Somebody
in Shakespeare—Touchstone, I think—talks about a man who is always
breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might
serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith’s method.  But whatever he
is, he is not a realist.  Or rather I would say that he is a child of
realism who is not on speaking terms with his father.  By deliberate
choice he has made himself a romanticist.  He has refused to bow the knee
to Baal, and after all, even if the man’s fine spirit did not revolt
against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite
sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance.  By its means
he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
wonderful roses.  As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of
the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.  The latter he
bequeathed to his disciples.  The former was entirely his own.  The
difference between such a book as M. Zola’s _L’Assommoir_ and Balzac’s
_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and
imaginative reality.  ‘All Balzac’s characters;’ said Baudelaire, ‘are
gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself.  All his
fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams.  Each mind is a weapon loaded
to the muzzle with will.  The very scullions have genius.’  A steady
course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
acquaintances to the shadows of shades.  His characters have a kind of
fervent fiery-coloured existence.  They dominate us, and defy scepticism.
One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de
Rubempré.  It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to
rid myself.  It haunts me in my moments of pleasure.  I remember it when
I laugh.  But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was.  He created
life, he did not copy it.  I admit, however, that he set far too high a
value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of
his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbô_ or
_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de
Bragelonne_.

CYRIL.  Do you object to modernity of form, then?

VIVIAN.  Yes.  It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result.  Pure
modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising.  It cannot help being
so.  The public imagine that, because they are interested in their
immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should
take them as her subject-matter.  But the mere fact that they are
interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art.  The
only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not
concern us.  As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects
us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to
our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live,
it is outside the proper sphere of art.  To art’s subject-matter we
should be more or less indifferent.  We should, at any rate, have no
preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind.  It is
exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an
admirable motive for a tragedy.  I do not know anything in the whole
history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade.
He wrote one beautiful book, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, a book as
much above _Romola_ as _Romola_ is above _Daniel Deronda_, and wasted the
rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public
attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our
private lunatic asylums.  Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all
conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the
poor-law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man
with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of
contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist,
is really a sight for the angels to weep over.  Believe me, my dear
Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and
absolutely wrong.  We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the
vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and
hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside
with Apollo.  Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our
birthright for a mess of facts.

CYRIL.  There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt that
whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely model novel, we have
rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it.  And this is perhaps the
best rough test of what is literature and what is not.  If one cannot
enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at
all.  But what do you say about the return to Life and Nature?  This is
the panacea that is always being recommended to us.

VIVIAN.  I will read you what I say on that subject.  The passage comes
later on in the article, but I may as well give it to you now:—

‘The popular cry of our time is “Let us return to Life and Nature; they
will recreate Art for us, and send the red blood coursing through her
veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong.”
But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meaning efforts.
Nature is always behind the age.  And as for Life, she is the solvent
that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.’

CYRIL.  What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind the age?

VIVIAN.  Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic.  What I mean is this.  If
we take Nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to
self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always
old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date.  One touch of Nature may make
the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of
Art.  If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of
phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to
her.  She has no suggestions of her own.  Wordsworth went to the lakes,
but he was never a lake poet.  He found in stones the sermons he had
already hidden there.  He went moralising about the district, but his
good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry.
Poetry gave him ‘Laodamia,’ and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such
as it is.  Nature gave him ‘Martha Ray’ and ‘Peter Bell,’ and the address
to Mr. Wilkinson’s spade.

CYRIL.  I think that view might be questioned.  I am rather inclined to
believe in ‘the impulse from a vernal wood,’ though of course the
artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of
temperament that receives it, so that the return to Nature would come to
mean simply the advance to a great personality.  You would agree with
that, I fancy.  However, proceed with your article.

VIVIAN (_reading_).  ‘Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely
imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and
non-existent.  This is the first stage.  Then Life becomes fascinated
with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle.
Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and
refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents,
imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable
barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.  The third
stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the
wilderness.  That is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are
now suffering.

‘Take the case of the English drama.  At first in the hands of the monks
Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological.  Then she
enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life’s external forms,
she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more
terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than
lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods,
who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.
To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language
full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence,
or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and
enriched with lofty diction.  She clothed her children in strange raiment
and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its
marble tomb.  A new Cæsar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and
with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river
to Antioch.  Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.
History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the
dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple
truth but complex beauty.  In this they were perfectly right.  Art itself
is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.

‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form.  Even in Shakespeare
we can see the beginning of the end.  It shows itself by the gradual
breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance
given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation.
The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the language is
uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due
to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the
intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be
suffered to find expression.  Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless
artist.  He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s
natural utterance.  He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative
medium she surrenders everything.  Goethe says, somewhere—

    In der Beschränkung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,

“It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,” and the
limitation, the very condition of any art is style.  However, we need not
linger any longer over Shakespeare’s realism.  _The Tempest_ is the most
perfect of palinodes.  All that we desired to point out was, that the
magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within
itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its
strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from
using life as an artistic method.  As the inevitable result of this
substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an
imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama.  The characters
in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they
have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life
and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the
gait, manner, costume and accent of real people; they would pass
unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage.  And yet how wearisome the
plays are!  They do not succeed in producing even that impression of
reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing.
As a method, realism is a complete failure.

‘What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those
arts that we call the decorative arts.  The whole history of these arts
in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its
frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its
dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own
imitative spirit.  Wherever the former has been paramount, as in
Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe
by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative
work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic
conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned
for her delight.  But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting.  Modern
tapestry, with its aërial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad
expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty
whatsoever.  The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable.  We
are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we
have returned to the method and spirit of the East.  Our rugs and carpets
of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane
worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have
become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter.  A cultured
Mahomedan once remarked to us, “You Christians are so occupied in
misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of
making an artistic application of the second.”  He was perfectly right,
and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art
in is not Life but Art.’

And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the
question very completely.

‘It was not always thus.  We need not say anything about the poets, for
they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have been really
faithful to their high mission, and are universally recognised as being
absolutely unreliable.  But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of
the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modern sciolists to verify his
history, may justly be called the “Father of Lies”; in the published
speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his
best; in Pliny’s _Natural History_; in Hanno’s _Periplus_; in all the
early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas
Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus,
and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent _Prodigiorum et Ostentorum
Chronicon_; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of
Casanova; in Defoe’s _History of the Plague_; in Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_; in Napoleon’s despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle,
whose _French Revolution_ is one of the most fascinating historical
novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate
position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness.
Now, everything is changed.  Facts are not merely finding a footing-place
in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded
the kingdom of Romance.  Their chilling touch is over everything.  They
are vulgarising mankind.  The crude commercialism of America, its
materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things,
and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely
due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who,
according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it
is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the
cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any
other moral tale in the whole of literature.’

CYRIL.  My dear boy!

VIVIAN.  I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole
thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute myth.  However,
you must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic future
either of America or of our own country.  Listen to this:—

‘That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its
close we have no doubt whatsoever.  Bored by the tedious and improving
conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the
genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences
are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by
probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the
merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must
return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.  Who he was
who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the
wandering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the
purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat
and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of our
modern anthropologists, for all their much-boasted science, has had the
ordinary courage to tell us.  Whatever was his name or race, he certainly
was the true founder of social intercourse.  For the aim of the liar is
simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.  He is the very basis of
civilised society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions
of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate
at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand’s farcical comedies.

‘Nor will he be welcomed by society alone.  Art, breaking from the
prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false,
beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great
secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and
absolutely a matter of style; while Life—poor, probable, uninteresting
human life—tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert
Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in
general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own
simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.

‘No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer in the
_Saturday Review_, will gravely censure the teller of fairy tales for his
defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work
by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and will hold up their
ink-stained hands in horror if some honest gentleman, who has never been
farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book of
travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole
history of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past.
To excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of him
who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his
servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs
of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood
near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty
Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters.  They
will call upon Shakespeare—they always do—and will quote that hackneyed
passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the
mirror up to Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince
the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.’

CYRIL.  Ahem!  Another cigarette, please.

VIVIAN.  My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic
utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare’s real views upon art than
the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals.  But let me
get to the end of the passage:

‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.  She
is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.  She is a
veil, rather than a mirror.  She has flowers that no forests know of,
birds that no woodland possesses.  She makes and unmakes many worlds, and
can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.  Hers are the “forms
more real than living man,” and hers the great archetypes of which things
that have existence are but unfinished copies.  Nature has, in her eyes,
no laws, no uniformity.  She can work miracles at her will, and when she
calls monsters from the deep they come.  She can bid the almond-tree
blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.  At her
word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of June, and
the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills.  The
dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile
strangely at her when she comes near them.  She has hawk-faced gods that
worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.’

CYRIL.  I like that.  I can see it.  Is that the end?

VIVIAN.  No.  There is one more passage, but it is purely practical.  It
simply suggests some methods by which we could revive this lost art of
Lying.

CYRIL.  Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you a
question.  What do you mean by saying that life, ‘poor, probable,
uninteresting human life,’ will try to reproduce the marvels of art?  I
can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror.
You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked
looking-glass.  But you don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that
Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?

VIVIAN.  Certainly I do.  Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are
always dangerous things—it is none the less true that Life imitates art
far more than Art imitates life.  We have all seen in our own day in
England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented
and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that
whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees,
here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the
strange square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently
loved, there the sweet maidenhood of ‘The Golden Stair,’ the blossom-like
mouth and weary loveliness of the ‘Laus Amoris,’ the passion-pale face of
Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in ‘Merlin’s
Dream.’  And it has always been so.  A great artist invents a type, and
Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an
enterprising publisher.  Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England
what they have given us.  They brought their types with them, and Life
with her keen imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with
models.  The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this,
and set in the bride’s chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that
she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at
in her rapture or her pain.  They knew that Life gains from art not
merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or
soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours
of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of
Praxiteles.  Hence came their objection to realism.  They disliked it on
purely social grounds.  They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly,
and they were perfectly right.  We try to improve the conditions of the
race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous
bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders.  But these
things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty.  For this, Art
is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his
studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they
plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word,
Life is Art’s best, Art’s only pupil.

As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature.  The most
obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of
the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick
Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into
sweet-shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from
the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and
unloaded revolvers.  This interesting phenomenon, which always occurs
after the appearance of a new edition of either of the books I have
alluded to, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the
imagination.  But this is a mistake.  The imagination is essentially
creative, and always seeks for a new form.  The boy-burglar is simply the
inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct.  He is Fact, occupied as
Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him
is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.
Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern
thought, but Hamlet invented it.  The world has become sad because a
puppet was once melancholy.  The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no
faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he
does not believe in, is a purely literary product.  He was invented by
Tourgénieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.  Robespierre came out of the
pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the
_débris_ of a novel.  Literature always anticipates life.  It does not
copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.  The nineteenth century, as we
know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.  Our Luciens de Rubempré, our
Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of
the _Comédie Humaine_.  We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and
unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great
novelist.  I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he
had had any model for Becky Sharp.  She told me that Becky was an
invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested
by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and
was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman.  I inquired what
became of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years
after the appearance of _Vanity Fair_, she ran away with the nephew of
the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great
splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s style, and entirely by
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s methods.  Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared
to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and
other gambling places.  The noble gentleman from whom the same great
sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few months after _The
Newcomer_ had reached a fourth edition, with the word ‘Adsum’ on his
lips.  Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious psychological
story of transformation, a friend of mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the
north of London, and being anxious to get to a railway station, took what
he thought would be a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a
network of mean, evil-looking streets.  Feeling rather nervous he began
to walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right
between his legs.  It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and
trampled upon it.  Being of course very much frightened and a little
hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole street was full
of rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants.  They
surrounded him, and asked him his name.  He was just about to give it
when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson’s
story.  He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own person
that terrible and well-written scene, and at having done accidentally,
though in fact, what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate
intent, that he ran away as hard as he could go.  He was, however, very
closely followed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door of
which happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant, who
happened to be there, exactly what had occurred.  The humanitarian crowd
were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and as
soon as the coast was clear he left.  As he passed out, the name on the
brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye.  It was ‘Jekyll.’  At
least it should have been.

Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course accidental.  In the
following case the imitation was self-conscious.  In the year 1879, just
after I had left Oxford, I met at a reception at the house of one of the
Foreign Ministers a woman of very curious exotic beauty.  We became great
friends, and were constantly together.  And yet what interested me most
in her was not her beauty, but her character, her entire vagueness of
character.  She seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the
possibility of many types.  Sometimes she would give herself up entirely
to art, turn her drawing-room into a studio, and spend two or three days
a week at picture galleries or museums.  Then she would take to attending
race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, and talk about nothing but
betting.  She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics,
and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy.  In fact,
she was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all her
transformations as was that wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of
him.  One day a serial began in one of the French magazines.  At that
time I used to read serial stories, and I well remember the shock of
surprise I felt when I came to the description of the heroine.  She was
so like my friend that I brought her the magazine, and she recognised
herself in it immediately, and seemed fascinated by the resemblance.  I
should tell you, by the way, that the story was translated from some dead
Russian writer, so that the author had not taken his type from my friend.
Well, to put the matter briefly, some months afterwards I was in Venice,
and finding the magazine in the reading-room of the hotel, I took it up
casually to see what had become of the heroine.  It was a most piteous
tale, as the girl had ended by running away with a man absolutely
inferior to her, not merely in social station, but in character and
intellect also.  I wrote to my friend that evening about my views on John
Bellini, and the admirable ices at Florian’s, and the artistic value of
gondolas, but added a postscript to the effect that her double in the
story had behaved in a very silly manner.  I don’t know why I added that,
but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same
thing.  Before my letter had reached her, she had run away with a man who
deserted her in six months.  I saw her in 1884 in Paris, where she was
living with her mother, and I asked her whether the story had had
anything to do with her action.  She told me that she had felt an
absolutely irresistible impulse to follow the heroine step by step in her
strange and fatal progress, and that it was with a feeling of real terror
that she had looked forward to the last few chapters of the story.  When
they appeared, it seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them
in life, and she did so.  It was a most clear example of this imitative
instinct of which I was speaking, and an extremely tragic one.

However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual instances.
Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle.  All that I
desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far
more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously
about it you will find that it is true.  Life holds the mirror up to Art,
and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor,
or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.  Scientifically
speaking, the basis of life—the energy of life, as Aristotle would call
it—is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting
various forms through which this expression can be attained.  Life seizes
on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt.  Young men have
committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand
because by his own hand Werther died.  Think of what we owe to the
imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Cæsar.

CYRIL.  The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make it
complete you must show that Nature, no less than Life, is an imitation of
Art.  Are you prepared to prove that?

VIVIAN.  My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.

CYRIL.  Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her effects
from him?

VIVIAN.  Certainly.  Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get
those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring
the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?  To whom,
if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that
brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved
bridge and swaying barge?  The extraordinary change that has taken place
in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a
particular school of Art.  You smile.  Consider the matter from a
scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am
right.  For what is Nature?  Nature is no great mother who has borne us.
She is our creation.  It is in our brain that she quickens to life.
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it,
depends on the Arts that have influenced us.  To look at a thing is very
different from seeing a thing.  One does not see anything until one sees
its beauty.  Then, and then only, does it come into existence.  At
present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets
and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.
There may have been fogs for centuries in London.  I dare say there were.
But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them.  They did
not exist till Art had invented them.  Now, it must be admitted, fogs are
carried to excess.  They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and
the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis.
Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.  And so,
let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.
She has done so already, indeed.  That white quivering sunlight that one
sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless
violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces
it quite admirably.  Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she
gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pissaros.  Indeed there are
moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time,
when Nature becomes absolutely modern.  Of course she is not always to be
relied upon.  The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position.  Art
creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on
to other things.  Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation
can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect
until we all become absolutely wearied of it.  Nobody of any real
culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.
Sunsets are quite old-fashioned.  They belong to the time when Turner was
the last note in art.  To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism
of temperament.  Upon the other hand they go on.  Yesterday evening Mrs.
Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious
sky, as she called it.  Of course I had to look at it.  She is one of
those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing.  And what
was it?  It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad
period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and
over-emphasised.  Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very
often commits the same error.  She produces her false Renés and her sham
Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on
another a more than questionable Rousseau.  Still, Nature irritates one
more when she does things of that kind.  It seems so stupid, so obvious,
so unnecessary.  A false Vautrin might be delightful.  A doubtful Cuyp is
unbearable.  However, I don’t want to be too hard on Nature.  I wish the
Channel, especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry
Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied,
Nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.  That she imitates Art, I
don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now.  It is the one thing
that keeps her in touch with civilised man.  But have I proved my theory
to your satisfaction?

CYRIL.  You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better.  But
even admitting this strange imitative instinct in Life and Nature, surely
you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper of its age, the
spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and
under whose influence it is produced.

VIVIAN.  Certainly not!  Art never expresses anything but itself.  This
is the principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, more than that
vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells,
that makes music the type of all the arts.  Of course, nations and
individuals, with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of
existence, are always under the impression that it is of them that the
Muses are talking, always trying to find in the calm dignity of
imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always
forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo but Marsyas.  Remote
from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave,
Art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the
opening of the marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own
history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding
expression in a new form.  But it is not so.  The highest art rejects the
burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh
material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty
passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness.  She
develops purely on her own lines.  She is not symbolic of any age.  It is
the ages that are her symbols.

Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place and
people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less
it represents to us the spirit of its age.  The evil faces of the Roman
emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in
which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work, and we fancy
that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of
the ruin of the Empire.  But it was not so.  The vices of Tiberius could
not destroy that supreme civilisation, any more than the virtues of the
Antonines could save it.  It fell for other, for less interesting
reasons.  The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to
interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call
the Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of
Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland?  The more abstract,
the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its
age.  If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look
at its architecture or its music.

CYRIL.  I quite agree with you there.  The spirit of an age may be best
expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract
and ideal.  Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of an age, for
its look, as the phrase goes, we must of course go to the arts of
imitation.

VIVIAN.  I don’t think so.  After all, what the imitative arts really
give us are merely the various styles of particular artists, or of
certain schools of artists.  Surely you don’t imagine that the people of
the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on mediæval
stained glass, or in mediæval stone and wood carving, or on mediæval
metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminated MSS.  They were probably very
ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or
fantastic in their appearance.  The Middle Ages, as we know them in art,
are simply a definite form of style, and there is no reason at all why an
artist with this style should not be produced in the nineteenth century.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would
cease to be an artist.  Take an example from our own day.  I know that
you are fond of Japanese things.  Now, do you really imagine that the
Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence?
If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all.  The Japanese
people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual
artists.  If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great
native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see
that there is not the slightest resemblance between them.  The actual
people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English
people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing
curious or extraordinary about them.  In fact the whole of Japan is a
pure invention.  There is no such country, there are no such people.  One
of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the
Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese.  All he saw,
all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans.  He
was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful
exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell’s Gallery showed only too well.  He did
not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of
style, an exquisite fancy of art.  And so, if you desire to see a
Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio.  On
the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of
certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of
their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go
some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you
cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it
anywhere.  Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the
ancient Greeks.  Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek
people were like?  Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the
stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those
marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same
building?  If you judge from the art, they certainly were so.  But read
an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance.  You will find that the
Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair
yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly
fashionable or fallen creature of our own day.  The fact is that we look
back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very
fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

CYRIL.  But modern portraits by English painters, what of them?  Surely
they are like the people they pretend to represent?

VIVIAN.  Quite so.  They are so like them that a hundred years from now
no one will believe in them.  The only portraits in which one believes
are portraits where there is very little of the sitter, and a very great
deal of the artist.  Holbein’s drawings of the men and women of his time
impress us with a sense of their absolute reality.  But this is simply
because Holbein compelled life to accept his conditions, to restrain
itself within his limitations, to reproduce his type, and to appear as he
wished it to appear.  It is style that makes us believe in a
thing—nothing but style.  Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed
to absolute oblivion.  They never paint what they see.  They paint what
the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

CYRIL.  Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end of your
article.

VIVIAN.  With pleasure.  Whether it will do any good I really cannot say.
Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible.  Why,
even Sleep has played us false, and has closed up the gates of ivory, and
opened the gates of horn.  The dreams of the great middle classes of this
country, as recorded in Mr. Myers’s two bulky volumes on the subject, and
in the Transactions of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing
things that I have ever read.  There is not even a fine nightmare among
them.  They are commonplace, sordid and tedious.  As for the Church, I
cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the
presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the
supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that
mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination.  But in the
English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but
through his capacity for disbelief.  Ours is the only Church where the
sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the
ideal apostle.  Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable
works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is
sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University
to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah’s ark, or
Balaam’s ass, or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear
him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect.
The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to
be regretted.  It is really a degrading concession to a low form of
realism.  It is silly, too.  It springs from an entire ignorance of
psychology.  Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe
the improbable.  However, I must read the end of my article:—

‘What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive
this old art of Lying.  Much of course may be done, in the way of
educating the public, by amateurs in the domestic circle, at literary
lunches, and at afternoon teas.  But this is merely the light and
graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard at Cretan
dinner-parties.  There are many other forms.  Lying for the sake of
gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance—lying with a
moral purpose, as it is usually called—though of late it has been rather
looked down upon, was extremely popular with the antique world.  Athena
laughs when Odysseus tells her “his words of sly devising,” as Mr.
William Morris phrases it, and the glory of mendacity illumines the pale
brow of the stainless hero of Euripidean tragedy, and sets among the
noble women of the past the young bride of one of Horace’s most exquisite
odes.  Later on, what at first had been merely a natural instinct was
elevated into a self-conscious science.  Elaborate rules were laid down
for the guidance of mankind, and an important school of literature grew
up round the subject.  Indeed, when one remembers the excellent
philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question, one cannot help
regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheap and
condensed edition of the works of that great casuist.  A short primer,
“When to Lie and How,” if brought out in an attractive and not too
expensive a form, would no doubt command a large sale, and would prove of
real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people.  Lying
for the sake of the improvement of the young, which is the basis of home
education, still lingers amongst us, and its advantages are so admirably
set forth in the early books of Plato’s _Republic_ that it is unnecessary
to dwell upon them here.  It is a mode of lying for which all good
mothers have peculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still further
development, and has been sadly overlooked by the School Board.  Lying
for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in Fleet Street,
and the profession of a political leader-writer is not without its
advantages.  But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it
certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity.
The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for
its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already
pointed out, Lying in Art.  Just as those who do not love Plato more than
Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do
not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.  The
solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx
in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy, _La Chimère_, dances round
it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.  It may not hear
her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the
commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try
to borrow her wings.

‘And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be!
Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning
over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to
the land.  The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes.
Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the
high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when
books on geography were actually readable.  Dragons will wander about the
waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the
air.  We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the
toad’s head.  Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our
stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful
and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen,
of things that are not and that should be.  But before this comes to pass
we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.’

CYRIL.  Then we must entirely cultivate it at once.  But in order to
avoid making any error I want you to tell me briefly the doctrines of the
new æsthetics.

VIVIAN.  Briefly, then, they are these.  Art never expresses anything but
itself.  It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops
purely on its own lines.  It is not necessarily realistic in an age of
realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith.  So far from being the
creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the
only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.
Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps, and revives some antique form,
as happened in the archaistic movement of late Greek Art, and in the
pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day.  At other times it entirely
anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes
another century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy.  In no case
does it reproduce its age.  To pass from the art of a time to the time
itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.

The second doctrine is this.  All bad art comes from returning to Life
and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.  Life and Nature may
sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of
any real service to art they must be translated into artistic
conventions.  The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it
surrenders everything.  As a method Realism is a complete failure, and
the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and
modernity of subject-matter.  To us, who live in the nineteenth century,
any century is a suitable subject for art except our own.  The only
beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.  It is, to have
the pleasure of quoting myself, exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us
that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy.  Besides, it is
only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.  M. Zola sits down to
give us a picture of the Second Empire.  Who cares for the Second Empire
now?  It is out of date.  Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism
is always in front of Life.

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates
Life.  This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from
the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and
that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise
that energy.  It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but
it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the
history of Art.

It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates
Art.  The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have
already seen through poetry, or in paintings.  This is the secret of
Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature’s weakness.

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
things, is the proper aim of Art.  But of this I think I have spoken at
sufficient length.  And now let us go out on the terrace, where ‘droops
the milk-white peacock like a ghost,’ while the evening star ‘washes the
dusk with silver.’  At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive
effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to
illustrate quotations from the poets.  Come!  We have talked long enough.




PEN, PENCIL AND POISON
A STUDY IN GREEN


IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men
of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.
As a rule this must necessarily be so.  That very concentration of vision
and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic
temperament is in itself a mode of limitation.  To those who are
preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much
importance.  Yet there are many exceptions to this rule.  Rubens served
as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin
secretary to Cromwell.  Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the
humourists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire
nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their
country; and Charles Lamb’s friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the
subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic
temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a
poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose,
an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful,
but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle
and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.

This remarkable man, so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison,’ as a
great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick,
in 1794.  His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray’s
Inn and Hatton Garden.  His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr.
Griffiths, the editor and founder of the _Monthly Review_, the partner in
another literary speculation of Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of
whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller, but ‘a gentleman who
dealt in books,’ the friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the
most well-known men of his day.  Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him
birth, at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_ tells us of her ‘amiable disposition and numerous
accomplishments,’ and adds somewhat quaintly that ‘she is supposed to
have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person
of either sex now living.’  His father did not long survive his young
wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his
grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George
Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned.  His boyhood was passed
at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those many fine Georgian mansions
that have unfortunately disappeared before the inroads of the suburban
builder, and to its lovely gardens and well-timbered park he owed that
simple and impassioned love of nature which never left him all through
his life, and which made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual
influences of Wordsworth’s poetry.  He went to school at Charles Burney’s
academy at Hammersmith.  Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of
music, and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn
out his most remarkable pupil.  He seems to have been a man of a good
deal of culture, and in after years Mr. Wainewright often spoke of him
with much affection as a philosopher, an archæologist, and an admirable
teacher who, while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not
forget the importance of early moral training.  It was under Mr. Burney
that he first developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us
that a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays
great talent and natural feeling.  Indeed, painting was the first art
that fascinated him.  It was not till much later that he sought to find
expression by pen or poison.

Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams
of the romance and chivalry of a soldier’s life, and to have become a
young guardsman.  But the reckless dissipated life of his companions
failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made
for other things.  In a short time he wearied of the service.  ‘Art,’ he
tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and
strange fervour, ‘Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high
influence the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and
tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to
the simple-hearted.’  But Art was not the only cause of the change.  ‘The
writings of Wordsworth,’ he goes on to say, ‘did much towards calming the
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations.  I wept over
them tears of happiness and gratitude.’  He accordingly left the army,
with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, and
returned to Linden House, full of this new-born enthusiasm for culture.
A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was ‘broken like a
vessel of clay,’ prostrated him for a time.  His delicately strung
organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain
on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain.  He shrank from
suffering as a thing that mars and maims human life, and seems to have
wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many
great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged.  But he was
young—only twenty-five years of age—and he soon passed out of the ‘dead
black waters,’ as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic
culture.  As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost
to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up literature as
an art.  ‘I said with John Woodvil,’ he cries, ‘it were a life of gods to
dwell in such an element,’ to see and hear and write brave things:—

    ‘These high and gusty relishes of life
    Have no allayings of mortality.’

It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance
of a man who had a true passion for letters.  ‘To see and hear and write
brave things,’ this was his aim.

Scott, the editor of the _London Magazine_, struck by the young man’s
genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he
exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of
articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonym
he began to contribute to the literature of his day.  _Janus
Weathercock_, _Egomet Bonmot_, and _Van Vinkvooms_, were some of the
grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to
reveal his levity.  A mask tells us more than a face.  These disguises
intensified his personality.  In an incredibly short time he seems to
have made his mark.  Charles Lamb speaks of ‘kind, light-hearted
Wainewright,’ whose prose is ‘capital.’  We hear of him entertaining
Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet
John Clare, and others, at _a petit-dîner_.  Like Disraeli, he determined
to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique
cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well
known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new
manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite
white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being
different from others.  There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de
Rubempré.  At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel.  De Quincey saw him
once.  It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s.  ‘Amongst the company, all
literary men, sat a murderer,’ he tells us, and he goes on to describe
how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman,
and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table
at the young writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to
him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on ‘what sudden
growth of another interest’ would have changed his mood, had he known of
what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even
then guilty.

His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr.
Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside his
achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us
hardly justifies his reputation.

But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by
the vulgar test of production.  This young dandy sought to be somebody,
rather than to do something.  He recognised that Life itself is in art,
and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.
Nor is his work without interest.  We hear of William Blake stopping in
the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be
‘very fine.’  His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been
realised.  He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
culture that are regarded by many as true essentials.  He writes about La
Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance.  He loves
Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of _Cupid
and Psyche_, and the _Hypnerotomachia_, and book-binding and early
editions, and wide-margined proofs.  He is keenly sensitive to the value
of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the
rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live.  He had that
curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a
subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity,
if not a decadence of morals.  Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of
cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that ‘sweet marble monster’
of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.

There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for
decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself from the
false taste of his time.  But it is clear that he was one of the first to
recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote of æsthetic eclecticism, I
mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age
or place, of school or manner.  He saw that in decorating a room, which
is to be, not a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim
at any archæological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves
with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy.  In this artistic
perception he was perfectly right.  All beautiful things belong to the
same age.

And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate
fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted figures and the
faint ΚΑΛΟΣ finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving
of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michael Angelo, or of the ‘Pastoral’ of
Giorgione.  Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp
from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, ‘cased in a
cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with
small brilliants and rubies,’ and close by it ‘squats a little ugly
monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing
Sicily.’  Some dark antique bronzes contrast with the pale gleam of two
noble _Christi Crucifixi_, one carved in ivory, the other moulded in
wax.’  He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze
_bonbonnière_ with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized
‘brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,’ his citron morocco letter-case,
and his ‘pomona-green’ chair.

One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts and
engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over his fine
collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which
he was a warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique
gems and cameos, ‘the head of Alexander on an onyx of two strata,’ or
‘that superb _altissimo relievo_ on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.’  He was
always a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful
suggestions as to the best means of forming a collection.  Indeed, while
fully appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of
reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that he says
about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.

As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex
impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step in
æsthetic criticism is to realise one’s own impressions.  He cared nothing
for abstract discussions on the nature of the Beautiful, and the
historical method, which has since yielded such rich fruit, did not
belong to his day, but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art’s
first appeal is neither to the intellect nor to the emotions, but purely
to the artistic temperament, and he more than once points out that this
temperament, this ‘taste,’ as he calls it, being unconsciously guided and
made perfect by frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a
form of right judgment.  Of course there are fashions in art just as
there are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free
ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of novelty.  He
certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to
form any fair estimate of contemporary work.  But, on the whole, his
taste was good and sound.  He admired Turner and Constable at a time when
they were not so much thought of as they are now, and saw that for the
highest landscape art we require more than ‘mere industry and accurate
transcription.’  Of Crome’s ‘Heath Scene near Norwich’ he remarks that it
shows ‘how much a subtle observation of the elements, in their wild
moods, does for a most uninteresting flat,’ and of the popular type of
landscape of his day he says that it is ‘simply an enumeration of hill
and dale, stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses;
little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which
rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through rifted
clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of the real
painter, are not.’  He had a thorough dislike of what is obvious or
commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie at
dinner, he cared as little for Sir David’s pictures as he did for Mr.
Crabbe’s poems.  With the imitative and realistic tendencies of his day
he had no sympathy and he tells us frankly that his great admiration for
Fuseli was largely due to the fact that the little Swiss did not consider
it necessary that an artist should paint only what he sees.  The
qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and
dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power.  Upon the
other hand, he was not a doctrinaire.  ‘I hold that no work of art can be
tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be
consistent with itself is the question.’  This is one of his excellent
aphorisms.  And in criticising painters so different as Landseer and
Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical,
he is trying ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’

However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease in his
criticisms of contemporary work.  ‘The present,’ he says, ‘is about as
agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first perusal. . . . Modern
things dazzle me.  I must look at them through Time’s telescope.  Elia
complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain; “print,” as
he excellently says, “settles it.”  Fifty years’ toning does the same
thing to a picture.’  He is happier when he is writing about Watteau and
Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and
Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things.
What is Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of
the Renaissance were always dear to him.  He saw what our English school
could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies of pointing
out to the young student the artistic possibilities that lie dormant in
Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work.  In his judgments on the
great Italian Masters, says De Quincey, ‘there seemed a tone of sincerity
and of native sensibility, as in one who spoke for himself, and was not
merely a copier from books.’  The highest praise that we can give to him
is that he tried to revive style as a conscious tradition.  But he saw
that no amount of art lectures or art congresses, or ‘plans for advancing
the fine arts,’ will ever produce this result.  The people, he says very
wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have ‘the
best models constantly before their eyes.’

As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely
technical in his art criticisms.  Of Tintoret’s ‘St. George delivering
the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,’ he remarks:—

    The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from
    the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the full hues
    of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the
    purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saint,
    besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the foreground
    in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle.

And elsewhere he talks learnedly of ‘a delicate Schiavone, various as a
tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,’ of ‘a glowing portrait, remarkable
for _morbidezza_, by the scarce Moroni,’ and of another picture being
‘pulpy in the carnations.’

But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic
whole, and tries to translate those impressions into words, to give, as
it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect.
He was one of the first to develop what has been called the
art-literature of the nineteenth century, that form of literature which
has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning, its two most perfect exponents.
His description of Lancret’s _Repas Italien_, in which ‘a dark-haired
girl, “amorous of mischief,” lies on the daisy-powdered grass,’ is in
some respects very charming.  Here is his account of ‘The Crucifixion,’
by Rembrandt.  It is extremely characteristic of his style—

    Darkness—sooty, portentous darkness—shrouds the whole scene: only
    above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky
    ceiling, a rainy deluge—‘sleety-flaw, discoloured water’—streams down
    amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than
    that palpable night.  Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the
    darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt—the air is stagnant—a
    muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and some of that
    miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill.  The horses snuff the
    coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear.  The moment
    rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by His own weight,
    fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from
    His slit veins, His temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His
    black tongue parched with the fiery death-fever, Jesus cries, ‘I
    thirst.’  The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.

    His head sinks, and the sacred corpse ‘swings senseless of the
    cross.’  A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air and
    vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea
    rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves.  Earth yawns,
    and the graves give up their dwellers.  The dead and the living are
    mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy
    city.  New prodigies await them there.  The veil of the temple—the
    unpierceable veil—is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that
    dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries—the fatal ark with the
    tables and seven-branched candelabrum—is disclosed by the light of
    unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude.

    Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right.  It
    would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing veil
    of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting
    imagination may speculate.  At present it is like a thing in another
    world.  A dark gulf is betwixt us.  It is not tangible by the body.
    We can only approach it in the spirit.

In this passage, written, the author tells us, ‘in awe and reverence,’
there is much that is terrible, and very much that is quite horrible, but
it is not without a certain crude form of power, or, at any rate, a
certain crude violence of words, a quality which this age should highly
appreciate, as it is its chief defect.  It is pleasanter, however, to
pass to this description of Giulio Romano’s ‘Cephalus and Procris’:—

    We should read Moschus’s lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before
    looking at this picture, or study the picture as a preparation for
    the lament.  We have nearly the same images in both.  For either
    victim the high groves and forest dells murmur; the flowers exhale
    sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale mourns on the craggy
    lands, and the swallow in the long-winding vales; ‘the satyrs, too,
    and fauns dark-veiled groan,’ and the fountain nymphs within the wood
    melt into tearful waters.  The sheep and goats leave their pasture;
    and oreads, ‘who love to scale the most inaccessible tops of all
    uprightest rocks,’ hurry down from the song of their wind-courting
    pines; while the dryads bend from the branches of the meeting trees,
    and the rivers moan for white Procris, ‘with many-sobbing streams,’

                   Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.

    The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling
    horn of Aurora’s love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight on
    the top of Hymettus.  The foreground of our subject is a grassy
    sunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of
    land-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping roots and
    stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing
    out light-green shoots.  This bank rises rather suddenly on the right
    to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the entrance of
    which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees
    that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone, parting the
    rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on thorns
    and flowers with jealousy-stung foot—now helpless, heavy, void of all
    motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.

    From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
    forward with loud cries—

    And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
    And put strange pity in their horned countenance.

    Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
    death.  On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with ‘vans
    dejected’ holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan
    people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing their
    children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along from the
    left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on
    whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her
    grief-telling waters.  Above and more remote than the Ephidryad,
    another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned
    pillars of an unshorn grove.  The centre of the picture is filled by
    shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is ‘the vast
    strength of the ocean stream,’ from whose floor the extinguisher of
    stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-washed steeds to
    behold the death-pangs of her rival.

Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable.
The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent.  Much of
the best modern literature springs from the same aim.  In a very ugly and
sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied.  In everything connected
with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and
strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and
scene-painting.  ‘In art,’ he says in one of his essays, ‘whatever is
worth doing at all is worth doing well’; and he points out that once we
allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where
the line is to be drawn.  In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on
a famous occasion, he was ‘on the side of the angels.’  He was one of the
first to admire Keats and Shelley—‘the tremulously-sensitive and poetical
Shelley,’ as he calls him.  His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and
profound.  He thoroughly appreciated William Blake.  One of the best
copies of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that is now in
existence was wrought specially for him.  He loved Alain Chartier, and
Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and
Petrarch.  And to him all the arts were one.  ‘Our critics,’ he remarks
with much wisdom, ‘seem hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds
of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the serious
study of one art co-generates a proportionate perfection in the other’;
and he says elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo
talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his
listeners.  To his fellow-contributors in the _London Magazine_ he was
always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham,
Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a
friend.  Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way,
and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their
subject:—

    What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety
    of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart as ever sent
    tears to the eyes.

    How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most
    seasonably out of season.  His talk without affectation was
    compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity.  Like
    grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets.
    He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the
    _fashion for men of genius_ was a standing dish.  Sir Thomas Browne
    was a ‘bosom cronie’ of his; so was Burton, and old Fuller.  In his
    amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many-folio
    odour; and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he
    induced light dreams.  He would deliver critical touches on these,
    like one inspired, but it was good to let him choose his own game; if
    another began even on the acknowledged pets he was liable to
    interrupt, or rather append, in a mode difficult to define whether as
    misapprehensive or mischievous.  One night at C-’s, the above
    dramatic partners were the temporary subject of chat.  Mr. X.
    commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don’t know
    which of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who told him
    ‘_That_ was nothing; the lyrics were the high things—the lyrics!’

One side of his literary career deserves especial notice.  Modern
journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the
early part of this century.  He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and
delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations.  To have a
style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest
achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street
leader-writers, and this school _Janus Weathercock_ may be said to have
invented.  He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to
make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely
journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what
he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in
what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for
some popular newspaper of our own time.  This being the least valuable
side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence.  A
publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of
the illegalities of his private life.

Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature.  ‘I hold
three things in high estimation,’ he says somewhere: ‘to sit lazily on an
eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees
while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the
consciousness of neighbourhood.  The country gives them all to me.’  He
writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating
Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening,’ just to catch the fine quality of the moment;
about smothering his face ‘in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May
dews’; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine ‘pass
slowly homeward through the twilight,’ and hearing ‘the distant clank of
the sheep-bell.’  One phrase of his, ‘the polyanthus glowed in its cold
bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken
panel,’ is curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage
is rather pretty in its way:—

    The short tender grass was covered with marguerites—‘such that men
    called _daisies_ in our town’—thick as stars on a summer’s night.
    The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high
    dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard
    the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown seeds.
    The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a
    cloud streaked the calm æther; only round the horizon’s edge streamed
    a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village
    with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding
    whiteness.  I thought of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written in March.’

However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned
these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was
also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle
and secret poisoners of this or any age.  How he first became fascinated
by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he
carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods
that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.  Even in later days,
too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about
‘The Excursion,’ and the ‘Poems founded on the Affections.’  There is no
doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine.  In one of
the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which served to show
off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry
crystals of the Indian _nux vomica_, a poison, one of his biographers
tells us, ‘nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of
almost infinite dilution.’  His murders, says De Quincey, were more than
were ever made known judicially.  This is no doubt so, and some of them
are worthy of mention.  His first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas
Griffiths.  He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a
place to which he had always been very much attached.  In the August of
the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife’s mother, and in the
following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his
sister-in-law.  Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained.  It
may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power
that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.
But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his
wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had insured
her life in various offices.  The circumstances were as follows.  On the
12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden
House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street.  With
them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie.  On the
evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night
Helen sickened.  The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of
Hanover Square, was called in to attend her.  She lived till Monday, the
20th, when, after the doctor’s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright
brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk.  When they
returned Helen Abercrombie was dead.  She was about twenty years of age,
a tall graceful girl with fair hair.  A very charming red-chalk drawing
of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much
his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter
for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration.  De Quincey
says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder.  Let us
hope that she was not.  Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.

The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined
to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want
of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in
the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one
decision should govern all the cases.  The trial, however, did not come
on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately
given in the companies’ favour.  The judge on the occasion was Lord
Abinger.  _Egomet Bonmot_ was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William
Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for
the other side.  The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present
at either of the trials.  The refusal of the companies to give him the
£18,000 had placed him in a position of most painful pecuniary
embarrassment.  Indeed, a few months after the murder of Helen
Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the streets of
London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends.
This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he
thought it better to go abroad till he could come to some practical
arrangement with his creditors.  He accordingly went to Boulogne on a
visit to the father of the young lady in question, and while he was there
induced him to insure his life with the Pelican Company for £3000.  As
soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they
sat together one evening after dinner.  He himself did not gain any
monetary advantage by doing this.  His aim was simply to revenge himself
on the first office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin.
His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at
once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany,
and was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a
beautiful country house at St. Omer.  From this he moved to Paris, where
he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others
talk of his ‘skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all
who knew him.’  In 1837 he returned to England privately.  Some strange
mad fascination brought him back.  He followed a woman whom he loved.

It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in
Covent Garden.  His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and he
prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen.  Thirteen years
before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc
Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a power of attorney,
which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had
inherited from his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement.  He
knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to
England he was imperilling his life.  Yet he returned.  Should one
wonder?  It was said that the woman was very beautiful.  Besides, she did
not love him.

It was by a mere accident that he was discovered.  A noise in the street
attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in modern life, he
pushed aside the blind for a moment.  Some one outside called out,
‘That’s Wainewright, the Bank-forger.’  It was Forrester, the Bow Street
runner.

On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey.  The following
report of the proceedings appeared in the _Times_:—

    Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
    Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing
    mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of
    attorney for £2259, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company
    of the Bank of England.

    There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he
    pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin
    in the course of the morning.  On being brought before the judges,
    however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and
    then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a
    capital nature.

    The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other
    indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea
    of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at
    the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation
    for life.

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.
In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself
‘lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death’ for having been
unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the
British Museum in order to complete his collection.  The sentence now
passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death.  He complained
bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of
reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own,
having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was,
had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,
was at least a _circonstance attenuante_.  The permanence of personality
is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law
solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner.  There is,
however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was
inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the
prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across
him by chance.  They had been going over the prisons of London, searching
for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of
Wainewright.  He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but
Macready was ‘horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in
former years, and at whose table he had dined.’

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of
fashionable lounge.  Many men of letters went down to visit their old
literary comrade.  But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom
Charles Lamb admired.  He seems to have grown quite cynical.

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: ‘Sir, you City men enter on
your speculations, and take the chances of them.  Some of your
speculations succeed, some fail.  Mine happen to have failed, yours
happen to have succeeded.  That is the only difference, sir, between my
visitor and me.  But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have
succeeded to the last.  I have been determined through life to hold the
position of a gentleman.  I have always done so.  I do so still.  It is
the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take
his morning’s turn of sweeping it out.  I occupy a cell with a bricklayer
and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’  When a friend
reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very
thick ankles.’

From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from
there in the _Susan_ to Van Diemen’s Land along with three hundred other
convicts.  The voyage seems to have been most distasteful to him, and in
a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of ‘the
companion of poets and artists’ being compelled to associate with
‘country bumpkins.’  The phrase that he applies to his companions need
not surprise us.  Crime in England is rarely the result of sin.  It is
nearly always the result of starvation.  There was probably no one on
board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a
psychologically interesting nature.

His love of art, however, never deserted him.  At Hobart Town he started
a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his
conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm.  Nor did he
give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in
which he tried to make away with people who had offended him.  But his
hand seems to have lost its cunning.  Both of his attempts were complete
failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian
society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir
John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave.  In it he speaks of
himself as being ‘tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and
realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of the
exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.’  His request,
however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled himself by
making those marvellous _Paradis Artificiels_ whose secret is only known
to the eaters of opium.  In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living
companion being a cat, for which he had evinced at extraordinary
affection.

His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art.  They gave
a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work
certainly lacked.  In a note to the _Life of Dickens_, Forster mentions
that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who
held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young
lady from his clever brush; and it is said that ‘he had contrived to put
the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice,
kind-hearted girl.’  M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young
man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish
impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which
bear a curious resemblance to his victim.  The development of Mr.
Wainewright’s style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive.  One can
fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary
London, and made so brilliant a _début_ in life and letters, is
undoubtedly a most interesting study.  Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest
biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this
memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is
of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretence and
assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power.  This seems
to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view.  The fact of a man being a
poisoner is nothing against his prose.  The domestic virtues are not the
true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement
for second-rate artists.  It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his
critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his
published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in
the bad sense of that bad word.  Here and there he is distinctly vulgar
in expression, and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the true
artist.  But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he
lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought ‘capital’ has no
small historic interest.  That he had a sincere love of art and nature
seems to me quite certain.  There is no essential incongruity between
crime and culture.  We cannot re-write the whole of history for the
purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.

Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form
any purely artistic judgment about him.  It is impossible not to feel a
strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or
Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol.  But had the man worn a costume
and spoken a language different from our own, had he lived in imperial
Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the
seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and
this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced
estimate of his position and value.  I know that there are many
historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think
it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute
their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful
schoolmaster.  This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that
the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it
will make its appearance wherever it is not required.  Nobody with the
true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius,
or censuring Cæsar Borgia.  These personages have become like the puppets
of a play.  They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they
do not harm us.  They are not in immediate relation to us.  We have
nothing to fear from them.  They have passed into the sphere of art and
science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or
disapproval.  And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb’s friend.  At
present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be treated in that
fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming
studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens
of Mr. John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee,
and other distinguished writers.  However, Art has not forgotten him.  He
is the hero of Dickens’s _Hunted Down_, the Varney of Bulwer’s
_Lucretia_; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some
homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison.’  To be
suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.




THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE
IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING


              _A DIALOGUE_.  _Part I._  _Persons_: _Gilbert_
           _and Ernest_.  _Scene_: _the library of a house in_
               _Piccadilly_, _overlooking the Green Park_.

GILBERT (_at the Piano_).  My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

ERNEST (_looking up_).  At a capital story that I have just come across
in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.

GILBERT.  What is the book?  Ah! I see.  I have not read it yet.  Is it
good?

ERNEST.  Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over the
pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs.
They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their
memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however,
is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English
public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to
it.

GILBERT.  Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives
everything except genius.  But I must confess that I like all memoirs.  I
like them for their form, just as much as for their matter.  In
literature mere egotism is delightful.  It is what fascinates us in the
letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and
Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné.  Whenever we come across it, and,
strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not
easily forget it.  Humanity will always love Rousseau for having
confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant
nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the
green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given
it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his
shame.  The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter
very little.  He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or
a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own
secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to
silence.  The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented—if that
can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual
problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I
think, survive.  But the world will never weary of watching that troubled
soul in its progress from darkness to darkness.  The lonely church at
Littlemore, where ‘the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are
few,’ will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow
snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that
gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower’s sure recurrence a prophecy
that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his days—a
prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be
fulfilled.  Yes; autobiography is irresistible.  Poor, silly, conceited
Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into the circle of the
Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the better part of valour,
bustles about among them in that ‘shaggy purple gown with gold buttons
and looped lace’ which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at
his ease, and prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the
Indian blue petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the ‘good hog’s
hars-let,’ and the ‘pleasant French fricassee of veal’ that he loved to
eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his ‘gadding after
beauties,’ and his reciting of _Hamlet_ on a Sunday, and his playing of
the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things.  Even in
actual life egotism is not without its attractions.  When people talk to
us about others they are usually dull.  When they talk to us about
themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them
up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of
which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.

ERNEST.  There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say.  But
do you seriously propose that every man should become his own Boswell?
What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and Recollections
in that case?

GILBERT.  What has become of them?  They are the pest of the age, nothing
more and nothing less.  Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and
it is always Judas who writes the biography.

ERNEST.  My dear fellow!

GILBERT.  I am afraid it is true.  Formerly we used to canonise our
heroes.  The modern method is to vulgarise them.  Cheap editions of great
books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely
detestable.

ERNEST.  May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?

GILBERT.  Oh! to all our second-rate _littérateurs_.  We are overrun by a
set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house
along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as
mutes.  But we won’t talk about them.  They are the mere body-snatchers
of literature.  The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and
the soul is out of their reach.  And now, let me play Chopin to you, or
Dvorák?  Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorák?  He writes passionate,
curiously-coloured things.

ERNEST.  No; I don’t want music just at present.  It is far too
indefinite.  Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner last
night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect, she
insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in the German
language.  Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad to say that it does
not sound in the smallest degree like German.  There are forms of
patriotism that are really quite degrading.  No; Gilbert, don’t play any
more.  Turn round and talk to me.  Talk to me till the white-horned day
comes into the room.  There is something in your voice that is wonderful.

GILBERT (_rising from the piano_).  I am not in a mood for talking
to-night.  I really am not.  How horrid of you to smile!  Where are the
cigarettes?  Thanks.  How exquisite these single daffodils are!  They
seem to be made of amber and cool ivory.  They are like Greek things of
the best period.  What was the story in the confessions of the remorseful
Academician that made you laugh?  Tell it to me.  After playing Chopin, I
feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and
mourning over tragedies that were not my own.  Music always seems to me
to produce that effect.  It creates for one a past of which one has been
ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden
from one’s tears.  I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace
life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly
discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed
through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic
loves, or great renunciations.  And so tell me this story, Ernest.  I
want to be amused.

ERNEST.  Oh!  I don’t know that it is of any importance.  But I thought
it a really admirable illustration of the true value of ordinary
art-criticism.  It seems that a lady once gravely asked the remorseful
Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated picture of ‘A Spring-Day
at Whiteley’s,’ or, ‘Waiting for the Last Omnibus,’ or some subject of
that kind, was all painted by hand?

GILBERT.  And was it?

ERNEST.  You are quite incorrigible.  But, seriously speaking, what is
the use of art-criticism?  Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create
a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which
we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be
wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of
selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a
momentary perfection.  It seems to me that the imagination spreads, or
should spread, a solitude around it, and works best in silence and in
isolation.  Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of
criticism?  Why should those who cannot create take upon themselves to
estimate the value of creative work?  What can they know about it?  If a
man’s work is easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .

GILBERT.  And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is wicked.

ERNEST.  I did not say that.

GILBERT.  Ah! but you should have.  Nowadays, we have so few mysteries
left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.  The members
of the Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad Church Party,
or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott’s Great Writers Series, seem to me to
spend their time in trying to explain their divinity away.  Where one had
hoped that Browning was a mystic they have sought to show that he was
simply inarticulate.  Where one had fancied that he had something to
conceal, they have proved that he had but little to reveal.  But I speak
merely of his incoherent work.  Taken as a whole the man was great.  He
did not belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the
Titan.  He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could sing.  His
work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from
emotion to form, but from thought to chaos.  Still, he was great.  He has
been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking,
and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him,
but rather the processes by which thought moves.  It was the machine he
loved, not what the machine makes.  The method by which the fool arrives
at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.  So
much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he
despised language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of
expression.  Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill
creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real
artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a
spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may
be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and
suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had
knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man’s utterance to the speech of
gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in
Robert Browning’s hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made
him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often
with his tongue in his cheek.  There are moments when he wounds us by
monstrous music.  Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the
strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no
Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory
horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh.  Yet, he
was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from
it men and women that live.  He is the most Shakespearian creature since
Shakespeare.  If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could
stammer through a thousand mouths.  Even now, as I am speaking, and
speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the
pageant of his persons.  There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks
still burning from some girl’s hot kiss.  There, stands dread Saul with
the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.  Mildred Tresham is
there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben
Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed’s.  The spawn of Setebos gibbers in
the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima’s haggard
face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself.  Pale as the white
satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous
eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as
he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go
down.  Yes, Browning was great.  And as what will he be remembered?  As a
poet?  Ah, not as a poet!  He will be remembered as a writer of fiction,
as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.
His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not
answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what
more should an artist do?  Considered from the point of view of a creator
of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet.  Had he been
articulate, he might have sat beside him.  The only man who can touch the
hem of his garment is George Meredith.  Meredith is a prose Browning, and
so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.

ERNEST.  There is something in what you say, but there is not everything
in what you say.  In many points you are unjust.

GILBERT.  It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.  But let us
return to the particular point at issue.  What was it that you said?

ERNEST.  Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no
art-critics.

GILBERT.  I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest.  It has
all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.

ERNEST.  It is true.  Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that
petulant manner.  It is quite true.  In the best days of art there were
no art-critics.  The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great
white-limbed Hermes that slept within it.  The waxers and gilders of
images gave tone and texture to the statue, and the world, when it saw
it, worshipped and was dumb.  He poured the glowing bronze into the mould
of sand, and the river of red metal cooled into noble curves and took the
impress of the body of a god.  With enamel or polished jewels he gave
sight to the sightless eyes.  The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath
his graver.  And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit
portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who passed by,
δια λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες αβρως αιθέρος, became conscious of a new
influence that had come across their lives, and dreamily, or with a sense
of strange and quickening joy, went to their homes or daily labour, or
wandered, it may be, through the city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow
where young Phædrus bathed his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass,
beneath the tall wind—whispering planes and flowering _agnus castus_,
began to think of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed
awe.  In those days the artist was free.  From the river valley he took
the fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone,
fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to the
dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty tombs on
the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and the fading
crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.  On a wall of
fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron,
he pictured one who trod with tired feet the purple white-starred fields
of asphodel, one ‘in whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan War,’
Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or figured Odysseus, the wise and
cunning, bound by tight cords to the mast-step, that he might listen
without hurt to the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear
river of Acheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed;
or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at
Marathon, or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little
Salaminian bay.  He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment
and prepared cedar.  Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted
with wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated
irons making it firm.  Panel and marble and linen canvas became wonderful
as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her own image, was still,
and dared not speak.  All life, indeed, was his, from the merchants
seated in the market-place to the cloaked shepherd lying on the hill;
from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon, to
the king whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon
oil-bright shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans.  Men and women, with
pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passed before him.  He watched them,
and their secret became his.  Through form and colour he re-created a
world.

All subtle arts belonged to him also.  He held the gem against the
revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for Adonis, and
across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds.  He beat out the
gold into roses, and strung them together for necklace or armlet.  He
beat out the gold into wreaths for the conqueror’s helmet, or into
palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the royal dead.  On the
back of the silver mirror he graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or
love-sick Phædra with her nurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting
poppies in her hair.  The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from
the silent wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands.  He decorated the
base and stem and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated
acanthus, or curved and crested wave.  Then in black or red he painted
lads wrestling, or in the race: knights in full armour, with strange
heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped chariot
over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or working their
miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their pain.  Sometimes he
would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground of white the languid
bridegroom and his bride, with Eros hovering round them—an Eros like one
of Donatello’s angels, a little laughing thing with gilded or with azure
wings.  On the curved side he would write the name of his friend.  ΚΑΛΟΣ
ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ or ΚΑΛΟΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΗΣ tells us the story of his days.  Again, on
the rim of the wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion
at rest, as his fancy willed it.  From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed
Aphrodite at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Mænads in his train,
Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained feet, while,
satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated skins, or shook
that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted fir-cone, and wreathed
with dark ivy.  And no one came to trouble the artist at his work.  No
irresponsible chatter disturbed him.  He was not worried by opinions.  By
the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no Higginbotham.  By the
Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing
provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth.
By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the
industrious prattle of what they do not understand.  On the reed-grown
banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism
monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in the
dock.  The Greeks had no art-critics.

GILBERT.  Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are terribly
unsound.  I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of
some one older than yourself.  That is always a dangerous thing to do,
and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it
absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.  As for modern
journalism, it is not my business to defend it.  It justifies its own
existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the
vulgarest.  I have merely to do with literature.

ERNEST.  But what is the difference between literature and journalism?

GILBERT.  Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.  That
is all.  But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no
art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd.  It would be more just to
say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.

ERNEST.  Really?

GILBERT.  Yes, a nation of art-critics.  But I don’t wish to destroy the
delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the relation of the
Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his age.  To give an
accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper
occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of
parts and culture.  Still less do I desire to talk learnedly.  Learned
conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession
of the mentally unemployed.  And, as for what is called improving
conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more
foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the
criminal classes.  No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by
Dvorák.  The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, and the
heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.  Don’t let us
discuss anything solemnly.  I am but too conscious of the fact that we
are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live
in terror of not being misunderstood.  Don’t degrade me into the position
of giving you useful information.  Education is an admirable thing, but
it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth
knowing can be taught.  Through the parted curtains of the window I see
the moon like a clipped piece of silver.  Like gilded bees the stars
cluster round her.  The sky is a hard hollow sapphire.  Let us go out
into the night.  Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
still.  Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear
the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

ERNEST.  You are horribly wilful.  I insist on your discussing this
matter with me.  You have said that the Greeks were a nation of
art-critics.  What art-criticism have they left us?

GILBERT.  My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism
had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none
the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they
invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of
everything else.  For, after all, what is our primary debt to the Greeks?
Simply the critical spirit.  And, this spirit, which they exercised on
questions of religion and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics
and education, they exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of
the two supreme and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless
system of criticism that the world has ever seen.

ERNEST.  But what are the two supreme and highest arts?

GILBERT.  Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life.
The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not
realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.  The principles
of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that
we can hardly understand them.  Recognising that the most perfect art is
that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they
elaborated the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere
material of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system
of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain;
studying, for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as
scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint,
and, I need hardly say, with much keener æsthetic instinct.  In this they
were right, as they were right in all things.  Since the introduction of
printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the
middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a tendency in
literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the
ear which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it
should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide
always.  Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most
perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far
more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and
there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and
richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.  We, in fact, have
made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a
form of elaborate design.  The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded
writing simply as a method of chronicling.  Their test was always the
spoken word in its musical and metrical relations.  The voice was the
medium, and the ear the critic.  I have sometimes thought that the story
of Homer’s blindness might be really an artistic myth, created in
critical days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the great poet
is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with
the eyes of the soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his
song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself
till he has caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the
words that are winged with light.  Certainly, whether this be so or not,
it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that
England’s great poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous
splendour of his later verse.  When Milton could no longer write he began
to sing.  Who would match the measures of _Comus_ with the measures of
_Samson Agonistes_, or of _Paradise Lost_ or _Regained_?  When Milton
became blind he composed, as every one should compose, with the voice
purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days became that mighty
many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all the stateliness
of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have its swiftness, and is the one
imperishable inheritance of English literature sweeping through all the
ages, because above them, and abiding with us ever, being immortal in its
form.  Yes: writing has done much harm to writers.  We must return to the
voice.  That must be our test, and perhaps then we shall be able to
appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism.

As it now is, we cannot do so.  Sometimes, when I have written a piece of
prose that I have been modest enough to consider absolutely free from
fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I may have been guilty of
the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachic movements, a
crime for which a learned critic of the Augustan age censures with most
just severity the brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias.  I grow
cold when I think of it, and wonder to myself if the admirable ethical
effect of the prose of that charming writer, who once in a spirit of
reckless generosity towards the uncultivated portion of our community
proclaimed the monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life,
will not some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the pæons
have been wrongly placed.

ERNEST.  Ah! now you are flippant.

GILBERT.  Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that the
Greeks had no art-critics?  I can understand it being said that the
constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but not that
the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not criticise.  You will
not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art criticism from Plato to
Plotinus.  The night is too lovely for that, and the moon, if she heard
us, would put more ashes on her face than are there already.  But think
merely of one perfect little work of æsthetic criticism, Aristotle’s
_Treatise on Poetry_.  It is not perfect in form, for it is badly
written, consisting perhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or
of isolated fragments destined for some larger book, but in temper and
treatment it is perfect, absolutely.  The ethical effect of art, its
importance to culture, and its place in the formation of character, had
been done once for all by Plato; but here we have art treated, not from
the moral, but from the purely æsthetic point of view.  Plato had, of
course, dealt with many definitely artistic subjects, such as the
importance of unity in a work of art, the necessity for tone and harmony,
the æsthetic value of appearances, the relation of the visible arts to
the external world, and the relation of fiction to fact.  He first
perhaps stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet
satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth,
and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the
Kosmos.  The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may
seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysical sphere
of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer them to the
sphere of art, and you will find that they are still vital and full of
meaning.  It may be that it is as a critic of Beauty that Plato is
destined to live, and that by altering the name of the sphere of his
speculation we shall find a new philosophy.  But Aristotle, like Goethe,
deals with art primarily in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy,
for instance, and investigating the material it uses, which is language,
its subject-matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is
action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are those of
theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is plot, and its
final æsthetic appeal, which is to the sense of beauty realised through
the passions of pity and awe.  That purification and spiritualising of
the nature which he calls κάθαρσις is, as Goethe saw, essentially
æsthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied.  Concerning himself
primarily with the impression that the work of art produces, Aristotle
sets himself to analyse that impression, to investigate its source, to
see how it is engendered.  As a physiologist and psychologist, he knows
that the health of a function resides in energy.  To have a capacity for
a passion and not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and
limited.  The mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the
bosom of much ‘perilous stuff,’ and by presenting high and worthy objects
for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the man; nay,
not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him also into noble
feelings of which he might else have known nothing, the word κάθαρσις
having, it has sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of
initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to fancy,
its true and only meaning here.  This is of course a mere outline of the
book.  But you see what a perfect piece of æsthetic criticism it is.  Who
indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so well?  After reading it,
one does not wonder any longer that Alexandria devoted itself so largely
to art-criticism, and that we find the artistic temperaments of the day
investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great
Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon,
that sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or
the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual
life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value
of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper
subject-matter for the artist.  Indeed, I fear that the inartistic
temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature
and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such
accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or
from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own,
fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they
have been robbed.  And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks
chattered about painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had
their private views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts
guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and
lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their
art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.  Why,
even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought their
dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid them very
handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices.  Whatever, in fact, is
modern in our life we owe to the Greeks.  Whatever is an anachronism is
due to mediævalism.  It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system
of art-criticism, and how fine their critical instinct was, may be seen
from the fact that the material they criticised with most care was, as I
have already said, language.  For the material that painter or sculptor
uses is meagre in comparison with that of words.  Words have not merely
music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any
that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and
plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in
marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs
also, are theirs indeed alone.  If the Greeks had criticised nothing but
language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world.
To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of
all the arts.

But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud.  Out
of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion’s eye.  She is afraid
that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, of Quinctilian and
Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of all those who in the
antique world wrote or lectured upon art matters.  She need not be
afraid.  I am tired of my expedition into the dim, dull abyss of facts.
There is nothing left for me now but the divine μονόχρονος ηδονή of
another cigarette.  Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one
unsatisfied.

ERNEST.  Try one of mine.  They are rather good.  I get them direct from
Cairo.  The only use of our _attachés_ is that they supply their friends
with excellent tobacco.  And as the moon has hidden herself, let us talk
a little longer.  I am quite ready to admit that I was wrong in what I
said about the Greeks.  They were, as you have pointed out, a nation of
art-critics.  I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them.  For
the creative faculty is higher than the critical.  There is really no
comparison between them.

GILBERT.  The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary.  Without the
critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the
name.  You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and
delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us,
and gives to it a momentary perfection.  Well, that spirit of choice,
that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of
its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this
critical faculty can create anything at all in art.  Arnold’s definition
of literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form, but
it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the critical element
in all creative work.

ERNEST.  I should have said that great artists work unconsciously, that
they were ‘wiser than they knew,’ as, I think, Emerson remarks somewhere.

GILBERT.  It is really not so, Ernest.  All fine imaginative work is
self-conscious and deliberate.  No poet sings because he must sing.  At
least, no great poet does.  A great poet sings because he chooses to
sing.  It is so now, and it has always been so.  We are sometimes apt to
think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler,
fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early
poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical
quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song.
The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are
bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed
the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to
sing to the shepherds in the vale.  But in this we are merely lending to
other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own.  Our
historical sense is at fault.  Every century that produces poetry is, so
far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most
natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most
self-conscious effort.  Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without
self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are
one.

ERNEST.  I see what you mean, and there is much in it.  But surely you
would admit that the great poems of the early world, the primitive,
anonymous collective poems, were the result of the imagination of races,
rather than of the imagination of individuals?

GILBERT.  Not when they became poetry.  Not when they received a
beautiful form.  For there is no art where there is no style, and no
style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.  No doubt
Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had
chronicles and plays and novels from which to work, but they were merely
his rough material.  He took them, and shaped them into song.  They
become his, because he made them lovely.  They were built out of music,

       And so not built at all,
    And therefore built for ever.

The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels
that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that
it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.
Indeed, I am inclined to think that each myth and legend that seems to us
to spring out of the wonder, or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was
in its origin the invention of one single mind.  The curiously limited
number of the myths seems to me to point to this conclusion.  But we must
not go off into questions of comparative mythology.  We must keep to
criticism.  And what I want to point out is this.  An age that has no
criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and
confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no
art at all.  There have been critical ages that have not been creative,
in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in which the spirit of man has
sought to set in order the treasures of his treasure-house, to separate
the gold from the silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over the
jewels, and to give names to the pearls.  But there has never been a
creative age that has not been critical also.  For it is the critical
faculty that invents fresh forms.  The tendency of creation is to repeat
itself.  It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that
springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.  There is
really not a single form that art now uses that does not come to us from
the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were either
stereotyped or invented or made perfect.  I say Alexandria, not merely
because it was there that the Greek spirit became most self-conscious,
and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and theology, but because it
was to that city, and not to Athens, that Rome turned for her models, and
it was through the survival, such as it was, of the Latin language that
culture lived at all.  When, at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned
upon Europe, the soil had been in some measure prepared for it.  But, to
get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome and usually
inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to
the Greek critical spirit.  To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire
drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll,
the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the
oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and
the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that word.  In fact, we owe it
everything, except the sonnet, to which, however, some curious parallels
of thought-movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism,
to which no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham Scotch
dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has recently proposed
should be made the basis for a final and unanimous effort on the part of
our second-rate poets to make themselves really romantic.  Each new
school, as it appears, cries out against criticism, but it is to the
critical faculty in man that it owes its origin.  The mere creative
instinct does not innovate, but reproduces.

ERNEST.  You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of the
creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory.  But what of
criticism outside creation?  I have a foolish habit of reading
periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly
valueless.

GILBERT.  So is most modern creative work also.  Mediocrity weighing
mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother—that
is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us from
time to time.  And yet, I feel I am a little unfair in this matter.  As a
rule, the critics—I speak, of course, of the higher class, of those in
fact who write for the sixpenny papers—are far more cultured than the
people whose work they are called upon to review.  This is, indeed, only
what one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation
than creation does.

ERNEST.  Really?

GILBERT.  Certainly.  Anybody can write a three-volumed novel.  It merely
requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.  The
difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty of
sustaining any standard.  Where there is no style a standard must be
impossible.  The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the
reporters of the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the
doings of the habitual criminals of art.  It is sometimes said of them
that they do not read all through the works they are called upon to
criticise.  They do not.  Or at least they should not.  If they did so,
they would become confirmed misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase
from one of the pretty Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the
rest of their lives.  Nor is it necessary.  To know the vintage and
quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.  It must be
perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or
worth nothing.  Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the
instinct for form.  Who wants to wade through a dull volume?  One tastes
it, and that is quite enough—more than enough, I should imagine.  I am
aware that there are many honest workers in painting as well as in
literature who object to criticism entirely.  They are quite right.
Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age.  It brings us
no new element of pleasure.  It suggests no fresh departure of thought,
or passion, or beauty.  It should not be spoken of.  It should be left to
the oblivion that it deserves.

ERNEST.  But, my dear fellow—excuse me for interrupting you—you seem to
me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too
far.  For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult
to do a thing than to talk about it.

GILBERT.  More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it?  Not at
all.  That is a gross popular error.  It is very much more difficult to
talk about a thing than to do it.  In the sphere of actual life that is
of course obvious.  Anybody can make history.  Only a great man can write
it.  There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share
with the lower animals.  It is only by language that we rise above them,
or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child,
of thought.  Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in
its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be
that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have
nothing whatsoever to do.  No, Ernest, don’t talk about action.  It is a
blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of
whose nature it is unconscious.  It is a thing incomplete in its essence,
because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always
at variance with its aim.  Its basis is the lack of imagination.  It is
the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

ERNEST.  Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball.  You
hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy.  You do
nothing but re-write history.

GILBERT.  The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.  That is not
the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit.  When we have
fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise
that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of
action.  He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their
results.  From the field in which he thought that he had sown thorns, we
have gathered our vintage, and the fig-tree that he planted for our
pleasure is as barren as the thistle, and more bitter.  It is because
Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find
its way.

ERNEST.  You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious aim is
a delusion?

GILBERT.  It is worse than a delusion.  If we lived long enough to see
the results of our actions it may be that those who call themselves good
would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls
evil stirred by a noble joy.  Each little thing that we do passes into
the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make
them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new
civilisation, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone
before.  But men are the slaves of words.  They rage against Materialism,
as they call it, forgetting that there has been no material improvement
that has not spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if
any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world’s faculties in
barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds.
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress.  Without it the
world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.  By its
curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race.  Through its
intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of
type.  In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one
with the higher ethics.  And as for the virtues!  What are the virtues?
Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little about chastity, and it may be
that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not to their own purity,
that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom from stain.  Charity,
as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been
compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.  The mere
existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much
nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect
development.  It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and
self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that
old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the
world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its
altars in the land.  Virtues!  Who knows what the virtues are?  Not you.
Not I.  Not any one.  It is well for our vanity that we slay the
criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had
gained by his crime.  It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his
martyrdom.  He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.

ERNEST.  Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note.  Let us go back to the more
gracious fields of literature.  What was it you said?  That it was more
difficult to talk about a thing than to do it?

GILBERT (_after a pause_).  Yes: I believe I ventured upon that simple
truth.  Surely you see now that I am right?  When man acts he is a
puppet.  When he describes he is a poet.  The whole secret lies in that.
It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy Ilion to send the notched
arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl against the shield of hide and
flamelike brass the long ash-handled spear.  It was easy for the
adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian carpets for her lord, and then, as
he lay couched in the marble bath, to throw over his head the purple net,
and call to her smooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the
heart that should have broken at Aulis.  For Antigone even, with Death
waiting for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the
tainted air at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the
wretched naked corse that had no tomb.  But what of those who wrote about
these things?  What of those who gave them reality, and made them live
for ever?  Are they not greater than the men and women they sing of?
‘Hector that sweet knight is dead,’ and Lucian tells us how in the dim
under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen, and marvelled that
it was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships were launched,
those beautiful mailed men laid low, those towered cities brought to
dust.  Yet, every day the swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the
battlements, and looks down at the tide of war.  The greybeards wonder at
her loveliness, and she stands by the side of the king.  In his chamber
of stained ivory lies her leman.  He is polishing his dainty armour, and
combing the scarlet plume.  With squire and page, her husband passes from
tent to tent.  She can see his bright hair, and hears, or fancies that
she hears, that clear cold voice.  In the courtyard below, the son of
Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass.  The white arms of Andromache
are around his neck.  He sets his helmet on the ground, lest their babe
should be frightened.  Behind the embroidered curtains of his pavilion
sits Achilles, in perfumed raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver
the friend of his soul arrays himself to go forth to the fight.  From a
curiously carven chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his
ship-side, the Lord of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that
the lip of man had never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and
with fresh water cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black
wine its burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon the
ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophets worshipped,
and prays to Him, and knows not that he prays in vain, and that by the
hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous’ son, Euphorbus, whose
love-locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid, the lion-hearted,
Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his doom.  Phantoms, are
they?  Heroes of mist and mountain?  Shadows in a song?  No: they are
real.  Action!  What is action?  It dies at the moment of its energy.  It
is a base concession to fact.  The world is made by the singer for the
dreamer.

ERNEST.  While you talk it seems to me to be so.

GILBERT.  It is so in truth.  On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the
lizard like a thing of green bronze.  The owl has built her nest in the
palace of Priam.  Over the empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with
their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced, oily sea, οινοψ πόντος, as
Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great
galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely
tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his
net.  Yet, every morning the doors of the city are thrown open, and on
foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors go forth to battle, and
mock their enemies from behind their iron masks.  All day long the fight
rages, and when night comes the torches gleam by the tents, and the
cresset burns in the hall.  Those who live in marble or on painted panel,
know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its
beauty, but limited to one note of passion or one mood of calm.  Those
whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of
courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering.  The seasons come and
go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years
pass by before them.  They have their youth and their manhood, they are
children, and they grow old.  It is always dawn for St. Helena, as
Veronese saw her at the window.  Through the still morning air the angels
bring her the symbol of God’s pain.  The cool breezes of the morning lift
the gilt threads from her brow.  On that little hill by the city of
Florence, where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the
solstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly
can the slim naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of
clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the
chords.  It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free
among the silver poplars of France.  In eternal twilight they move, those
frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch
the dew-drenched grass they tread on.  But those who walk in epos, drama,
or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons wax and
wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and from
sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting day with all its gold and
shadow.  For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the
Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her
raiment for their pleasure.  The statue is concentrated to one moment of
perfection.  The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual
element of growth or change.  If they know nothing of death, it is
because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death
belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and
who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall
from a past of glory or of shame.  Movement, that problem of the visible
arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone.  It is Literature that
shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.

ERNEST.  Yes; I see now what you mean.  But, surely, the higher you place
the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.

GILBERT.  Why so?

ERNEST.  Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo of rich
music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form.  It may, indeed, be that life
is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms are mean and its
heroisms ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature to create,
from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be
more marvellous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common
eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek to realise their
perfection.  But surely, if this new world has been made by the spirit
and touch of a great artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect
that there will be nothing left for the critic to do.  I quite understand
now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far more difficult to talk
about a thing than to do it.  But it seems to me that this sound and
sensible maxim, which is really extremely soothing to one’s feelings, and
should be adopted as its motto by every Academy of Literature all over
the world, applies only to the relations that exist between Art and Life,
and not to any relations that there may be between Art and Criticism.

GILBERT.  But, surely, Criticism is itself an art.  And just as artistic
creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed,
without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really
creative in the highest sense of the word.  Criticism is, in fact, both
creative and independent.

ERNEST.  Independent?

GILBERT.  Yes; independent.  Criticism is no more to be judged by any low
standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or
sculptor.  The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that
he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour,
or the unseen world of passion and of thought.  He does not even require
for the perfection of his art the finest materials.  Anything will serve
his purpose.  And just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the
silly wife of a small country doctor in the squalid village of
Yonville-l’Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a
classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or
of no importance, such as the pictures in this year’s Royal Academy, or
in any year’s Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris’s poems, M.
Ohnet’s novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic
can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of
contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct
with intellectual subtlety.  Why not?  Dulness is always an irresistible
temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent _Bestia
Trionfans_ that calls wisdom from its cave.  To an artist so creative as
the critic, what does subject-matter signify?  No more and no less than
it does to the novelist and the painter.  Like them, he can find his
motives everywhere.  Treatment is the test.  There is nothing that has
not in it suggestion or challenge.

ERNEST.  But is Criticism really a creative art?

GILBERT.  Why should it not be?  It works with materials, and puts them
into a form that is at once new and delightful.  What more can one say of
poetry?  Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation.
For just as the great artists, from Homer and Æschylus, down to
Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their
subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale,
so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified
for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already
added.  Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the
purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than
creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself,
and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would
put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.  Certainly, it is never
trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude.  No ignoble considerations
of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of
domestic or public life, affect it ever.  One may appeal from fiction
unto fact.  But from the soul there is no appeal.

ERNEST.  From the soul?

GILBERT.  Yes, from the soul.  That is what the highest criticism really
is, the record of one’s own soul.  It is more fascinating than history,
as it is concerned simply with oneself.  It is more delightful than
philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not
vague.  It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not
with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s
physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods
and imaginative passions of the mind.  I am always amused by the silly
vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that
the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate
work.  The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it
is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his
fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will
prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will
turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though
the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn.  His sole aim is to
chronicle his own impressions.  It is for him that pictures are painted,
books written, and marble hewn into form.

ERNEST.  I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.

GILBERT.  Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all
revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her
Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the
Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as
in itself it really is.  But this is a very serious error, and takes no
cognisance of Criticism’s most perfect form, which is in its essence
purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret
of another.  For the highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive
but as impressive purely.

ERNEST.  But is that really so?

GILBERT.  Of course it is.  Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on
Turner are sound or not?  What does it matter?  That mighty and majestic
prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so
rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best,
in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art
as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted
canvases in England’s Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at
times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on
account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in
those long-cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though
through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual
and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,
with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think,
even as Literature is the greater art.  Who, again, cares whether Mr.
Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo
never dreamed of?  The painter may have been merely the slave of an
archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool
galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange
figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in
some faint light under sea,’ I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than the
rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many
times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep
seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange
webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of
Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her
but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with
which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and
the hands.’  And I say to my friend, ‘The presence that thus so strangely
rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand
years man had come to desire’; and he answers me, ‘Hers is the head upon
which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little
weary.’

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and
reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the
music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that
flute-player’s music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle
and poisonous curves.  Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had
any one told him of this picture that ‘all the thoughts and experience of
the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to
refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the
lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition
and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias?’  He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none
of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious
colour-harmonies of blue and green.  And it is for this very reason that
the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.  It
treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.  It
does not confine itself—let us at least suppose so for the moment—to
discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.
And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing
is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in
his soul who wrought it.  Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the
beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and
sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital
portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of
what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.  The longer I
study, Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts
is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may be
marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention
on the part of the artist.  For when the work is finished it has, as it
were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other
than that which was put into its lips to say.  Sometimes, when I listen
to the overture to _Tannhäuser_, I seem indeed to see that comely knight
treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass, and to hear the voice of
Venus calling to him from the caverned hill.  But at other times it
speaks to me of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my
own life, or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of
loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions that
man has not known, and so has sought for.  To-night it may fill one with
that ΕΡΩΣ ΤΩΝ ΑΔΥΝΑΤΩΝ, that _Amour de l’Impossible_, which falls like a
madness on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so
that they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in
the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain, grow faint and swoon or
stumble.  To-morrow, like the music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us,
the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it may perform the office of a
physician, and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that
is wounded, and ‘bring the soul into harmony with all right things.’  And
what is true about music is true about all the arts.  Beauty has as many
meanings as man has moods.  Beauty is the symbol of symbols.  Beauty
reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.  When it shows us
itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

ERNEST.  But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?

GILBERT.  It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the
individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form
which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood
incompletely.

ERNEST.  The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and
the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really
is not; that is your theory, I believe?

GILBERT.  Yes, that is my theory.  To the critic the work of art is
simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily
bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.  The one
characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever
one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty,
that gives to creation its universal and æsthetic element, makes the
critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things
which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or
painted the panel or graved the gem.

It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the
highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures
that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the
anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature
or history.  But this is not so.  Indeed, pictures of this kind are far
too intelligible.  As a class, they rank with illustrations, and, even
considered from this point of view are failures, as they do not stir the
imagination, but set definite bounds to it.  For the domain of the
painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of the
poet.  To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not
merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to
also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of
colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought.
The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the
body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only through
conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical
equivalents that he can deal with psychology.  And how inadequately does
he do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban of the Moor for the
noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of
Lear!  Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him.  Most of our elderly
English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the
domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and
striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is
invisible, the splendour of what is not seen.  Their pictures are, as a
natural consequence, insufferably tedious.  They have degraded the
invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking
at is the obvious.  I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of
the same subject.  They have always done so and will always do so.  But
while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must
be pictorial always.  For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in
nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen.

And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate
the critic.  He will turn from them to such works as make him brood and
dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion,
and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider
world.  It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that
he cannot realise his ideal.  But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of
most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely.  For, when
the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than
itself.  This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.  Music
can never reveal its ultimate secret.  This, also, is the explanation of
the value of limitations in art.  The sculptor gladly surrenders
imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because
by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation
of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a
realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual.  It is
through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and
so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty
of reason, but to the æsthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both
reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both
to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking
whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very
complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the
ultimate impression itself.  You see, then, how it is that the æsthetic
critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to
deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks
rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their
imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation
final.  Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will
have to the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such
resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the painter
of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between
Nature and the work of the decorative artist.  Just as on the flowerless
carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to look
on, though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the
pearl and purple of the sea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at
Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is
made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock’s tail,
though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of
whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows
us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty,
and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the
problem of Art’s unity.

But I see it is time for supper.  After we have discussed some Chambertin
and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of the critic
considered in the light of the interpreter.

ERNEST.  Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally be allowed
to see the object as in itself it really is.

GILBERT.  I am not quite sure.  Perhaps I may admit it after supper.
There is a subtle influence in supper.




THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE
OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING


             _A DIALOGUE_: _Part II._  _Persons_: _the same_.
                           _Scene_: _the same_.

ERNEST.  The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect, and
now let us return to the point at issue.

GILBERT.  Ah! don’t let us do that.  Conversation should touch
everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.  Let us talk about
_Moral Indignation_, _its Cause and Cure_, a subject on which I think of
writing: or about _The Survival of Thersites_, as shown by the English
comic papers; or about any topic that may turn up.

ERNEST.  No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism.  You have told
me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as expressive, but as
impressive purely, and is consequently both creative and independent, is
in fact an art by itself, occupying the same relation to creative work
that creative work does to the visible world of form and colour, or the
unseen world of passion and of thought.  Well, now, tell me, will not the
critic be sometimes a real interpreter?

GILBERT.  Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses.  He can
pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, to an
analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I
hold it to be, there are many delightful things to be said and done.  Yet
his object will not always be to explain the work of art.  He may seek
rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker,
that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike.
Ordinary people are ‘terribly at ease in Zion.’  They propose to walk arm
in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, ‘Why
should we read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton?  We can read
the plays and the poems.  That is enough.’  But an appreciation of Milton
is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate
scholarship.  And he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must
understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance
and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he
must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between
the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school
of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and
Marlowe’s greater son; he must know the materials that were at
Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the
conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the
literary criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons;
he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed
verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the
connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of
the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan
London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true
position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.
The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as
a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by
one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name.  Rather, he will
look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify,
and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of
men.

And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens.  The critic will indeed be
an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the sense of one who
simply repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips
to say.  For, just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign
nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life
that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by
intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the
personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality
enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes,
the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.

ERNEST.  I would have said that personality would have been a disturbing
element.

GILBERT.  No; it is an element of revelation.  If you wish to understand
others you must intensify your own individualism.

ERNEST.  What, then, is the result?

GILBERT.  I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by definite
example.  It seems to me that, while the literary critic stands of course
first, as having the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material,
each of the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned to it.  The actor is
a critic of the drama.  He shows the poet’s work under new conditions,
and by a method special to himself.  He takes the written word, and
action, gesture and voice become the media of revelation.  The singer or
the player on lute and viol is the critic of music.  The etcher of a
picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of
a new material its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the
relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the
critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from
that of the work itself, and the employment of a new material is a
critical as well as a creative element.  Sculpture, too, has its critic,
who may be either the carver of a gem, as he was in Greek days, or some
painter like Mantegna, who sought to reproduce on canvas the beauty of
plastic line and the symphonic dignity of processional bas-relief.  And
in the case of all these creative critics of art it is evident that
personality is an absolute essential for any real interpretation.  When
Rubinstein plays to us the _Sonata Appassionata_ of Beethoven, he gives
us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven
absolutely—Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and
made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality.  When a
great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience.  His own
individuality becomes a vital part of the interpretation.  People
sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not
Shakespeare’s; and this fallacy—for it is a fallacy—is, I regret to say,
repeated by that charming and graceful writer who has lately deserted the
turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the
author of _Obiter Dicta_.  In point of fact, there is no such thing as
Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a
work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life.  There
are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.

ERNEST.  As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?

GILBERT.  Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is only to
personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of the two
comes right interpreta

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