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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