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Title: The Garotters
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Contents
The Decay of Lying
Pen, Pencil, and Poison
The Critic as Artist
The Truth of Masks
THE DECAY OF LYING
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 modem 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 CREATION,
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 encyclopaedias 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 genie 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 LITTERAIRE 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 Rubempre.
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 SALAMMBO 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 Caesar 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 Beschrankung 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 aerial 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 modem 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 Tourgenieff,
and completed by Dostoieffski.
Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out of the DEBRIS 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 Rubempre,
our Rastignacs,
and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the COMEDIE 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 Caesar.
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 Renes 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 aesthetics;
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 mediaeval stained glass,
or in mediaeval stone and wood carving,
or on mediaeval 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 CHIMERE,
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 aesthetics.
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 archaeologist,
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-DINER.
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 Rubempre.
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 aesthetic 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 archaeological 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 [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] 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 BONBONNIERE
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 AEgiochus.'
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 aesthetic 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 archaeological 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 aether;
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 pounds,
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 pounds 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 pounds.
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 pounds,
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 DEBUT 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 Caesar 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 Sevigne.
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 LITTERATEURS.
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 Dvorek?
Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorek?
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,
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced],
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 Phaedrus 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 Phaedra
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.
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced] 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 Maenads 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 Dvorek.
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 aesthetic 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 paeons 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is,
as Goethe saw,
essentially aesthetic,
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 [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] 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 aesthetic 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 archaeologists,
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 mediaevalism.
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 [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] 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 ATTACHES 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,
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced],
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 AEschylus,
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 TANNHAUSER,
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 [Greek text which cannot be reproduced],
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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 interpretative criticism.
ERNEST.
The critic,
then,
considered as the interpreter,
will give no less than he receives,
and lend as much as he borrows?
GILBERT.
He will be always showing us the work of art in some new relation
to our age.
He will always be reminding us that great works of art are living things - are,
in fact,
the only things that live.
So much,
indeed,
will he feel this,
that I am certain that,
as civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised,
the elect spirits of each age,
the critical and cultured spirits,
will grow less and less interested in actual life,
and WILL SEEK
to GAIN THEIR IMPRESSIONS ALMOST ENTIRELY FROM WHAT ART HAS TOUCHED.
For life is terribly deficient in form.
Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and
to the wrong people.
There is a grotesque horror about its comedies,
and its tragedies seem
to culminate in farce.
One is always wounded when one approaches it.
Things last either too long,
or not long enough.
ERNEST.
Poor life! Poor human life! Are you not even touched by the tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.
GILBERT.
Too quickly touched by them,
I fear.
For when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity,
and filled
with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy,
it all seems
to be a dream and an illusion.
What are the unreal things,
but the passions that once burned one like fire?
What are the incredible things,
but the things that one has faithfully believed?
What are the improbable things?
The things that one has done oneself.
No,
Ernest;
life cheats us
with shadows,
like a puppet- master.
We ask it
for pleasure.
It gives it
to us,
with bitterness and disappointment in its train.
We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy
to our days,
but it passes away from us,
and things less noble take its place,
and on some grey windy dawn,
or odorous eve of silence and of silver,
we find ourselves looking
with callous wonder,
or dull heart of stone,
at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.
ERNEST.
Life then is a failure?
GILBERT.
From the artistic point of view,
certainly.
And the chief thing that makes life a failure from this artistic point of view is the thing that lends
to life its sordid security,
the fact that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion.
How different it is in the world of Art! On a shelf of the bookcase behind you stands the DIVINE COMEDY,
and I know that,
if I open it at a certain place,
I shall be filled
with a fierce hatred of some one who has never wronged me,
or stirred by a great love
for some one whom I shall never see.
There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us,
and those of us who have discovered her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are going
to be.
We can choose our day and select our hour.
We can say
to ourselves,
'To- morrow,
at dawn,
we shall walk
with grave Virgil through the valley of the shadow of death,'
and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood,
and the Mantuan stands by our side.
We pass through the gate of the legend fatal
to hope,
and
with pity or
with joy behold the horror of another world.
The hypocrites go by,
with their painted faces and their cowls of gilded lead.
Out of the ceaseless winds that drive them,
the carnal look at us,
and we watch the heretic rending his flesh,
and the glutton lashed by the rain.
We break the withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies,
and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds
with red blood before us,
and cries aloud
with bitter cries.
Out of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks
to us,
and when from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises,
the pride that triumphs over the torture of that bed becomes ours
for a moment.
Through the dim purple air fly those who have stained the world
with the beauty of their sin,
and in the pit of loathsome disease,
dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the semblance of a monstrous lute,
lies Adamo di Brescia,
the coiner of false coin.
He bids us listen
to his misery;
we stop,
and
with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentine hills.
Sinon,
the false Greek of Troy,
mocks at him.
He smites him in the face,
and they wrangle.
We are fascinated by their shame,
and loiter,
till Virgil chides us and leads us away
to that city turreted by giants where great Nimrod blows his horn.
Terrible things are in store
for us,
and we go
to meet them in Dante's raiment and
with Dante's heart.
We traverse the marshes of the Styx,
and Argenti swims
to the boat through the slimy waves.
He calls
to us,
and we reject him.
When we hear the voice of his agony we are glad,
and Virgil praises us
for the bitterness of our scorn.
We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus,
in which traitors stick like straws in glass.
Our foot strikes against the head of Bocca.
He will not tell us his name,
and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming skull.
Alberigo prays us
to break the ice upon his face that he may weep a little.
We pledge our word
to him,
and when he has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken,
and pass from him;
such cruelty being courtesy indeed,
for who more base than he who has mercy
for the condemned of God?
In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man who sold Christ,
and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew Caesar.
We tremble,
and come forth
to re-behold the stars.
In the land of Purgation the air is freer,
and the holy mountain rises into the pure light of day.
There is peace
for us,
and
for those who
for a season abide in it there is some peace also,
though,
pale from the poison of the Maremma,
Madonna Pia passes before us,
and Ismene,
with the sorrow of earth still lingering about her,
is there.
Soul after soul makes us share in some repentance or some joy.
He whom the mourning of his widow taught
to drink the sweet wormwood of pain,
tells us of Nella praying in her lonely bed,
and we learn from the mouth of Buonconte how a single tear may save a dying sinner from the fiend.
Sordello,
that noble and disdainful Lombard,
eyes us from afar like a couchant lion.
When he learns that Virgil is one of Mantua's citizens,
he falls upon his neck,
and when he learns that he is the singer of Rome he falls before his feet.
In that valley whose grass and flowers are fairer than cleft emerald and Indian wood,
and brighter than scarlet and silver,
they are singing who in the world were kings;
but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg do not move
to the music of the others,
and Philip of France beats his breast and Henry of England sits alone.
On and on we go,
climbing the marvellous stair,
and the stars become larger than their wont,
and the song of the kings grows faint,
and at length we reach the seven trees of gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise.
In a griffin-drawn chariot appears one whose brows are bound
with olive,
who is veiled in white,
and mantled in green,
and robed in a vesture that is coloured like live fire.
The ancient flame wakes within us.
Our blood quickens through terrible pulses.
We recognise her.
It is Beatrice,
the woman we have worshipped.
The ice congealed about our heart melts.
Wild tears of anguish break from us,
and we bow our forehead
to the ground,
for we know that we have sinned.
When we have done penance,
and are purified,
and have drunk of the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe,
the mistress of our soul raises us
to the Paradise of Heaven.
Out of that eternal pearl,
the moon,
the face of Piccarda Donati leans
to us.
Her beauty troubles us
for a moment,
and when,
like a thing that falls through water,
she passes away,
we gaze after her
with wistful eyes.
The sweet planet of Venus is full of lovers.
Cunizza,
the sister of Ezzelin,
the lady of Sordello's heart,
is there,
and Folco,
the passionate singer of Provence,
who in sorrow
for Azalais forsook the world,
and the Canaanitish harlot whose soul was the first that Christ redeemed.
Joachim of Flora stands in the sun,
and,
in the sun,
Aquinas recounts the story of St. Francis and Bonaventure the story of St. Dominic.
Through the burning rubies of Mars,
Cacciaguida approaches.
He tells us of the arrow that is shot from the bow of exile,
and how salt tastes the bread of another,
and how steep are the stairs in the house of a stranger.
In Saturn the soul sings not,
and even she who guides us dare not smile.
On a ladder of gold the flames rise and fall.
At last,
we see the pageant of the Mystical Rose.
Beatrice fixes her eyes upon the face of God
to turn them not again.
The beatific vision is granted
to us;
we know the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.
Yes,
we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make ourselves one
with the great Florentine,
kneel at the same altar
with him,
and share his rapture and his scorn.
And if we grow tired of an antique time,
and desire
to realise our own age in all its weariness and sin,
are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?
Close
to your hand lies a little volume,
bound in some Nile-green skin that has been powdered
with gilded nenuphars and smoothed
with hard ivory.
It is the book that Gautier loved,
it is Baudelaire's masterpiece.
Open it at that sad madrigal that begins Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
Sois belle! et sois triste! and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never worshipped joy.
Pass on
to the poem on the man who tortures himself,
let its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts,
and you will become
for a moment what he was who wrote it;
nay,
not
for a moment only,
but
for many barren moonlit nights and sunless sterile days will a despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you,
and the misery of another gnaw your heart away.
Read the whole book,
suffer it
to tell even one of its secrets
to your soul,
and your soul will grow eager
to know more,
and will feed upon poisonous honey,
and seek
to repent of strange crimes of which it is guiltless,
and
to make atonement
for terrible pleasures that it has never known.
And then,
when you are tired of these flowers of evil,
turn
to the flowers that grow in the garden of Perdita,
and in their dew-drenched chalices cool your fevered brow,
and let their loveliness heal and restore your soul;
or wake from his forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian,
Meleager,
and bid the lover of Heliodore make you music,
for he too has flowers in his song,
red pomegranate blossoms,
and irises that smell of myrrh,
ringed daffodils and dark blue hyacinths,
and marjoram and crinkled ox-eyes.
Dear
to him was the perfume of the bean-field at evening,
and dear
to him the odorous eared-spikenard that grew on the Syrian hills,
and the fresh green thyme,
the wine-cup's charm.
The feet of his love as she walked in the garden were like lilies set upon lilies.
Softer than sleep-laden poppy petals were her lips,
softer than violets and as scented.
The flame-like crocus sprang from the grass
to look at her.
For her the slim narcissus stored the cool rain;
and
for her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that wooed them.
And neither crocus,
nor anemone,
nor narcissus was as fair as she was.
It is a strange thing,
this transference of emotion.
We sicken
with the same maladies as the poets,
and the singer lends us his pain.
Dead lips have their message
for us,
and hearts that have fallen
to dust can communicate their joy.
We run
to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine,
and we follow Manon Lescaut over the whole world.
Ours is the love-madness of the Tyrian,
and the terror of Orestes is ours also.
There is no passion that we cannot feel,
no pleasure that we may not gratify,
and we can choose the time of our initiation and the time of our freedom also.
Life! Life! Don't let us go
to life
for our fulfilment or our experience.
It is a thing narrowed by circumstances,
incoherent in its utterance,
and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.
It makes us pay too high a price
for its wares,
and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
ERNEST.
Must we go,
then,
to Art
for everything?
GILBERT.
For everything.
Because Art does not hurt us.
The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art
to awaken.
We weep,
but we are not wounded.
We grieve,
but our grief is not bitter.
In the actual life of man,
sorrow,
as Spinoza says somewhere,
is a passage
to a lesser perfection.
But the sorrow
with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates,
if I may quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks.
It is through Art,
and through Art only,
that we can realise our perfection;
through Art,
and through Art only,
that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
This results not merely from the fact that nothing that one can imagine is worth doing,
and that one can imagine everything,
but from the subtle law that emotional forces,
like the forces of the physical sphere,
are limited in extent and energy.
One can feel so much,
and no more.
And how can it matter
with what pleasure life tries
to tempt one,
or
with what pain it seeks
to maim and mar one's soul,
if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed one has found the true secret of joy,
and wept away one's tears over their deaths who,
like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio,
can never die?
ERNEST.
Stop a moment.
It seems
to me that in everything that you have said there is something radically immoral.
GILBERT.
All art is immoral.
ERNEST.
All art?
GILBERT.
Yes.
For emotion
for the sake of emotion is the aim of art,
and emotion
for the sake of action is the aim of life,
and of that practical organisation of life that we call society.
Society,
which is the beginning and basis of morals,
exists simply
for the concentration of human energy,
and in order
to ensure its own continuance and healthy stability it demands,
and no doubt rightly demands,
of each of its citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour
to the common weal,
and toil and travail that the day's work may be done.
Society often forgives the criminal;
it never forgives the dreamer.
The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes,
and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up
to one at Private Views and other places that are open
to the general public,
and saying in a loud stentorian voice,
'What are you doing?'
whereas
'What are you thinking?'
is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed
to whisper
to another.
They mean well,
no doubt,
these honest beaming folk.
Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious.
But some one should teach them that while,
in the opinion of society,
Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty,
in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.
ERNEST.
Contemplation?
GILBERT.
Contemplation.
I said
to you some time ago that it was far more difficult
to talk about a thing than
to do it.
Let me say
to you now that
to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world,
the most difficult and the most intellectual.
To Plato,
with his passion
for wisdom,
this was the noblest form of energy.
To Aristotle,
with his passion
for knowledge,
this was the noblest form of energy also.
It was
to this that the passion
for holiness led the saint and the mystic of mediaeval days.
ERNEST.
We exist,
then,
to do nothing?
GILBERT.
It is
to do nothing that the elect exist.
Action is limited and relative.
Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches,
who walks in loneliness and dreaMs. But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too critical,
too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite pleasures,
to accept any speculations about life in exchange
for life itself.
To us the CITTE DIVINA is colourless,
and the FRUITIO DEI without meaning.
Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments,
and religious ecstasy is out of date.
The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes
'the spectator of all time and of all existence'
is not really an ideal world,
but simply a world of abstract ideas.
When we enter it,
we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought.
The courts of the city of God are not open
to us now.
Its gates are guarded by Ignorance,
and
to pass them we have
to surrender all that in our nature is most divine.
It is enough that our fathers believed.
They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.
Their legacy
to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid.
Had they put it into words,
it might not live within us as thought.
No,
Ernest,
no.
We cannot go back
to the saint.
There is far more
to be learned from the sinner.
We cannot go back
to the philosopher,
and the mystic leads us astray.
Who,
as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere,
would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf
for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high?
What
to us is the Illumination of Philo,
the Abyss of Eckhart,
the Vision of Bohme,
the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed
to Swedenborg's blinded eyes?
Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one daffodil of the field,
far less than the meanest of the visible arts,
for,
just as Nature is matter struggling into mind,
so Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter,
and thus,
even in the lowliest of her manifestations,
she speaks
to both sense and soul alike.
To the aesthetic temperament the vague is always repellent.
The Greeks were a nation of artists,
because they were spared the sense of the infinite.
Like Aristotle,
like Goethe after he had read Kant,
we desire the concrete,
and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.
ERNEST.
What then do you propose?
GILBERT.
It seems
to me that
with the development of the critical spirit we shall be able
to realise,
not merely our own lives,
but the collective life of the race,
and so
to make ourselves absolutely modern,
in the true meaning of the word modernity.
For he
to whom the present is the only thing that is present,
knows nothing of the age in which he lives.
To realise the nineteenth century,
one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed
to its making.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
There must be no mood
with which one cannot sympathise,
no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive.
Is this impossible?
I think not.
By revealing
to us the absolute mechanism of all action,
and so freeing us from the self- imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility,
the scientific principle of Heredity has become,
as it were,
the warrant
for the contemplative life.
It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try
to act.
It has hemmed us round
with the nets of the hunter,
and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom.
We may not watch it,
for it is within us.
We may not see it,
save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.
It is Nemesis without her mask.
It is the last of the Fates,
and the most terrible.
It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know.
And yet,
while in the sphere of practical and external life it has robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice,
in the subjective sphere,
where the soul is at work,
it comes
to us,
this terrible shadow,
with many gifts in its hands,
gifts of strange temperaments and subtle susceptibilities,
gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference,
complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance
with each other,
and passions that war against themselves.
And so,
it is not our own life that we live,
but the lives of the dead,
and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity,
making us personal and individual,
created
for our service,
and entering into us
for our joy.
It is something that has dwelt in fearful places,
and in ancient sepulchres has made its abode.
It is sick
with many maladies,
and has memories of curious sins.
It is wiser than we are,
and its wisdom is bitter.
It fills us
with impossible desires,
and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain.
One thing,
however,
Ernest,
it can do
for us.
It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed
to us by the mist of familiarity,
or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our development.
It can help us
to leave the age in which we were born,
and
to pass into other ages,
and find ourselves not exiled from their air.
It can teach us how
to escape from our experience,
and
to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are.
The pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain.
Theocritus blows on his pipe,
and we laugh
with the lips of nymph and shepherd.
In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds,
and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen.
We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard,
and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame into song.
We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes,
and when we wander
with Endymion the Moon grows amorous of our youth.
Ours is the anguish of Atys,
and ours the weak rage and noble sorrows of the Dane.
Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us
to live these countless lives?
Yes:
it is the imagination;
and the imagination is the result of heredity.
It is simply concentrated race-experience.
ERNEST.
But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?
GILBERT.
The culture that this transmission of racial experiences makes possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone,
and indeed may be said
to be one
with it.
For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams,
and ideas,
and feelings of myriad generations,
and
to whom no form of thought is alien,
no emotional impulse obscure?
And who the true man of culture,
if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious rejection has made instinct self-conscious and intelligent,
and can separate the work that has distinction from the work that has it not,
and so by contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets of style and school,
and understands their meanings,
and listens
to their voices,
and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real root,
as it is the real flower,
of the intellectual life,
and thus attains
to intellectual clarity,
and,
having learned
'the best that is known and thought in the world,'
lives - it is not fanciful
to say so -
with those who are the Immortals.
Yes,
Ernest:
the contemplative life,
the life that has
for its aim not DOING but BEING,
and not BEING merely,
but BECOMING - that is what the critical spirit can give us.
The gods live thus:
either brooding over their own perfection,
as Aristotle tells us,
or,
as Epicurus fancied,
watching
with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragicomedy of the world that they have made.
We,
too,
might live like them,
and set ourselves
to witness
with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford.
We might make ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action,
and become perfect by the rejection of energy.
It has often seemed
to me that Browning felt something of this.
Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into active life,
and makes him realise his mission by effort.
Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission by thought.
Incident and event were
to him unreal or unmeaning.
He made the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy,
and looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play.
To us,
at any rate,
the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is the true ideal.
From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world.
Calm,
and self-centred,
and complete,
the aesthetic critic contemplates life,
and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness.
He at least is safe.
He has discovered how
to live.
Is such a mode of life immoral?
Yes:
all the arts are immoral,
except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek
to excite
to action of evil or of good.
For action of every kind belongs
to the sphere of ethics.
The aim of art is simply
to create a mood.
Is such a mode of life unpractical?
Ah! it is not so easy
to be unpractical as the ignorant Philistine imagines.
It were well
for England if it were so.
There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours.
With us,
Thought is degraded by its constant association
with practice.
Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence,
noisy politician,
or brawling social reformer,
or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant section of the community among whom he has cast his lot,
can seriously claim
to be able
to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any one thing?
Each of the professions means a prejudice.
The necessity
for a career forces every one
to take sides.
We live in the age of the overworked,
and the under- educated;
the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
And,
harsh though it may sound,
I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom.
The sure way of knowing nothing about life is
to try
to make oneself useful.
ERNEST.
A charming doctrine,
Gilbert.
GILBERT.
I am not sure about that,
but it has at least the minor merit of being true.
That the desire
to do good
to others produces a plentiful crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which it is the cause.
The prig is a very interesting psychological study,
and though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive,
still
to have a pose at all is something.
It is a formal recognition of the importance of treating life from a definite and reasoned standpoint.
That Humanitarian Sympathy wars against Nature,
by securing the survival of the failure,
may make the man of science loathe its facile virtues.
The political economist may cry out against it
for putting the improvident on the same level as the provident,
and so robbing life of the strongest,
because most sordid,
incentive
to industry.
But,
in the eyes of the thinker,
the real harm that emotional sympathy does is that it limits knowledge,
and so prevents us from solving any single social problem.
We are trying at present
to stave off the coming crisis,
the coming revolution as my friends the Fabianists call it,
by means of doles and alMs. Well,
when the revolution or crisis arrives,
we shall be powerless,
because we shall know nothing.
And so,
Ernest,
let us not be deceived.
England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia
to her dominions.
There is more than one of her colonies that she might
with advantage surrender
for so fair a land.
What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment,
and think beyond the day.
Those who try
to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.
It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.
But perhaps you think that in beholding
for the mere joy of beholding,
and contemplating
for the sake of contemplation,
there is something that is egotistic.
If you think so,
do not say so.
It takes a thoroughly selfish age,
like our own,
to deify self- sacrifice.
It takes a thoroughly grasping age,
such as that in which we live,
to set above the fine intellectual virtues,
those shallow and emotional virtues that are an immediate practical benefit
to itself.
They miss their aim,
too,
these philanthropists and sentimentalists of our day,
who are always chattering
to one about one's duty
to one's neighbour.
For the development of the race depends on the development of the individual,
and where self- culture has ceased
to be the ideal,
the intellectual standard is instantly lowered,
and,
often,
ultimately lost.
If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself - a rare type in our time,
I admit,
but still one occasionally
to be met
with - you rise from table richer,
and conscious that a high ideal has
for a moment touched and sanctified your days.
But oh! my dear Ernest,
to sit next
to a man who has spent his life in trying
to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is! How appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions! How limited in range the creature's mind proves
to be! How it wearies us,
and must weary himself,
with its endless repetitions and sickly reiteration! How lacking it is in any element of intellectual growth! In what a vicious circle it always moves! ERNEST.
You speak
with strange feeling,
Gilbert.
Have you had this dreadful experience,
as you call it,
lately?
GILBERT.
Few of us escape it.
People say that the schoolmaster is abroad.
I wish
to goodness he were.
But the type of which,
after all,
he is only one,
and certainly the least important,
of the representatives,
seems
to me
to be really dominating our lives;
and just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere,
so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying
to educate others,
that he has never had any time
to educate himself.
No,
Ernest,
self-culture is the true ideal of man.
Goethe saw it,
and the immediate debt that we owe
to Goethe is greater than the debt we owe
to any man since Greek days.
The Greeks saw it,
and have left us,
as their legacy
to modern thought,
the conception of the contemplative life as well as the critical method by which alone can that life be truly realised.
It was the one thing that made the Renaissance great,
and gave us Humanism.
It is the one thing that could make our own age great also;
for the real weakness of England lies,
not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts,
not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes,
or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts,
but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.
I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment,
still less that it is,
and perhaps will be
for years
to come,
unpopular
with the crowd.
It is so easy
for people
to have sympathy
with suffering.
It is so difficult
for them
to have sympathy
with thought.
Indeed,
so little do ordinary people understand what thought really is,
that they seem
to imagine that,
when they have said that a theory is dangerous,
they have pronounced its condemnation,
whereas it is only such theories that have any true intellectual value.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
ERNEST.
Gilbert,
you bewilder me.
You have told me that all art is,
in its essence,
immoral.
Are you going
to tell me now that all thought is,
in its essence,
dangerous?
GILBERT.
Yes,
in the practical sphere it is so.
The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct,
and the basis of the stability of society,
as a healthy organism,
is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
The great majority of people being fully aware of this,
rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them
to the dignity of machines,
and rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life,
that one is tempted
to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon
to act in accordance
with the dictates of reason.
But let us turn from the practical sphere,
and say no more about the wicked philanthropists,
who,
indeed,
may well be left
to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of the Yellow River Chuang Tsu the wise,
who has proved that such well-meaning and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous virtue that there is in man.
They are a wearisome topic,
and I am anxious
to get back
to the sphere in which criticism is free.
ERNEST.
The sphere of the intellect?
GILBERT.
Yes.
You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in his own way as creative as the artist,
whose work,
indeed,
may be merely of value in so far as it gives
to the critic a suggestion
for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise
with equal,
or perhaps greater,
distinction of form,
and,
through the use of a fresh medium of expression,
make differently beautiful and more perfect.
Well,
you seemed
to be a little sceptical about the theory.
But perhaps I wronged you?
ERNEST.
I am not really sceptical about it,
but I must admit that I feel very strongly that such work as you describe the critic producing - and creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted
to be - is,
of necessity,
purely subjective,
whereas the greatest work is objective always,
objective and impersonal.
GILBERT.
The difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form merely.
It is accidental,
not essential.
All artistic creation is absolutely subjective.
The very landscape that Corot looked at was,
as he said himself,
but a mood of his own mind;
and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem
to us
to possess an actual existence of their own,
apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned them,
are,
in their ultimate analysis,
simply the poets themselves,
not as they thought they were,
but as they thought they were not;
and by such thinking came in strange manner,
though but
for a moment,
really so
to be.
For out of ourselves we can never pass,
nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not.
Nay,
I would say that the more objective a creation appears
to be,
the more subjective it really is.
Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London,
or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square;
but Hamlet came out of his soul,
and Romeo out of his passion.
They were elements of his nature
to which he gave visible form,
impulses that stirred so strongly within him that he had,
as it were perforce,
to suffer them
to realise their energy,
not on the lower plane of actual life,
where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so made imperfect,
but on that imaginative plane of art where Love can indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment,
where one can stab the eavesdropper behind the arras,
and wrestle in a new-made grave,
and make a guilty king drink his own hurt,
and see one's father's spirit,
beneath the glimpses of the moon,
stalking in complete steel from misty wall
to wall.
Action being limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed;
and,
just as it is because he did nothing that he has been able
to achieve everything,
so it is because he never speaks
to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him
to us absolutely,
and show us his true nature and temperament far more completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets,
even,
in which he bares
to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart.
Yes,
the objective form is the most subjective in matter.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask,
and he will tell you the truth.
ERNEST.
The critic,
then,
being limited
to the subjective form,
will necessarily be less able fully
to express himself than the artist,
who has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.
GILBERT.
Not necessarily,
and certainly not at all if he recognises that each mode of criticism is,
in its highest development,
simply a mood,
and that we are never more true
to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.
The aesthetic critic,
constant only
to the principle of beauty in all things,
will ever be looking
for fresh impressions,
winning from the various schools the secret of their charm,
bowing,
it may be,
before foreign altars,
or smiling,
if it be his fancy,
at strange new gods.
What other people call one's past has,
no doubt,
everything
to do
with them,
but has absolutely nothing
to do
with oneself.
The man who regards his past is a man who deserves
to have no future
to look forward to.
When one has found expression
for a mood,
one has done
with it.
You laugh;
but believe me it is so.
Yesterday it was Realism that charmed one.
One gained from it that NOUVEAU FRISSON which it was its aim
to produce.
One analysed it,
explained it,
and wearied of it.
At sunset came the LUMINISTE in painting,
and the SYMBOLISTE in poetry,
and the spirit of mediaevalism,
that spirit which belongs not
to time but
to temperament,
woke suddenly in wounded Russia,
and stirred us
for a moment by the terrible fascination of pain.
To-day the cry is
for Romance,
and already the leaves are tremulous in the valley,
and on the purple hill-tops walks Beauty
with slim gilded feet.
The old modes of creation linger,
of course.
The artists reproduce either themselves or each other,
with wearisome iteration.
But Criticism is always moving on,
and the critic is always developing.
Nor,
again,
is the critic really limited
to the subjective form of expression.
The method of the drama is his,
as well as the method of the epos.
He may use dialogue,
as he did who set Milton talking
to Marvel on the nature of comedy and tragedy,
and made Sidney and Lord Brooke discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks;
or adopt narration,
as Mr. Pater is fond of doing,
each of whose Imaginary Portraits - is not that the title of the book?
- presents
to us,
under the fanciful guise of fiction,
some fine and exquisite piece of criticism,
one on the painter Watteau,
another on the philosophy of Spinoza,
a third on the Pagan elements of the early Renaissance,
and the last,
and in some respects the most suggestive,
on the source of that Aufklarung,
that enlightening which dawned on Germany in the last century,
and
to which our own culture owes so great a debt.
Dialogue,
certainly,
that wonderful literary form which,
from Plato
to Lucian,
and from Lucian
to Giordano Bruno,
and from Bruno
to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight,
the creative critics of the world have always employed,
can never lose
for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.
By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself,
and give form
to every fancy,
and reality
to every mood.
By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view,
and show it
to us in the round,
as a sculptor shows us things,
gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress,
and really illumine the idea more completely,
or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness
to the central scheme,
and yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance.
ERNEST.
By its means,
too,
he can invent an imaginary antagonist,
and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.
GILBERT.
Ah! it is so easy
to convert others.
It is so difficult
to convert oneself.
To arrive at what one really believes,
one must speak through lips different from one's own.
To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods.
For what is Truth?
In matters of religion,
it is simply the opinion that has survived.
In matters of science,
it is the ultimate sensation.
In matters of art,
it is one's last mood.
And you see now,
Ernest,
that the critic has at his disposal as many objective forms of expression as the artist has.
Ruskin put his criticism into imaginative prose,
and is superb in his changes and contradictions;
and Browning put his into blank verse and made painter and poet yield us their secret;
and M.
Renan uses dialogue,
and Mr. Pater fiction,
and Rossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione and the design of Ingres,
and his own design and colour also,
feeling,
with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance;
that the ultimate art is literature,
and the finest and fullest medium that of words.
ERNEST.
Well,
now that you have settled that the critic has at his disposal all objective forms,
I wish you would tell me what are the qualities that should characterise the true critic.
GILBERT.
What would you say they were?
ERNEST.
Well,
I should say that a critic should above all things be fair.
GILBERT.
Ah! not fair.
A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word.
It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiassed opinion,
which is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.
The man who sees both sides of a question,
is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.
Art is a passion,
and,
in matters of art,
Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion,
and so is fluid rather than fixed,
and,
depending upon fine moods and exquisite moments,
cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a scientific formula or a theological dogma.
It is
to the soul that Art speaks,
and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of the body.
One should,
of course,
have no prejudices;
but,
as a great Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago,
it is one's business in such matters
to have preferences,
and when one has preferences one ceases
to be fair.
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of Art.
No;
fairness is not one of the qualities of the true critic.
It is not even a condition of criticism.
Each form of Art
with which we come in contact dominates us
for the moment
to the exclusion of every other form.
We must surrender ourselves absolutely
to the work in question,
whatever it may be,
if we wish
to gain its secret.
For the time,
we must think of nothing else,
can think of nothing else,
indeed.
ERNEST.
The true critic will be rational,
at any rate,
will he not?
GILBERT.
Rational?
There are two ways of disliking art,
Ernest.
One is
to dislike it.
The other,
to like it rationally.
For Art,
as Plato saw,
and not without regret,
creates in listener and spectator a form of divine madness.
It does not spring from inspiration,
but it makes others inspired.
Reason is not the faculty
to which it appeals.
If one loves Art at all,
one must love it beyond all other things in the world,
and against such love,
the reason,
if one listened
to it,
would cry out.
There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty.
It is too splendid
to be sane.
Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem
to the world
to be pure visionaries.
ERNEST.
Well,
at least,
the critic will be sincere.
GILBERT.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,
and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
The true critic will,
indeed,
always be sincere in his devotion
to the principle of beauty,
but he will seek
for beauty in every age and in each school,
and will never suffer himself
to be limited
to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped mode of looking at things.
He will realise himself in many forms,
and by a thousand different ways,
and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view.
Through constant change,
and through constant change alone,
he will find his true unity.
He will not consent
to be the slave of his own opinions.
For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?
The essence of thought,
as the essence of life,
is growth.
You must not be frightened by word,
Ernest.
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
ERNEST.
I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.
GILBERT.
Of the three qualifications you mentioned,
two,
sincerity and fairness,
were,
if not actually moral,
at least on the borderland of morals,
and the first condition of criticism is that the critic should be able
to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.
When they are confused,
Chaos has come again.
They are too often confused in England now,
and though our modern Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing,
yet,
by means of their extraordinary prurience,
they can almost taint beauty
for a moment.
It is chiefly,
I regret
to say,
through journalism that such people find expression.
I regret it because there is much
to be said in favour of modern journalism.
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated,
it keeps us in touch
with the ignorance of the community.
By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life,
it shows us of what very little importance such events really are.
By invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite
for culture,
and what are not.
But it should not allow poor Tartuffe
to write articles upon modern art.
When it does this it stultifies itself.
And yet Tartuffe's articles and Chadband's notes do this good,
at least.
They serve
to show how extremely limited is the area over which ethics,
and ethical considerations,
can claim
to exercise influence.
Science is out of the reach of morals,
for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.
Art is out of the reach of morals,
for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.
To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.
However,
let these mouthing Puritans pass;
they have their comic side.
Who can help laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes
to limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?
Some limitation might well,
and will soon,
I hope,
be placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers.
For they give us the bald,
sordid,
disgusting facts of life.
They chronicle,
with degrading avidity,
the sins of the second-rate,
and
with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.
But the artist,
who accepts the facts of life,
and yet transforms them into shapes of beauty,
and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe,
and shows their colour-element,
and their wonder,
and their true ethical import also,
and builds out of them a world more real than reality itself,
and of loftier and more noble import - who shall set limits
to him?
Not the apostles of that new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity
'writ large.'
Not the apostles of that new Puritanism,
which is but the whine of the hypocrite,
and is both writ and spoken badly.
The mere suggestion is ridiculous.
Let us leave these wicked people,
and proceed
to the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary
for the true critic.
ERNEST.
And what are they?
Tell me yourself.
GILBERT.
Temperament is the primary requisite
for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible
to beauty,
and
to the various impressions that beauty gives us.
Under what conditions,
and by what means,
this temperament is engendered in race or individual,
we will not discuss at present.
It is sufficient
to note that it exists,
and that there is in us a beauty-sense,
separate from the other senses and above them,
separate from the reason and of nobler import,
separate from the soul and of equal value - a sense that leads some
to create,
and others,
the finer spirits as I think,
to contemplate merely.
But
to be purified and made perfect,
this sense requires some form of exquisite environment.
Without this it starves,
or is dulled.
You remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated,
and
with what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings,
telling us how the lad is
to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds,
so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul
for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual.
Insensibly,
and without knowing the reason why,
he is
to develop that real love of beauty which,
as Plato is never weary of reminding us,
is the true aim of education.
By slow degrees there is
to be engendered in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply
to choose the good in preference
to the bad,
and,
rejecting what is vulgar and discordant,
to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveliness.
Ultimately,
in its due course,
this taste is
to become critical and self-conscious,
but at first it is
to exist purely as a cultivated instinct,
and
'he who has received this true culture of the inner man will
with clear and certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature,
and
with a taste that cannot err,
while he praises,
and finds his pleasure in what is good,
and receives it into his soul,
and so becomes good and noble,
he will rightly blame and hate the bad,
now in the days of his youth,
even before he is able
to know the reason why':
and so,
when,
later on,
the critical and self-conscious spirit develops in him,
he
'will recognise and salute it as a friend
with whom his education has made him long familiar.'
I need hardly say,
Ernest,
how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal,
and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one ventured
to suggest
to him that the true aim of education was the love of beauty,
and that the methods by which education should work were the development of temperament,
the cultivation of taste,
and the creation of the critical spirit.
Yet,
even
for us,
there is left some loveliness of environment,
and the dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen,
and listen
to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel,
or lie in the green meadow,
among the strange snake-spotted fritillaries,
and watch the sunburnt noon smite
to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes,
or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans,
or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St. John.
Nor is it merely at Oxford,
or Cambridge,
that the sense of beauty can be formed and trained and perfected.
All over England there is a Renaissance of the decorative Arts.
Ugliness has had its day.
Even in the houses of the rich there is taste,
and the houses of those who are not rich have been made gracious and comely and sweet
to live in.
Caliban,
poor noisy Caliban,
thinks that when he has ceased
to make mows at a thing,
the thing ceases
to exist.
But if he mocks no longer,
it is because he has been met
with mockery,
swifter and keener than his own,
and
for a moment has been bitterly schooled into that silence which should seal
for ever his uncouth distorted lips.
What has been done up
to now,
has been chiefly in the clearing of the way.
It is always more difficult
to destroy than it is
to create,
and when what one has
to destroy is vulgarity and stupidity,
the task of destruction needs not merely courage but also contempt.
Yet it seems
to me
to have been,
in a measure,
done.
We have got rid of what was bad.
We have now
to make what is beautiful.
And though the mission of the aesthetic movement is
to lure people
to contemplate,
not
to lead them
to create,
yet,
as the creative instinct is strong in the Celt,
and it is the Celt who leads in art,
there is no reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not become almost as mighty in its way as was that new birth of Art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of Italy.
Certainly,
for the cultivation of temperament,
we must turn
to the decorative arts:
to the arts that touch us,
not
to the arts that teach us.
Modern pictures are,
no doubt,
delightful
to look at.
At least,
some of them are.
But they are quite impossible
to live with;
they are too clever,
too assertive,
too intellectual.
Their meaning is too obvious,
and their method too clearly defined.
One exhausts what they have
to say in a very short time,
and then they become as tedious as one's relations.
I am very fond of the work of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London.
Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school.
Some of their arrangements and harmonies serve
to remind one of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier's immortal SYMPHONIE EN BLANC MAJEUR,
that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.
For a class that welcomes the incompetent
with sympathetic eagerness,
and that confuses the bizarre
with the beautiful,
and vulgarity
with truth,
they are extremely accomplished.
They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of epigrams,
pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes,
and as
for their portraits,
whatever the commonplace may say against them,
no one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm which belongs
to works of pure fiction.
But even the Impressionists,
earnest and industrious as they are,
will not do.
I like them.
Their white keynote,
with its variations in lilac,
was an era in colour.
Though the moment does not make the man,
the moment certainly makes the Impressionist,
and
for the moment in art,
and the
'moment's monument,'
as Rossetti phrased it,
what may not be said?
They are suggestive also.
If they have not opened the eyes of the blind,
they have at least given great encouragement
to the short-sighted,
and while their leaders may have all the inexperience of old age,
their young men are far too wise
to be ever sensible.
Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it were a mode of autobiography invented
for the use of the illiterate,
and are always prating
to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions,
and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and only modest thing about them.
One tires,
at the end,
of the work of individuals whose individuality is always noisy,
and generally uninteresting.
There is far more
to be said in favour of that newer school at Paris,
the ARCHAICISTES,
as they call themselves,
who,
refusing
to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather,
do not find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect,
but seek rather
for the imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour,
and rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see,
try
to see something worth seeing,
and
to see it not merely
with actual and physical vision,
but
with that nobler vision of the soul which is as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic purpose.
They,
at any rate,
work under those decorative conditions that each art requires
for its perfection,
and have sufficient aesthetic instinct
to regret those sordid and stupid limitations of absolute modernity of form which have proved the ruin of so many of the Impressionists.
Still,
the art that is frankly decorative is the art
to live with.
It is,
of all our visible arts,
the one art that creates in us both mood and temperament.
Mere colour,
unspoiled by meaning,
and unallied
with definite form,
can speak
to the soul in a thousand different ways.
The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind.
The repetitions of pattern give us rest.
The marvels of design stir the imagination.
In the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements of culture.
Nor is this all.
By its deliberate rejection of Nature as the ideal of beauty,
as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary painter,
decorative art not merely prepares the soul
for the reception of true imaginative work,
but develops in it that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of critical achievement.
For the real artist is he who proceeds,
not from feeling
to form,
but from form
to thought and passion.
He does not first conceive an idea,
and then say
to himself,
'I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,'
but,
realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme,
he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme,
and the mere form suggests what is
to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete.
From time
to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet,
because,
to use its hackneyed and silly phrase,
he has
'nothing
to say.'
But if he had something
to say,
he would probably say it,
and the result would be tedious.
It is just because he has no new message,
that he can do beautiful work.
He gains his inspiration from form,
and from form purely,
as an artist should.
A real passion would ruin him.
Whatever actually occurs is spoiled
for art.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
To be natural is
to be obvious,
and
to be obvious is
to be inartistic.
ERNEST.
I wonder do you really believe what you say?
GILBERT.
Why should you wonder?
It is not merely in art that the body is the soul.
In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of things.
The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey,
Plato tells us,
both rhythm and harmony into the mind.
Forms are the food of faith,
cried Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that make us admire and know the man.
He was right,
though he may not have known how terribly right he was.
The Creeds are believed,
not because they are rational,
but because they are repeated.
Yes:
Form is everything.
It is the secret of life.
Find expression
for a sorrow,
and it will become dear
to you.
Find expression
for a joy,
and you intensify its ecstasy.
Do you wish
to love?
Use Love's Litany,
and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring.
Have you a grief that corrodes your heart?
Steep yourself in the Language of grief,
learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance,
and you will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation,
and that Form,
which is the birth of passion,
is also the death of pain.
And so,
to return
to the sphere of Art,
it is Form that creates not merely the critical temperament,
but also the aesthetic instinct,
that unerring instinct that reveals
to one all things under their conditions of beauty.
Start
with the worship of form,
and there is no secret in art that will not be revealed
to you,
and remember that in criticism,
as in creation,
temperament is everything,
and that it is,
not by the time of their production,
but by the temperaments
to which they appeal,
that the schools of art should be historically grouped.
ERNEST.
Your theory of education is delightful.
But what influence will your critic,
brought up in these exquisite surroundings,
possess?
Do you really think that any artist is ever affected by criticism?
GILBERT.
The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own existence.
He will represent the flawless type.
In him the culture of the century will see itself realised.
You must not ask of him
to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself.
The demand of the intellect,
as has been well said,
is simply
to feel itself alive.
The critic may,
indeed,
desire
to exercise influence;
but,
if so,
he will concern himself not
with the individual,
but
with the age,
which he will seek
to wake into consciousness,
and
to make responsive,
creating in it new desires and appetites,
and lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods.
The actual art of to-day will occupy him less than the art of to-morrow,
far less than the art of yesterday,
and as
for this or that person at present toiling away,
what do the industrious matter?
They do their best,
no doubt,
and consequently we get the worst from them.
It is always
with the best intentions that the worst work is done.
And besides,
my dear Ernest,
when a man reaches the age of forty,
or becomes a Royal Academician,
or is elected a member of the Athenaeum Club,
or is recognised as a popular novelist,
whose books are in great demand at suburban railway stations,
one may have the amusement of exposing him,
but one cannot have the pleasure of reforming him.
And this is,
I dare say,
very fortunate
for him;
for I have no doubt that reformation is a much more painful process than punishment,
is indeed punishment in its most aggravated and moral form - a fact which accounts
for our entire failure as a community
to reclaim that interesting phenomenon who is called the confirmed criminal.
ERNEST.
But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry,
and the painter of painting?
Each art must appeal primarily
to the artist who works in it.
His judgment will surely be the most valuable?
GILBERT.
The appeal of all art is simply
to the artistic temperament.
Art does not address herself
to the specialist.
Her claim is that she is universal,
and that in all her manifestations she is one.
Indeed,
so far from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art,
a really great artist can never judge of other people's work at all,
and can hardly,
in fact,
judge of his own.
That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist,
limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation.
The energy of creation hurries him blindly on
to his own goal.
The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him.
The gods are hidden from each other.
They can recognise their worshippers.
That is all.
ERNEST.
You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty of work different from his own.
GILBERT.
It is impossible
for him
to do so.
Wordsworth saw in ENDYMION merely a pretty piece of Paganism,
and Shelley,
with his dislike of actuality,
was deaf
to Wordsworth's message,
being repelled by its form,
and Byron,
that great passionate human incomplete creature,
could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake,
and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him.
The realism of Euripides was hateful
to Sophokles.
Those droppings of warm tears had no music
for him.
Milton,
with his sense of the grand style,
could not understand the method of Shakespeare,
any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough.
Bad artists always admire each other's work.
They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice.
But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown,
or beauty fashioned,
under any conditions other than those that he has selected.
Creation employs all its critical faculty within its own sphere.
It may not use it in the sphere that belongs
to others.
It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it.
ERNEST.
Do you really mean that?
GILBERT.
Yes,
for creation limits,
while contemplation widens,
the vision.
ERNEST.
But what about technique?
Surely each art has its separate technique?
GILBERT.
Certainly:
each art has its grammar and its materials.
There is no mystery about either,
and the incompetent can always be correct.
But,
while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and certain,
to find their true realisation they must be touched by the imagination into such beauty that they will seem an exception,
each one of them.
Technique is really personality.
That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it,
why the pupil cannot learn it,
and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.
To the great poet,
there is only one method of music - his own.
To the great painter,
there is only one manner of painting - that which he himself employs.
The aesthetic critic,
and the aesthetic critic alone,
can appreciate all forms and modes.
It is
to him that Art makes her appeal.
ERNEST.
Well,
I think I have put all my questions
to you.
And now I must admit - GILBERT.
Ah! don't say that you agree
with me.
When people agree
with me I always feel that I must be wrong.
ERNEST.
In that case I certainly won't tell you whether I agree
with you or not.
But I will put another question.
You have explained
to me that criticism is a creative art.
What future has it?
GILBERT.
It is
to criticism that the future belongs.
The subject- matter at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and variety.
Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted the obvious.
If creation is
to last at all,
it can only do so on the condition of becoming far more critical than it is at present.
The old roads and dusty highways have been traversed too often.
Their charm has been worn away by plodding feet,
and they have lost that element of novelty or surprise which is so essential
for romance.
He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new background,
or reveal
to us the soul of man in its innermost workings.
The first is
for the moment being done
for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
As one turns over the pages of his PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS,
one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.
The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes.
The jaded,
second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity
with their surroundings.
The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism
to what he tells us.
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.
From the point of view of life,
he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy.
Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness.
He is our first authority on the second-rate,
and has seen marvellous things through keyholes,
and his backgrounds are real works of art.
As
for the second condition,
we have had Browning,
and Meredith is
with us.
But there is still much
to be done in the sphere of introspection.
People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid.
As far as psychology is concerned,
it has never been morbid enough.
We have merely touched the surface of the soul,
that is all.
In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of,
who,
like the author of LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR,
have sought
to track the soul into its most secret places,
and
to make life confess its dearest sins.
Still,
there is a limit even
to the number of untried backgrounds,
and it is possible that a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal
to that creative faculty
to which it seeks
to supply fresh material.
I myself am inclined
to think that creation is doomed.
It springs from too primitive,
too natural an impulse.
However this may be,
it is certain that the subject- matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing,
while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily.
There are always new attitudes
for the mind,
and new points of view.
The duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances.
There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now.
It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.
Hours ago,
Ernest,
you asked me the use of Criticism.
You might just as well have asked me the use of thought.
It is Criticism,
as Arnold points out,
that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age.
It is Criticism,
as I hope
to point out myself some day,
that makes the mind a fine instrument.
We,
in our educational system,
have burdened the memory
with a load of unconnected facts,
and laboriously striven
to impart our laboriously-acquired knowledge.
We teach people how
to remember,
we never teach them how
to grow.
It has never occurred
to us
to try and develop in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and discernment.
The Greeks did this,
and when we come in contact
with the Greek critical intellect,
we cannot but be conscious that,
while our subject- matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs,
theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can be interpreted.
England has done one thing;
it has invented and established Public Opinion,
which is an attempt
to organise the ignorance of the community,
and
to elevate it
to the dignity of physical force.
But Wisdom has always been hidden from it.
Considered as an instrument of thought,
the English mind is coarse and undeveloped.
The only thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.
It is Criticism,
again,
that,
by concentration,
makes culture possible.
It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work,
and distils it into a finer essence.
Who that desires
to retain any sense of form could struggle through the monstrous multitudinous books that the world has produced,
books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls?
The thread that is
to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism.
Nay more,
where there is no record,
and history is either lost,
or was never written,
Criticism can re-create the past
for us from the very smallest fragment of language or art,
just as surely as the man of science can from some tiny bone,
or the mere impress of a foot upon a rock,
re-create
for us the winged dragon or Titan lizard that once made the earth shake beneath its tread,
can call Behemoth out of his cave,
and make Leviathan swim once more across the startled sea.
Prehistoric history belongs
to the philological and archaeological critic.
It is
to him that the origins of things are revealed.
The self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly always misleading.
Through philological criticism alone we know more of the centuries of which no actual record has been preserved,
than we do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls.
It can do
for us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics.
It can give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming.
It can do
for us what History cannot do.
It can tell us what man thought before he learned how
to write.
You have asked me about the influence of Criticism.
I think I have answered that question already;
but there is this also
to be said.
It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan.
The Manchester school tried
to make men realise the brotherhood of humanity,
by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace.
It sought
to degrade the wonderful world into a common market-place
for the buyer and the seller.
It addressed itself
to the lowest instincts,
and it failed.
War followed upon war,
and the tradesman's creed did not prevent France and Germany from clashing together in blood-stained battle.
There are others of our own day who seek
to appeal
to mere emotional sympathies,
or
to the shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics.
They have their Peace Societies,
so dear
to the sentimentalists,
and their proposals
for unarmed International Arbitration,
so popular among those who have never read history.
But mere emotional sympathy will not do.
It is too variable,
and too closely connected
with the passions;
and a board of arbitrators who,
for the general welfare of the race,
are
to be deprived of the power of putting their decisions into execution,
will not be of much avail.
There is only one thing worse than Injustice,
and that is Justice without her sword in her hand.
When Right is not Might,
it is Evil.
No:
the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan,
any more than the greed
for gain could do so.
It is only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able
to rise superior
to race-prejudices.
Goethe - you will not misunderstand what I say - was a German of the Germans.
He loved his country - no man more so.
Its people were dear
to him;
and he led them.
Yet,
when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard and cornfield,
his lips were silent.
'How can one write songs of hatred without hating?'
he said
to Eckermann,
'and how could I,
to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance,
hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth and
to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?'
This note,
sounded in the modern world by Goethe first,
will become,
I think,
the starting point
for the cosmopolitanism of the future.
Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices,
by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forMs. If we are tempted
to make war upon another nation,
we shall remember that we are seeking
to destroy an element of our own culture,
and possibly its most important element.
As long as war is regarded as wicked,
it will always have its fascination.
When it is looked upon as vulgar,
it will cease
to be popular.
The change will of course be slow,
and people will not be conscious of it.
They will not say
'We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,'
but because the prose of France is perfect,
they will not hate the land.
Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist.
It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.
Nor is this all.
It is Criticism that,
recognising no position as final,
and refusing
to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school,
creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth
for its own sake,
and loves it not the less because it knows it
to be unattainable.
How little we have of this temper in England,
and how much we need it! The English mind is always in a rage.
The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.
It was reserved
for a man of science
to show us the supreme example of that
'sweet reasonableness'
of which Arnold spoke so wisely,
and,
alas!
to so little effect.
The author of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES had,
at any rate,
the philosophic temper.
If one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England,
one can but feel the contempt of Julian,
or the indifference of Montaigne.
We are dominated by the fanatic,
whose worst vice is his sincerity.
Anything approaching
to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us.
People cry out against the sinner,
yet it is not the sinful,
but the stupid,
who are our shame.
There is no sin except stupidity.
ERNEST.
Ah! what an antinomian you are! GILBERT.
The artistic critic,
like the mystic,
is an antinomian always.
To be good,
according
to the vulgar standard of goodness,
is obviously quite easy.
It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror,
a certain lack of imaginative thought,
and a certain low passion
for middle-class respectability.
Aesthetics are higher than ethics.
They belong
to a more spiritual sphere.
To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point
to which we can arrive.
Even a colour-sense is more important,
in the development of the individual,
than a sense of right and wrong.
Aesthetics,
in fact,
are
to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation,
what,
in the sphere of the external world,
sexual is
to natural selection.
Ethics,
like natural selection,
make existence possible.
Aesthetics,
like sexual selection,
make life lovely and wonderful,
fill it
with new forms,
and give it progress,
and variety and change.
And when we reach the true culture that is our aim,
we attain
to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed,
the perfection of those
to whom sin is impossible,
not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic,
but because they can do everything they wish without hurt
to the soul,
and can wish
for nothing that can do the soul harm,
the soul being an entity so divine that it is able
to transform into elements of a richer experience,
or a finer susceptibility,
or a newer mode of thought,
acts or passions that
with the common would be commonplace,
or
with the uneducated ignoble,
or
with the shameful vile.
Is this dangerous?
Yes;
it is dangerous - all ideas,
as I told you,
are so.
But the night wearies,
and the light flickers in the lamp.
One more thing I cannot help saying
to you.
You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing.
The nineteenth century is a turning point in history,
simply on account of the work of two men,
Darwin and Renan,
the one the critic of the Book of Nature,
the other the critic of the books of God.
Not
to recognise this is
to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.
Creation is always behind the age.
It is Criticism that leads us.
The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.
ERNEST.
And he who is in possession of this spirit,
or whom this spirit possesses,
will,
I suppose,
do nothing?
GILBERT.
Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us,
the sweet pensive Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and amaranth are blooming,
he will sit contented
'in that deep,
motionless quiet which mortals pity,
and which the gods enjoy.'
He will look out upon the world and know its secret.
By contact
with divine things he will become divine.
His will be the perfect life,
and his only.
ERNEST.
You have told me many strange things to-night,
Gilbert.
You have told me that it is more difficult
to talk about a thing than
to do it,
and that
to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world;
you have told me that all Art is immoral,
and all thought dangerous;
that criticism is more creative than creation,
and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there;
that it is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it;
and that the true critic is unfair,
insincere,
and not rational.
My friend,
you are a dreamer.
GILBERT.
Yes:
I am a dreamer.
For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight,
and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
ERNEST.
His punishment?
GILBERT.
And his reward.
But,
see,
it is dawn already.
Draw back the curtains and open the windows wide.
How cool the morning air is! Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver.
A faint purple mist hangs over the Park,
and the shadows of the white houses are purple.
It is too late
to sleep.
Let us go down
to Covent Garden and look at the roses.
Come! I am tired of thought.
THE TRUTH OF MASKS - A NOTE ON ILLUSION In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made on that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian revivals in England,
it seems
to have been tacitly assumed by the critics that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent
to the costumes of his actors,
and that,
could he see Mrs. Langtry's production of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA,
he would probably say that the play,
and the play only,
is the thing,
and that everything else is leather and prunella.
While,
as regards any historical accuracy in dress,
Lord Lytton,
in an article in the NINETEENTH CENTURY,
has laid it down as a dogma of art that archaeology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of Shakespeare's plays,
and the attempt
to introduce it one of the stupidest pedantries of an age of prigs.
Lord Lytton's position I shall examine later on;
but,
as regards the theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about the costume-wardrobe of his theatre,
anybody who cares
to study Shakespeare's method will see that there is absolutely no dramatist of the French,
English,
or Athenian stage who relies so much
for his illusionist effects on the dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself.
Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty of costume,
he constantly introduces into his plays masques and dances,
purely
for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye;
and we have still his stage-directions
for the three great processions in HENRY THE EIGHTH,
directions which are characterised by the most extraordinary elaborateness of detail down
to the collars of S.S.
and the pearls in Anne Boleyn's hair.
Indeed it would be quite easy
for a modern manager
to reproduce these pageants absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed;
and so accurate were they that one of the court officials of the time,
writing an account of the last performance of the play at the Globe Theatre
to a friend,
actually complains of their realistic character,
notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of the Garter in the robes and insignia of the order as being calculated
to bring ridicule on the real ceremonies;
much in the same spirit in which the French Government,
some time ago,
prohibited that delightful actor,
M.
Christian,
from appearing in uniform,
on the plea that it was prejudicial
to the glory of the army that a colonel should be caricatured.
And elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English stage under Shakespeare's influence was attacked by the contemporary critics,
not as a rule,
however,
on the grounds of the democratic tendencies of realism,
but usually on those moral grounds which are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.
The point,
however,
which I wish
to emphasise is,
not that Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness
to poetry,
but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing certain dramatic effects.
Many of his plays,
such as MEASURE
for MEASURE,
TWELFTH NIGHT,
THE TWO GENTLEMAN OF VERONA,
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL,
CYMBELINE,
and others,
depend
for their illusion on the character of the various dresses worn by the hero or the heroine;
the delightful scene in HENRY THE SIXTH,
on the modern miracles of healing by faith,
loses all its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet;
and the DENOUMENT of the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR hinges on the colour of Anne Page's gown.
As
for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises the instances are almost numberless.
Posthumus hides his passion under a peasant's garb,
and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot's rags;
Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer,
and Rosalind is attired in
'all points as a man';
the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen
to the Youth Fidele;
Jessica flees from her father's house in boy's dress,
and Julia ties up her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots,
and dons hose and doublet;
Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd,
and Romeo his as a pilgrim;
Prince Hal and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits,
and then in white aprons and leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern:
and as
for Falstaff,
does he not come on as a highwayman,
as an old woman,
as Herne the Hunter,
and as the clothes going
to the laundry?
Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of intensifying dramatic situation less numerous.
After slaughter of Duncan,
Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep;
Timon ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour;
Richard flatters the London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour,
and,
as soon as he has stepped in blood
to the throne,
marches through the streets in crown and George and Garter;
the climax of THE TEMPEST is reached when Prospero,
throwing off his enchanter's robes,
sends Ariel
for his hat and rapier,
and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke;
the very Ghost in HAMLET changes his mystical apparel
to produce different effects;
and as
for Juliet,
a modern playwright would probably have laid her out in her shroud,
and made the scene a scene of horror merely,
but Shakespeare arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment,
whose loveliness makes the vault
'a feasting presence full of light,'
turns the tomb into a bridal chamber,
and gives the cue and motive
for Romeo's speech of the triumph of Beauty over Death.
Even small details of dress,
such as the colour of a major-domo's stockings,
the pattern on a wife's handkerchief,
the sleeve of a young soldier,
and a fashionable woman's bonnets,
become in Shakespeare's hands points of actual dramatic importance,
and by some of them the action of the play in question is conditioned absolutely.
Many other dramatists have availed themselves of costume as a method of expressing directly
to the audience the character of a person on his entrance,
though hardly so brilliantly as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles,
whose dress,
by the way,
only an archaeologist can understand;
the fun of a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience,
of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine clothes,
and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups,
may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down
to Mr. Gilbert;
but nobody from the mere details of apparel and adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast,
such immediate and tragic effect,
such pity and such pathos,
as Shakespeare himself.
Armed cap-e-pie,
the dead King stalks on the battlements of Elsinore because all is not right
with Denmark;
Shylock's Jewish gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded and embittered nature writhes;
Arthur begging
for his life can think of no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert - Have you the heart?
when your head did but ache,
I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
(The best I had,
a princess wrought it me)
And I did never ask it you again;
and Orlando's blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre note in that exquisite woodland idyll,
and shows us the depth of feeling that underlies Rosalind's fanciful wit and wilful jesting.
Last night
'twas on my arm;
I kissed it;
I hope it be not gone
to tell my lord That I kiss aught but he,
says Imogen,
jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already on its way
to Rome
to rob her of her husband's faith;
the little Prince passing
to the Tower plays
with the dagger in his uncle's girdle;
Duncan sends a ring
to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own murder,
and the ring of Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant into a wife's comedy.
The great rebel York dies
with a paper crown on his head;
Hamlet's black suit is a kind of colour-motive in the piece,
like the mourning of the Chimene in the CID;
and the climax of Antony's speech is the production of Caesar's cloak:- I remember The first time ever Caesar put it on.
'Twas on a summer's evening,
in his tent,
The day he overcame the Nervii:- Look,
in this place ran Cassius'
dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed.
.
.
.
Kind souls,
what,
weep you when you but behold Our Caesar's vesture wounded?
The flowers which Ophelia carries
with her in her madness are as pathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave;
the effect of Lear's wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic attire;
and when Cloten,
stung by the taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her husband's raiment,
arrays himself in that husband's very garb
to work upon her the deed of shame,
we feel that there is nothing in the whole of modern French realism,
nothing even in THERESE RAQUIN,
that masterpiece of horror,
which
for terrible and tragic significance can compare
with this strange scene in CYMBELINE.
In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are those suggested by costume.
Rosalind's Dost thou think,
though I am caparisoned like a man,
I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?
Constance's Grief fills the place of my absent child,
Stuffs out his vacant garments
with his form;
and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth - Ah! cut my lace asunder! - are only a few of the many examples one might quote.
One of the finest effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini,
in the last act of LEAR,
tearing the plume from Kent's cap and applying it
to Cordelia's lips when he came
to the line,
This feather stirs;
she lives! Mr. Booth,
whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion,
plucked,
I remember,
some fur from his archaeologically-incorrect ermine
for the same business;
but Salvini's was the finer effect of the two,
as well as the truer.
And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last act of RICHARD THE THIRD have not,
I am sure,
forgotten how much the agony and terror of his dream was intensified,
by contrast,
through the calm and quiet that preceded it,
and the delivery of such lines as What,
is my beaver easier than it was?
And all my armour laid into my tent?
Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy - lines which had a double meaning
for the audience,
remembering the last words which Richard's mother called after him as he was marching
to Bosworth:- Therefore take
with thee my most grievous curse,
Which in the day of battle tire thee more Than all the complete armour that thou wear'st.
As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal,
it is
to be remarked that,
while he more than once complains of the smallness of the stage on which he has
to produce big historical plays,
and of the want of scenery which obliges him
to cut out many effective open-air incidents,
he always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a most elaborate theatrical wardrobe,
and who could rely on the actors taking pains about their make-up.
Even now it is difficult
to produce such a play as the COMEDY OF ERRORS;
and
to the picturesque accident of Miss Ellen Terry's brother resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing TWELFTH NIGHT adequately performed.
Indeed,
to put any play of Shakespeare's on the stage,
absolutely as he himself wished it
to be done,
requires the services of a good property-man,
a clever wig-maker,
a costumier
with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures,
a master of the methods of making-up,
a fencing-master,
a dancing- master,
and an artist
to direct personally the whole production.
For he is most careful
to tell us the dress and appearance of each character.
'Racine abhorre la realite,'
says Auguste Vacquerie somewhere;
'il ne daigne pas s'occuper de son costume.
Si l'on s'en rapportait aux indications du poete,
Agamemnon serait vetu d'un sceptre et Achille d'une epee.'
But
with Shakespeare it is very different.
He gives us directions about the costumes of Perdita,
Florizel,
Autolycus,
the Witches in MACBETH,
and the apothecary in ROMEO AND JULIET,
several elaborate descriptions of his fat knight,
and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb in which Petruchio is
to be married.
Rosalind,
he tells us,
is tall,
and is
to carry a spear and a little dagger;
Celia is smaller,
and is
to paint her face brown so as
to look sunburnt.
The children who play at fairies in Windsor Forest are
to be dressed in white and green - a compliment,
by the way,
to Queen Elizabeth,
whose favourite colours they were - and in white,
with green garlands and gilded vizors,
the angels are
to come
to Katherine in Kimbolton.
Bottom is in homespun,
Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress,
and Launce has holes in his boots.
The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet
with her husband in mourning beside her.
The motley of the Fool,
the scarlet of the Cardinal,
and the French lilies broidered on the English coats,
are all made occasion
for jest or taunt in the dialogue.
We know the patterns on the Dauphin's armour and the Pucelle's sword,
the crest on Warwick's helmet and the colour of Bardolph's nose.
Portia has golden hair,
Phoebe is black-haired,
Orlando has chestnut curls,
and Sir Andrew Aguecheek's hair hangs like flax on a distaff,
and won't curl at all.
Some of the characters are stout,
some lean,
some straight,
some hunchbacked,
some fair,
some dark,
and some are
to blacken their faces.
Lear has a white beard,
Hamlet's father a grizzled,
and Benedick is
to shave his in the course of the play.
Indeed,
on the subject of stage beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate;
tells us of the many different colours in use,
and gives a hint
to actors always
to see that their own are properly tied on.
There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats,
and of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs;
a masque of Amazons,
a masque of Russians,
and a classical masque;
several immortal scenes over a weaver in an ass's head,
a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes the Lord Mayor of London
to quell,
and a scene between an infuriated husband and his wife's milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.
As
for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress,
and the aphorisms he makes on it,
his hits at the costume of his age,
particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies'
bonnets,
and the many descriptions of the MUNDUS MULIEBRIS,
from the long of Autolycus in the WINTER'S TALE down
to the account of the Duchess of Milan's gown in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING,
they are far too numerous
to quote;
though it may be worth while
to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is
to be found in Lear's scene
with Edgar - a passage which has the advantage of brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing metaphysics of SARTOR RESARTUS.
But I think that from what I have already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much interested in costume.
I do not mean in that shallow sense by which it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds and daffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan age;
but that he saw that costume could be made at once impressive of a certain effect on the audience and expressive of certain types of character,
and is one of the essential factors of the means which a true illusionist has at his disposal.
Indeed
to him the deformed figure of Richard was of as much value as Juliet's loveliness;
he sets the serge of the radical beside the silks of the lord,
and sees the stage effects
to be got from each:
he has as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel,
in rags as he has in cloth of gold,
and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.
The difficulty Ducis felt about translating OTHELLO in consequence of the importance given
to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief,
and his attempt
to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate
'Le bandeau! le bandeau!'
may be taken as an example of the difference between LA TRAGEDIE PHILOSOPHIQUE and the drama of real life;
and the introduction
for the first time of the word MOUCHOIR at the Theatre Francais was an era in that romantic- realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and M.
Zola the ENFANT TERRIBLE,
just as the classicism of the earlier part of the century was emphasised by Talma's refusal
to play Greek heroes any longer in a powdered periwig - one of the many instances,
by the way,
of that desire
for archaeological accuracy in dress which has distinguished the great actors of our age.
In criticising the importance given
to money in LA COMEDIE HUMAINE,
Theophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim
to have invented a new hero in fiction,
LE HEROS METALLIQUE.
Of Shakespeare it may be said he was the first
to see the dramatic value of doublets,
and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.
The burning of the Globe Theatre - an event due,
by the way,
to the results of the passion
for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare's stage-management - has unfortunately robbed us of many important documents;
but in the inventory,
still in existence,
of the costume-wardrobe of a London theatre in Shakespeare's time,
there are mentioned particular costumes
for cardinals,
shepherds,
kings,
clowns,
friars,
and fools;
green coats
for Robin Hood's men,
and a green gown
for Maid Marian;
a white and gold doublet
for Henry the Fifth,
and a robe
for Longshanks;
besides surplices,
copes,
damask gowns,
gowns of cloth of gold and of cloth of silver,
taffeta gowns,
calico gowns,
velvet coats,
satin coats,
frieze coats,
jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather,
red suits,
grey suits,
French Pierrot suits,
a robe
'for
to goo invisibell,'
which seems inexpensive at 3 pounds,
10s.,
and four incomparable fardingales - all of which show a desire
to give every character an appropriate dress.
There are also entries of Spanish,
Moorish and Danish costumes,
of helmets,
lances,
painted shields,
imperial crowns,
and papal tiaras,
as well as of costumes
for Turkish Janissaries,
Roman Senators,
and all the gods and goddesses of Olympus,
which evidence a good deal of archaeological research on the part of the manager of the theatre.
It is true that there is a mention of a bodice
for Eve,
but probably the DONNEE of the play was after the Fall.
Indeed,
anybody who cares
to examine the age of Shakespeare will see that archaeology was one of its special characteristics.
After that revival of the classical forms of architecture which was one of the notes of the Renaissance,
and the printing at Venice and elsewhere of the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature,
had come naturally an interest in the ornamentation and costume of the antique world.
Nor was it
for the learning that they could acquire,
but rather
for the loveliness that they might create,
that the artists studied these things.
The curious objects that were being constantly brought
to light by excavations were not left
to moulder in a museum,
for the contemplation of a callous curator,
and the ENNUI of a policeman bored by the absence of crime.
They were used as motives
for the production of a new art,
which was
to be not beautiful merely,
but also strange.
Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed
with the name
'Julia,
daughter of Claudius.'
On opening the coffer they found within its marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age,
preserved by the embalmer's skill from corruption and the decay of time.
Her eyes were half open,
her hair rippled round her in crisp curling gold,
and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet departed.
Borne back
to the Capitol,
she became at once the centre of a new cult,
and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims
to worship at the wonderful shrine,
till the Pope,
fearing lest those who had found the secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judaea's rough and rock-hewn sepulchre contained,
had the body conveyed away by night,
and in secret buried.
Legend though it may be,
yet the story is none the less valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique world.
Archaeology
to them was not a mere science
for the antiquarian;
it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life,
and fill
with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn.
From the pulpit of Niccola Pisano down
to Mantegna's
'Triumph of Caesar,'
and the service Cellini designed
for King Francis,
the influence of this spirit can be traced;
nor was it confined merely
to the immobile arts - the arts of arrested movement - but its influence was
to be seen also in the great Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts of the time,
and in the public pomps and processions
with which the citizens of big commercial towns were wont
to greet the princes that chanced
to visit them;
pageants,
by the way,
which were considered so important that large prints were made of them and published - a fact which is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such kind.
And this use of archaeology in shows,
so far from being a bit of priggish pedantry,
is in every way legitimate and beautiful.
For the stage is not merely the meeting-place of all the arts,
but is also the return of art
to life.
Sometimes in an archaeological novel the use of strange and obsolete terms seems
to hide the reality beneath the learning,
and I dare say that many of the readers of NOTRE DAME DE PARIS have been much puzzled over the meaning of such expressions as LA CASAQUE E MAHOITRES,
LES VOULGIERS,
LE GALLIMARD TACHE D'ENCRE,
LES CRAAQUINIERS,
and the like;
but
with the stage how different it is! The ancient world wakes from its sleep,
and history moves as a pageant before our eyes,
without obliging us
to have recourse
to a dictionary or an encyclopaedia
for the perfection of our enjoyment.
Indeed,
there is not the slightest necessity that the public should know the authorities
for the mounting of any piece.
From such materials,
for instance,
as the disk of Theodosius,
materials
with which the majority of people are probably not very familiar,
Mr. E.
W.
Godwin,
one of the most artistic spirits of this century in England,
created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of CLAUDIAN,
and showed us the life of Byzantium in the fourth century,
not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts,
not by a novel which requires a glossary
to explain it,
but by the visible presentation before us of all the glory of that great town.
And while the costumes were true
to the smallest points of colour and design,
yet the details were not assigned that abnormal importance which they must necessarily be given in a piecemeal lecture,
but were subordinated
to the rules of lofty composition and the unity of artistic effect.
Mr. Symonds,
speaking of that great picture of Mantegna's,
now in Hampton Court,
says that the artist has converted an antiquarian motive into a theme
for melodies of line.
The same could have been said
with equal justice of Mr. Godwin's scene.
Only the foolish called it pedantry,
only those who would neither look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play being killed by its paint.
It was in reality a scene not merely perfect in its picturesqueness,
but absolutely dramatic also,
getting rid of any necessity
for tedious descriptions,
and showing us,
by the colour and character of Claudian's dress,
and the dress of his attendants,
the whole nature and life of the man,
from what school of philosophy he affected,
down
to what horses he backed on the turf.
And indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some form of art.
I have no desire
to underrate the services of laborious scholars,
but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's Dictionary is of far more value
to us than Professor Max Muller's treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language.
Better ENDYMION than any theory,
however sound,
or,
as in the present instance,
unsound,
of an epidemic among adjectives! And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion
for his
'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?
Art,
and art only,
can make archaeology beautiful;
and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly,
for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life
with the wonder of the unreal world.
But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of Vitruvius;
it was the age of Vecellio also.
Every nation seems suddenly
to have become interested in the dress of its neighbours.
Europe began
to investigate its own clothes,
and the amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary.
At the beginning of the century the NUREMBERG CHRONICLE,
with its two thousand illustrations,
reached its fifth edition,
and before the century was over seventeen editions were published of Munster's COSMOGRAPHY.
Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns,
of Hans Weigel,
of Amman,
and of Vecellio himself,
all of them well illustrated,
some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the hand of Titian.
Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their knowledge.
The development of the habit of foreign travel,
the increased commercial intercourse between countries,
and the frequency of diplomatic missions,
gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary dress.
After the departure from England,
for instance,
of the ambassadors from the Czar,
the Sultan and the Prince of Morocco,
Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the strange attire of their visitors.
Later on London saw,
perhaps too often,
the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court,
and
to Elizabeth came envoys from all lands,
whose dress,
Shakespeare tells us,
had an important influence on English costume.
And the interest was not confined merely
to classical dress,
or the dress of foreign nations;
there was also a good deal of research,
amongst theatrical people especially,
into the ancient costume of England itself:
and when Shakespeare,
in the prologue
to one of his plays,
expresses his regret at being unable
to produce helmets of the period,
he is speaking as an Elizabethan manager and not merely as an Elizabethan poet.
At Cambridge,
for instance,
during his day,
a play of RICHARD THE THIRD was performed,
in which the actors were attired in real dresses of the time,
procured from the great collection of historical costume in the Tower,
which was always open
to the inspection of managers,
and sometimes placed at their disposal.
And I cannot help thinking that this performance must have been far more artistic,
as regards costume,
than Garrick's mounting of Shakespeare's own play on the subject,
in which he himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress,
and everybody else in the costume of the time of George the Third,
Richmond especially being much admired in the uniform of a young guardsman.
For what is the use
to the stage of that archaeology which has so strangely terrified the critics,
but that it,
and it alone,
can give us the architecture and apparel suitable
to the time in which the action of the play passes?
It enables us
to see a Greek dressed like a Greek,
and an Italian like an Italian;
to enjoy the arcades of Venice and the balconies of Verona;
and,
if the play deals
with any of the great eras in our country's history,
to contemplate the age in its proper attire,
and the king in his habit as he lived.
And I wonder,
by the way,
what Lord Lytton would have said some time ago,
at the Princess's Theatre,
had the curtain risen on his father's Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair,
attired in a flowing wig and a flowered dressing-gown,
a costume which in the last century was considered peculiarly appropriate
to an antique Roman!
for in those halcyon days of the drama no archaeology troubled the stage,
or distressed the critics,
and our inartistic grandfathers sat peaceably in a stifling atmosphere of anachronisms,
and beheld
with the calm complacency of the age of prose an Iachimo in powder and patches,
a Lear in lace ruffles,
and a Lady Macbeth in a large crinoline.
I can understand archaeology being attacked on the ground of its excessive realism,
but
to attack it as pedantic seems
to be very much beside the mark.
However,
to attack it
for any reason is foolish;
one might just as well speak disrespectfully of the equator.
For archaeology,
being a science,
is neither good nor bad,
but a fact simply.
Its value depends entirely on how it is used,
and only an artist can use it.
We look
to the archaeologist
for the materials,
to the artist
for the method.
In designing the scenery and costumes
for any of Shakespeare's plays,
the first thing the artist has
to settle is the best date
for the drama.
This should be determined by the general spirit of the play,
more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.
Most HAMLETS I have seen were placed far too early.
HAMLET is essentially a scholar of the Revival of Learning;
and if the allusion
to the recent invasion of England by the Danes puts it back
to the ninth century,
the use of foils brings it down much later.
Once,
however,
that the date has been fixed,
then the archaeologist is
to supply us
with the facts which the artist is
to convert into effects.
It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves show us that Shakespeare was indifferent
to historical accuracy,
and a great deal of capital has been made out of Hector's indiscreet quotation from Aristotle.
Upon the other hand,
the anachronisms are really few in number,
and not very important,
and,
had Shakespeare's attention been drawn
to them by a brother artist,
he would probably have corrected them.
For,
though they can hardly be called blemishes,
they are certainly not the great beauties of his work;
or,
at least,
if they are,
their anachronistic charm cannot be emphasised unless the play is accurately mounted according
to its proper date.
In looking at Shakespeare's plays as a whole,
however,
what is really remarkable is their extraordinary fidelity as regards his personages and his plots.
Many of his DRAMATIS PERSONAE are people who had actually existed,
and some of them might have been seen in real life by a portion of his audience.
Indeed the most violent attack that was made on Shakespeare in his time was
for his supposed caricature of Lord Cobham.
As
for his plots,
Shakespeare constantly draws them either from authentic history,
or from the old ballads and traditions which served as history
to the Elizabethan public,
and which even now no scientific historian would dismiss as absolutely untrue.
And not merely did he select fact instead of fancy as the basis of much of his imaginative work,
but he always gives
to each play the general character,
the social atmosphere in a word,
of the age in question.
Stupidity he recognises as being one of the permanent characteristics of all European civilisations;
so he sees no difference between a London mob of his own day and a Roman mob of pagan days,
between a silly watchman in Messina and a silly Justice of the Peace in Windsor.
But when he deals
with higher characters,
with those exceptions of each age which are so fine that they become its types,
he gives them absolutely the stamp and seal of their time.
Virgilia is one of those Roman wives on whose tomb was written
'Domi mansit,
lanam fecit,'
as surely as Juliet is the romantic girl of the Renaissance.
He is even true
to the characteristics of race.
Hamlet has all the imagination and irresolution of the Northern nations,
and the Princess Katharine is as entirely French as the heroine of DIVORCONS.
Harry the Fifth is a pure Englishman,
and Othello a true Moor.
Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from the fourteenth
to the sixteenth centuries,
it is wonderful how careful he is
to have his facts perfectly right - indeed he follows Holinshed
with curious fidelity.
The incessant wars between France and England are described
with extraordinary accuracy down
to the names of the besieged towns,
the ports of landing and embarkation,
the sites and dates of the battles,
the titles of the commanders on each side,
and the lists of the killed and wounded.
And as regards the Civil Wars of the Roses we have many elaborate genealogies of the seven sons of Edward the Third;
the claims of the rival Houses of York and Lancaster
to the throne are discussed at length;
and if the English aristocracy will not read Shakespeare as a poet,
they should certainly read him as a sort of early Peerage.
There is hardly a single title in the Upper House,
with the exception of course of the uninteresting titles assumed by the law lords,
which does not appear in Shakespeare along
with many details of family history,
creditable and discreditable.
Indeed if it be really necessary that the School Board children should know all about the Wars of the Roses,
they could learn their lessons just as well out of Shakespeare as out of shilling primers,
and learn them,
I need not say,
far more pleasurably.
Even in Shakespeare's own day this use of his plays was recognised.
'The historical plays teach history
to those who cannot read it in the chronicles,'
says Heywood in a tract about the stage,
and yet I am sure that sixteenth-century chronicles were much more delightful reading than nineteenth-century primers are.
Of course the aesthetic value of Shakespeare's plays does not,
in the slightest degree,
depend on their facts,
but on their Truth,
and Truth is independent of facts always,
inventing or selecting them at pleasure.
But still Shakespeare's use of facts is a most interesting part of his method of work,
and shows us his attitude towards the stage,
and his relations
to the great art of illusion.
Indeed he would have been very much surprised at any one classing his plays with
'fairy tales,'
as Lord Lytton does;
for one of his aims was
to create
for England a national historical drama,
which should deal
with incidents
with which the public was well acquainted,
and
with heroes that lived in the memory of a people.
Patriotism,
I need hardly say,
is not a necessary quality of art;
but it means,
for the artist,
the substitution of a universal
for an individual feeling,
and
for the public the presentation of a work of art in a most attractive and popular form.
It is worth noticing that Shakespeare's first and last successes were both historical plays.
It may be asked,
what has this
to do
with Shakespeare's attitude towards costume?
I answer that a dramatist who laid such stress on historical accuracy of fact would have welcomed historical accuracy of costume as a most important adjunct
to his illusionist method.
And I have no hesitation in saying that he did so.
The reference
to helmets of the period in the prologue
to HENRY THE FIFTH may be considered fanciful,
though Shakespeare must have often seen The very casque That did affright the air at Agincourt,
where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey,
along
with the saddle of that
'imp of fame,'
and the dinted shield
with its torn blue velvet lining and its tarnished lilies of gold;
but the use of military tabards in HENRY THE SIXTH is a bit of pure archaeology,
as they were not worn in the sixteenth century;
and the King's own tabard,
I may mention,
was still suspended over his tomb in St. George's Chapel,
Windsor,
in Shakespeare's day.
For,
up
to the time of the unfortunate triumph of the Philistines in 1645,
the chapels and cathedrals of England were the great national museums of archaeology,
and in them were kept the armour and attire of the heroes of English history.
A good deal was of course preserved in the Tower,
and even in Elizabeth's day tourists were brought there
to see such curious relics of the past as Charles Brandon's huge lance,
which is still,
I believe,
the admiration of our country visitors;
but the cathedrals and churches were,
as a rule,
selected as the most suitable shrines
for the reception of the historic antiquities.
Canterbury can still show us the helm of the Black Prince,
Westminster the robes of our kings,
and in old St. Paul's the very banner that had waved on Bosworth field was hung up by Richmond himself.
In fact,
everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London,
he saw the apparel and appurtenances of past ages,
and it is impossible
to doubt that he made use of his opportunities.
The employment of lance and shield,
for instance,
in actual warfare,
which is so frequent in his plays,
is drawn from archaeology,
and not from the military accoutrements of his day;
and his general use of armour in battle was not a characteristic of his age,
a time when it was rapidly disappearing before firearMs. Again,
the crest on Warwick's helmet,
of which such a point is made in HENRY THE SIXTH,
is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century play when crests were generally worn,
but would not have been so in a play of Shakespeare's own time,
when feathers and plumes had taken their place - a fashion which,
as he tells us in HENRY THE EIGHTH,
was borrowed from France.
For the historical plays,
then,
we may be sure that archaeology was employed,
and as
for the others I feel certain that it was the case also.
The appearance of Jupiter on his eagle,
thunderbolt in hand,
of Juno
with her peacocks,
and of Iris
with her many-coloured bow;
the Amazon masque and the masque of the Five Worthies,
may all be regarded as archaeological;
and the vision which Posthumus sees in prison of Sicilius Leonatus -
'an old man,
attired like a warrior,
leading an ancient matron'
- is clearly so.
Of the
'Athenian dress'
by which Lysander is distinguished from Oberon I have already spoken;
but one of the most marked instances is in the case of the dress of Coriolanus,
for which Shakespeare goes directly
to Plutarch.
That historian,
in his Life of the great Roman,
tells us of the oak-wreath
with which Caius Marcius was crowned,
and of the curious kind of dress in which,
according
to ancient fashion,
he had
to canvass his electors;
and on both of these points he enters into long disquisitions,
investigating the origin and meaning of the old custoMs. Shakespeare,
in the spirit of the true artist,
accepts the facts of the antiquarian and converts them into dramatic and picturesque effects:
indeed the gown of humility,
the
'woolvish gown,'
as Shakespeare calls it,
is the central note of the play.
There are other cases I might quote,
but this one is quite sufficient
for my purpose;
and it is evident from it at any rate that,
in mounting a play in the accurate costume of the time,
according
to the best authorities,
we are carrying out Shakespeare's own wishes and method.
Even if it were not so,
there is no more reason that we should continue any imperfections which may be supposed
to have characterised Shakespeare's stage mounting than that we should have Juliet played by a young man,
or give up the advantage of changeable scenery.
A great work of dramatic art should not merely be made expressive of modern passion by means of the actor,
but should be presented
to us in the form most suitable
to the modern spirit.
Racine produced his Roman plays in Louis Quatorze dress on a stage crowded
with spectators;
but we require different conditions
for the enjoyment of his art.
Perfect accuracy of detail,
for the sake of perfect illusion,
is necessary
for us.
What we have
to see is that the details are not allowed
to usurp the principal place.
They must be subordinate always
to the general motive of the play.
But subordination in art does not mean disregard of truth;
it means conversion of fact into effect,
and assigning
to each detail its proper relative value
'Les petits details d'histoire et de vie domestique
(says Hugo)
doivent etre scrupuleusement etudies et reproduits par le poete,
mais uniquement comme des moyens d'accroitre la realite de l'ensemble,
et de faire penetrer jusque dans les coins les plus obscurs de l'oeuvre cette vie generale et puissante au milieu de laquelle les personnages sont plus vrais,
et les catastrophes,
par consequeut,
plus poignantes.
Tout doit etre subordonne e ce but.
L'Homme sur le premier plan,
le reste au fond.'
This passage is interesting as coming from the first great French dramatist who employed archaeology on the stage,
and whose plays,
though absolutely correct in detail,
are known
to all
for their passion,
not
for their pedantry -
for their life,
not
for their learning.
It is true that he has made certain concessions in the case of the employment of curious or strange expressions.
Ruy Blas talks of M,
de Priego as
'sujet du roi'
instead of
'noble du roi,'
and Angelo Malipieri speaks of
'la croix rouge'
instead of
'la croix de gueules.'
But they are concessions made
to the public,
or rather
to a section of it.
'J'en offre ici toute mes excuses aux spectateurs intelligents,'
he says in a note
to one of the plays;
'esperons qu'un jour un seigneur venitien pourra dire tout bonnement sans peril son blason sur le theatre.
C'est un progres qui viendra.'
And,
though the description of the crest is not couched in accurate language,
still the crest itself was accurately right.
It may,
of course,
be said that the public do not notice these things;
upon the other hand,
it should be remembered that Art has no other aim but her own perfection,
and proceeds simply by her own laws,
and that the play which Hamlet describes as being caviare
to the general is a play he highly praises.
Besides,
in England,
at any rate,
the public have undergone a transformation;
there is far more appreciation of beauty now than there was a few years ago;
and though they may not be familiar
with the authorities and archaeological data
for what is shown
to them,
still they enjoy whatever loveliness they look at.
And this is the important thing.
Better
to take pleasure in a rose than
to put its root under a microscope.
Archaeological accuracy is merely a condition of illusionist stage effect;
it is not its quality.
And Lord Lytton's proposal that the dresses should merely be beautiful without being accurate is founded on a misapprehension of the nature of costume,
and of its value on the stage.
This value is twofold,
picturesque and dramatic;
the former depends on the colour of the dress,
the latter on its design and character.
But so interwoven are the two that,
whenever in our own day historical accuracy has been disregarded,
and the various dresses in a play taken from different ages,
the result has been that the stage has been turned into that chaos of costume,
that caricature of the centuries,
the Fancy Dress Ball,
to the entire ruin of all dramatic and picturesque effect.
For the dresses of one age do not artistically harmonise
with the dresses of another:
and,
as far as dramatic value goes,
to confuse the costumes is
to confuse the play.
Costume is a growth,
an evolution,
and a most important,
perhaps the most important,
sign of the manners,
customs and mode of life of each century.
The Puritan dislike of colour,
adornment and grace in apparel was part of the great revolt of the middle classes against Beauty in the seventeenth century.
A historian who disregarded it would give us a most inaccurate picture of the time,
and a dramatist who did not avail himself of it would miss a most vital element in producing an illusionist effect.
The effeminacy of dress that characterised the reign of Richard the Second was a constant theme of contemporary authors.
Shakespeare,
writing two hundred years after,
makes the king's fondness
for gay apparel and foreign fashions a point in the play,
from John of Gaunt's reproaches down
to Richard's own speech in the third act on his deposition from the throne.
And that Shakespeare examined Richard's tomb in Westminster Abbey seems
to me certain from York's speech:- See,
see,
King Richard doth himself appear As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal of the east,
When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
to dim his glory.
For we can still discern on the King's robe his favourite badge - the sun issuing from a cloud.
In fact,
in every age the social conditions are so exemplified in costume,
that
to produce a sixteenth-century play in fourteenth-century attire,
or VICE VERSA,
would make the performance seem unreal because untrue.
And,
valuable as beauty of effect on the stage is,
the highest beauty is not merely comparable
with absolute accuracy of detail,
but really dependent on it.
To invent,
an entirely new costume is almost impossible except in burlesque or extravaganza,
and as
for combining the dress of different centuries into one,
the experiment would be dangerous,
and Shakespeare's opinion of the artistic value of such a medley may be gathered from his incessant satire of the Elizabethan dandies
for imagining that they were well dressed because they got their doublets in Italy,
their hats in Germany,
and their hose in France.
And it should be noted that the most lovely scenes that have been produced on our stage have been those that have been characterised by perfect accuracy,
such as Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft's eighteenth-century revivals at the Haymarket,
Mr. Irying's superb production of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING,
and Mr,
Barrett's CLAUDIAN.
Besides,
and this is perhaps the most complete answer
to Lord Lytton's theory,
it must be remembered that neither in costume nor in dialogue is beauty the dramatist's primary aim at all.
The true dramatist aims first at what is characteristic,
and no more desires that all his personages should be beautifully attired than he desires that they should all have beautiful natures or speak beautiful English.
The true dramatist,
in fact,
shows us life under the conditions of art,
not art in the form of life.
The Greek dress was the loveliest dress the world has ever seen,
and the English dress of the last century one of the most monstrous;
yet we cannot costume a play by Sheridan as we would costume a play by Sophokles.
For,
as Polonius says in his excellent lecture,
a lecture
to which I am glad
to have the opportunity of expressing my obligations,
one of the first qualities of apparel is its expressiveness.
And the affected style of dress in the last century was the natural characteristic of a society of affected manners and affected conversation - a characteristic which the realistic dramatist will highly value down
to the smallest detail of accuracy,
and the materials
for which he can get only from archaeology.
But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate;
it must be also appropriate
to the stature and appearance of the actor,
and
to his supposed condition,
as well as
to his necessary action in the play.
In Mr. Hare's production OF AS YOU LIKE IT at the St. James's Theatre,
for instance,
the whole point of Orlando's complaint that he is brought up like a peasant,
and not like a gentleman,
was spoiled by the gorgeousness of his dress,
and the splendid apparel worn by the banished Duke and his friends was quite out of place.
Mr. Lewis Wingfield's explanation that the sumptuary laws of the period necessitated their doing so,
is,
I am afraid,
hardly sufficient.
Outlaws,
lurking in a forest and living by the chase,
are not very likely
to care much about ordinances of dress.
They were probably attired like Robin Hood's men,
to whom,
indeed,
they are compared in the course of the play.
And that their dress was not that of wealthy noblemen may be seen by Orlando's words when he breaks in upon them.
He mistakes them
for robbers,
and is amazed
to find that they answer him in courteous and gentle terMs. Lady Archibald Campbell's production,
under Mr. E.
W.
Godwin's direction,
of the same play in Coombe Wood was,
as regards mounting,
far more artistic.
At least it seemed so
to me.
The Duke and his companions were dressed in serge tunics,
leathern jerkins,
high boots and gauntlets,
and wore bycocket hats and hoods.
And as they were playing in a real forest,
they found,
I am sure,
their dresses extremely convenient.
To every character in the play was given a perfectly appropriate attire,
and the brown and green of their costumes harmonised exquisitely
with the ferns through which they wandered,
the trees beneath which they lay,
and the lovely English landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players.
The perfect naturalness of the scene was due
to the absolute accuracy and appropriateness of everything that was worn.
Nor could archaeology have been put
to a severer test,
or come out of it more triumphantly.
The whole production showed once
for all that,
unless a dress is archaeologically correct,
and artistically appropriate,
it always looks unreal,
unnatural,
and theatrical in the sense of artificial.
Nor,
again,
is it enough that there should be accurate and appropriate costumes of beautiful colours;
there must be also beauty of colour on the stage as a whole,
and as long as the background is painted by one artist,
and the foreground figures independently designed by another,
there is the danger of a want of harmony in the scene as a picture.
For each scene the colour- scheme should be settled as absolutely as
for the decoration of a room,
and the textures which it is proposed
to use should be mixed and re-mixed in every possible combination,
and what is discordant removed.
Then,
as regards the particular kinds of colours,
the stage is often too glaring,
partly through the excessive use of hot,
violent reds,
and partly through the costumes looking too new.
Shabbiness,
which in modern life is merely the tendency of the lower orders towards tone,
is not without its artistic value,
and modern colours are often much improved by being a little faded.
Blue also is too frequently used:
it is not merely a dangerous colour
to wear by gaslight,
but it is really difficult in England
to get a thoroughly good blue.
The fine Chinese blue,
which we all so much admire,
takes two years
to dye,
and the English public will not wait so long
for a colour.
Peacock blue,
of course,
has been employed on the stage,
notably at the Lyceum,
with great advantage;
but all attempts at a good light blue,
or good dark blue,
which I have seen have been failures.
The value of black is hardly appreciated;
it was used effectively by Mr. Irving in HAMLET as the central note of a composition,
but as a tone-giving neutral its importance is not recognised.
And this is curious,
considering the general colour of the dress of a century in which,
as Baudelaire says,
'Nous celebrons tous quelque enterrement.'
The archaeologist of the future will probably point
to this age as the time when the beauty of black was understood;
but I hardly think that,
as regards stage-mounting or house decoration,
it really is.
Its decorative value is,
of course,
the same as that of white or gold;
it can separate and harmonise colours.
In modern plays the black frock- coat of the hero becomes important in itself,
and should be given a suitable background.
But it rarely is.
Indeed the only good background
for a play in modern dress which I have ever seen was the dark grey and cream-white scene of the first act of the PRINCESSE GEORGES in Mrs. Langtry's production.
As a rule,
the hero is smothered in BRIC-E-BRAC and palm-trees,
lost in the gilded abyss of Louis Quatorze furniture,
or reduced
to a mere midge in the midst of marqueterie;
whereas the background should always be kept as a background,
and colour subordinated
to effect.
This,
of course,
can only be done when there is one single mind directing the whole production.
The facts of art are diverse,
but the essence of artistic effect is unity.
Monarchy,
Anarchy,
and Republicanism may contend
for the government of nations;
but a theatre should be in the power of a cultured despot.
There may be division of labour,
but there must be no division of mind.
Whoever understands the costume of an age understands of necessity its architecture and its surroundings also,
and it is easy
to see from the chairs of a century whether it was a century of crinolines or not.
In fact,
in art there is no specialism,
and a really artistic production should bear the impress of one master,
and one master only,
who not merely should design and arrange everything,
but should have complete control over the way in which each dress is
to be worn.
Mademoiselle Mars,
in the first production of HERNANI,
absolutely refused
to call her lover
'MON LION!'
unless she was allowed
to wear a little fashionable TOQUE then much in vogue on the Boulevards;
and many young ladies on our own stage insist
to the present day on wearing stiff starched petticoats under Greek dresses,
to the entire ruin of all delicacy of line and fold;
but these wicked things should not be allowed.
And there should be far more dress rehearsals than there are now.
Actors such as Mr. Forbes-Robertson,
Mr. Conway,
Mr. George Alexander,
and others,
not
to mention older artists,
can move
with ease and elegance in the attire of any century;
but there are not a few who seem dreadfully embarrassed about their hands if they have no side pockets,
and who always wear their dresses as if they were costumes.
Costumes,
of course,
they are
to the designer;
but dresses they should be
to those that wear them.
And it is time that a stop should be put
to the idea,
very prevalent on the stage,
that the Greeks and Romans always went about bareheaded in the open air - a mistake the Elizabethan managers did not fall into,
for they gave hoods as well as gowns
to their Roman senators.
More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining
to the actors that there is a form of gesture and movement that is not merely appropriate
to each style of dress,
but really conditioned by it.
The extravagant use of the arms in the eighteenth century,
for instance,
was the necessary result of the large hoop,
and the solemn dignity of Burleigh owed as much
to his ruff as
to his reason.
Besides until an actor is at home in his dress,
he is not at home in his part.
Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistic temperament in the audience,
and producing that joy in beauty
for beauty's sake without which the great masterpieces of art can never be understood,
I will not here speak;
though it is worth while
to notice how Shakespeare appreciated that side of the question in the production of his tragedies,
acting them always by artificial light,
and in a theatre hung
with black;
but what I have tried
to point out is that archaeology is not a pedantic method,
but a method of artistic illusion,
and that costume is a means of displaying character without description,
and of producing dramatic situations and dramatic effects.
And I think it is a pity that so many critics should have set themselves
to attack one of the most important movements on the modern stage before that movement has at all reached its proper perfection.
That it will do so,
however,
I feel as certain as that we shall require from our dramatic critics in the future higher qualification than that they can remember Macready or have seen Benjamin Webster;
we shall require of them,
indeed,
that they cultivate a sense of beauty.
POUR ETRE PLUS DIFFICILE,
LA TACHE N'EN EST QUE PLUS GLORIEUSE.
And if they will not encourage,
at least they must not oppose,
a movement of which Shakespeare of all dramatists would have most approved,
for it has the illusion of truth
for its method,
and the illusion of beauty
for its result.
Not that I agree
with everything that I have said in this essay.
There is much
with which I entirely disagree.
The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint,
and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything.
For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth.
A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.
And just as it is only in art- criticism,
and through it,
that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas,
so it is only in art-criticism,
and through it,
that we can realise Hegel's system of contraries.
The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Intentions,
by Oscar Wilde
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