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<pre>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shorter Prose Pieces, by Oscar Wilde
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
Title: Shorter Prose Pieces
Author: Oscar Wilde
Release Date: August 11, 2019 [eBook #2061]
[This file was first posted June 2, 1999]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORTER PROSE PIECES***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1920 Methuen edition of <i>Art and
Decoration</i> by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.lorg</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/cover.jpg">
<img alt=
"Public domain book cover"
title=
"Public domain book cover"
src="images/cover.jpg" />
</a></p>
<h1>OSCAR WILDE—SHORTER PROSE PIECES</h1>
<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
<table>
<tr>
<td><p> </p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Phrases and Philosophies for the use
of the Young</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Mrs. Langtry as Hester
Grazebrook</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page53">53</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Slaves of Fashion</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page56">56</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Woman’s Dress</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page60">60</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">More Radical Ideas upon Dress
Reform</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page66">66</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Costume</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page80">80</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The American Invasion</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page83">83</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Sermons in Stones at
Bloomsbury</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page90">90</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">L’Envoi</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>PHRASES
AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR<br />
THE USE OF THE YOUNG</h2>
<p style="text-align: center">(December 1894)</p>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> first duty in life is to be as
artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has
as yet discovered.</p>
<p>Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for
the curious attractiveness of others.</p>
<p>If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in
solving the problem of poverty.</p>
<p>Those who see any difference between soul and body have
neither.</p>
<p>A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and
Nature.</p>
<p>Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science
is the record of dead religions.</p>
<p>The well-bred contradict other people. The wise
contradict themselves.</p>
<p>Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest
importance.</p>
<p>Dulness is the coming of age of seriousness.</p>
<p>In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the
essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity,
is the essential.</p>
<p>If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be
found out.</p>
<p>Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing
ages like happiness.</p>
<p>It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope
to live in the memory of the commercial classes.</p>
<p>No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime.
Vulgarity is the conduct of others.</p>
<p>Only the shallow know themselves.</p>
<p>Time is waste of money.</p>
<p>One should always be a little improbable.</p>
<p>There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are
invariably made too soon.</p>
<p>The only way to atone for being occasionally a little
overdressed is by being always absolutely overeducated.</p>
<p>To be premature is to be perfect.</p>
<p>Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in
conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.</p>
<p>Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.</p>
<p>A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes
in it.</p>
<p>In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot
answer.</p>
<p>Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing
should reveal the body but the body.</p>
<p>One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.</p>
<p>It is only the superficial qualities that last.
Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.</p>
<p>Industry is the root of all ugliness.</p>
<p>The ages live in history through their anachronisms.</p>
<p>It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has
passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on.
Nero and Narcissus are always with us.</p>
<p>The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect
everything; the young know everything.</p>
<p>The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection
is youth.</p>
<p>Only the great masters of style ever succeeded in being
obscure.</p>
<p>There is something tragic about the enormous number of young
men there are in England at the present moment who start life
with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful
profession.</p>
<p>To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.</p>
<h2><a name="page53"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 53</span>MRS.
LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK</h2>
<p style="text-align: center">(<i>New York World</i>, November 7,
1882)</p>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is only in the best Greek gems,
on the silver coins of Syracuse, or among the marble figures of
the Parthenon frieze, that one can find the ideal representation
of the marvellous beauty of that face which laughed through the
leaves last night as Hester Grazebrook.</p>
<p>Pure Greek it is, with the grave low forehead, the exquisitely
arched brow; the noble chiselling of the mouth, shaped as if it
were the mouthpiece of an instrument of music; the supreme and
splendid curve of the cheek; the augustly pillared throat which
bears it all: it is Greek, because the lines which compose it are
so definite and so strong, and yet so exquisitely harmonized that
the effect is one of simple loveliness purely: Greek, because its
essence and its quality, as is the quality of music and of
architecture, is that of beauty based on absolutely mathematical
laws.</p>
<p>But while art remains dumb and immobile in its passionless
serenity, with the beauty of this face it is different: the grey
eyes lighten into blue or deepen into violet as fancy succeeds
fancy; the lips become flower-like in laughter or, tremulous as a
bird’s wing, mould themselves at last into the strong and
bitter moulds of pain or scorn. And then motion comes, and
the statue wakes into life. But the life is not the
ordinary life of common days; it is life with a new value given
to it, the value of art: and the charm to me of Hester
Grazebrook’s acting in the first scene of the play last
night was that mingling of classic grace with absolute reality
which is the secret of all beautiful art, of the plastic work of
the Greeks and of the pictures of Jean François Millet
equally.</p>
<p>I do not think that the sovereignty and empire of
women’s beauty has at all passed away, though we may no
longer go to war for them as the Greeks did for the daughter of
Leda. The greatest empire still remains for them—the
empire of art. And, indeed, this wonderful face, seen last
night for the first time in America, has filled and permeated
with the pervading image of its type the whole of our modern art
in England. Last century it was the romantic type which
dominated in art, the type loved by Reynolds and Gainsborough, of
wonderful contrasts of colour, of exquisite and varying charm of
expression, but without that definite plastic feeling which
divides classic from romantic work. This type degenerated
into mere facile prettiness in the hands of lesser masters, and,
in protest against it, was created by the hands of the
Pre-Raphaelites a new type, with its rare combination of Greek
form with Florentine mysticism. But this mysticism becomes
over-strained and a burden, rather than an aid to expression, and
a desire for the pure Hellenic joy and serenity came in its
place; and in all our modern work, in the paintings of such men
as Albert Moore and Leighton and Whistler, we can trace the
influence of this single face giving fresh life and inspiration
in the form of a new artistic ideal.</p>
<h2><a name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 56</span>SLAVES
OF FASHION</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Miss Leffler-Arnim’s</span>
statement, in a lecture delivered recently at St. Saviour’s
Hospital, that “she had heard of instances where ladies
were so determined not to exceed the fashionable measurement that
they had actually held on to a cross-bar while their maids
fastened the fifteen-inch corset,” has excited a good deal
of incredulity, but there is nothing really improbable in
it. From the sixteenth century to our own day there is
hardly any form of torture that has not been inflicted on girls,
and endured by women, in obedience to the dictates of an
unreasonable and monstrous Fashion. “In order to
obtain a real Spanish figure,” says Montaigne, “what
a Gehenna of suffering will not women endure, drawn in and
compressed by great <i>coches</i> entering the flesh; nay,
sometimes they even die thereof!” “A few days
after my arrival at school,” Mrs. Somerville tells us in
her memoirs, “although perfectly straight and well made, I
was enclosed in stiff stays, with a steel busk in front; while
above my frock, bands drew my shoulders back till the
shoulder-blades met. Then a steel rod with a semi-circle,
which went under my chin, was clasped to the steel busk in my
stays. In this constrained state I and most of the younger
girls had to prepare our lessons”; and in the life of Miss
Edgeworth we read that, being sent to a certain fashionable
establishment, “she underwent all the usual tortures of
back-boards, iron collars and dumbs, and also (because she was a
very tiny person) the unusual one of being hung by the neck to
draw out the muscles and increase the growth,” a signal
failure in her case. Indeed, instances of absolute
mutilation and misery are so common in the past that it is
unnecessary to multiply them; but it is really sad to think that
in our own day a civilized woman can hang on to a cross-bar while
her maid laces her waist into a fifteen-inch circle. To
begin with, the waist is not a circle at all, but an oval; nor
can there be any greater error than to imagine that an
unnaturally small waist gives an air of grace, or even of
slightness, to the whole figure. Its effect, as a rule, is
simply to exaggerate the width of the shoulders and the hips; and
those whose figures possess that stateliness which is called
stoutness by the vulgar, convert what is a quality into a defect
by yielding to the silly edicts of Fashion on the subject of
tight-lacing. The fashionable English waist, also, is not
merely far too small, and consequently quite out of proportion to
the rest of the figure, but it is worn far too low down. I
use the expression “worn” advisedly, for a waist
nowadays seems to be regarded as an article of apparel to be put
on when and where one likes. A long waist always implies
shortness of the lower limbs, and, from the artistic point of
view, has the effect of diminishing the height; and I am glad to
see that many of the most charming women in Paris are returning
to the idea of the Directoire style of dress. This style is
not by any means perfect, but at least it has the merit of
indicating the proper position of the waist. I feel quite
sure that all English women of culture and position will set
their faces against such stupid and dangerous practices as are
related by Miss Leffler-Arnim. Fashion’s motto is:
<i>Il faut souffrir pour être belle</i>; but the motto of
art and of common-sense is: <i>Il faut être bête pour
souffrir</i>.</p>
<p>Talking of Fashion, a critic in the <i>Pall Mall Gazelle</i>
expresses his surprise that I should have allowed an illustration
of a hat, covered with “the bodies of dead birds,” to
appear in the first number of the <i>Woman’s World</i>; and
as I have received many letters on the subject, it is only right
that I should state my exact position in the matter.
Fashion is such an essential part of the <i>mundus muliebris</i>
of our day, that it seems to me absolutely necessary that its
growth, development, and phases should be duly chronicled; and
the historical and practical value of such a record depends
entirely upon its perfect fidelity to fact. Besides, it is
quite easy for the children of light to adapt almost any
fashionable form of dress to the requirements of utility and the
demands of good taste. The Sarah Bernhardt tea-gown, for
instance, figured in the present issue, has many good points
about it, and the gigantic dress-improver does not appear to me
to be really essential to the mode; and though the Postillion
costume of the fancy dress ball is absolutely detestable in its
silliness and vulgarity, the so-called Late Georgian costume in
the same plate is rather pleasing. I must, however, protest
against the idea that to chronicle the development of Fashion
implies any approval of the particular forms that Fashion may
adopt.</p>
<h2><a name="page60"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
60</span>WOMAN’S DRESS</h2>
<p style="text-align: center">(<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, October
14, 1884)</p>
<blockquote><p><span class="smcap">Mr. Oscar Wilde</span>, who
asks us to permit him ‘that most charming of all pleasures,
the pleasure of answering one’s critics,’ sends us
the following remarks:—</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> “Girl Graduate”
must of course have precedence, not merely for her sex but for
her sanity: her letter is extremely sensible. She makes two
points: that high heels are a necessity for any lady who wishes
to keep her dress clean from the Stygian mud of our streets, and
that without a tight corset the ordinary number of petticoats and
etceteras’ cannot be properly or conveniently held
up. Now, it is quite true that as long as the lower
garments are suspended from the hips a corset is an absolute
necessity; the mistake lies in not suspending all apparel from
the shoulders. In the latter case a corset becomes useless,
the body is left free and unconfined for respiration and motion,
there is more health, and consequently more beauty. Indeed
all the most ungainly and uncomfortable articles of dress that
fashion has ever in her folly prescribed, not the tight corset
merely, but the farthingale, the vertugadin, the hoop, the
crinoline, and that modern monstrosity the so-called “dress
improver” also, all of them have owed their origin to the
same error, the error of not seeing that it is from the
shoulders, and from the shoulders only, that all garments should
be hung.</p>
<p>And as regards high heels, I quite admit that some additional
height to the shoe or boot is necessary if long gowns are to be
worn in the street; but what I object to is that the height
should be given to the heel only, and not to the sole of the foot
also. The modern high-heeled boot is, in fact, merely the
clog of the time of Henry VI., with the front prop left out, and
its inevitable effect is to throw the body forward, to shorten
the steps, and consequently to produce that want of grace which
always follows want of freedom.</p>
<p>Why should clogs be despised? Much art has been expended
on clogs. They have been made of lovely woods, and
delicately inlaid with ivory, and with mother-of-pearl. A
clog might be a dream of beauty, and, if not too high or too
heavy, most comfortable also. But if there be any who do
not like clogs, let them try some adaptation of the trouser of
the Turkish lady, which is loose round the limb and tight at the
ankle.</p>
<p>The “Girl Graduate,” with a pathos to which I am
not insensible, entreats me not to apotheosize “that awful,
befringed, beflounced, and bekilted divided skirt.”
Well, I will acknowledge that the fringes, the flounces, and the
kilting do certainly defeat the whole object of the dress, which
is that of ease and liberty; but I regard these things as mere
wicked superfluities, tragic proofs that the divided skirt is
ashamed of its own division. The principle of the dress is
good, and, though it is not by any means perfection, it is a step
towards it.</p>
<p>Here I leave the “Girl Graduate,” with much
regret, for Mr. Wentworth Huyshe. Mr. Huyshe makes the old
criticism that Greek dress is unsuited to our climate, and, to me
the somewhat new assertion, that the men’s dress of a
hundred years ago was preferable to that of the second part of
the seventeenth century, which I consider to have been the
exquisite period of English costume.</p>
<p>Now, as regards the first of these two statements, I will say,
to begin with, that the warmth of apparel does not depend really
on the number of garments worn, but on the material of which they
are made. One of the chief faults of modern dress is that
it is composed of far too many articles of clothing, most of
which are of the wrong substance; but over a substratum of pure
wool, such as is supplied by Dr. Jaeger under the modern German
system, some modification of Greek costume is perfectly
applicable to our climate, our country and our century.
This important fact has already been pointed out by Mr. E. W.
Godwin in his excellent, though too brief handbook on Dress,
contributed to the Health Exhibition. I call it an
important fact because it makes almost any form of lovely costume
perfectly practicable in our cold climate. Mr. Godwin, it
is true, points out that the English ladies of the thirteenth
century abandoned after some time the flowing garments of the
early Renaissance in favour of a tighter mode, such as Northern
Europe seems to demand. This I quite admit, and its
significance; but what I contend, and what I am sure Mr. Godwin
would agree with me in, is that the principles, the laws of Greek
dress may be perfectly realized, even in a moderately tight gown
with sleeves: I mean the principle of suspending all apparel from
the shoulders, and of relying for beauty of effect not on the
stiff ready-made ornaments of the modern milliner—the bows
where there should be no bows, and the flounces where there
should be no flounces—but on the exquisite play of light
and line that one gets from rich and rippling folds. I am
not proposing any antiquarian revival of an ancient costume, but
trying merely to point out the right laws of dress, laws which
are dictated by art and not by archæology, by science and
not by fashion; and just as the best work of art in our days is
that which combines classic grace with absolute reality, so from
a continuation of the Greek principles of beauty with the German
principles of health will come, I feel certain, the costume of
the future.</p>
<p>And now to the question of men’s dress, or rather to Mr.
Huyshe’s claim of the superiority, in point of costume, of
the last quarter of the eighteenth century over the second
quarter of the seventeenth. The broad-brimmed hat of 1640
kept the rain of winter and the glare of summer from the face;
the same cannot be said of the hat of one hundred years ago,
which, with its comparatively narrow brim and high crown, was the
precursor of the modern “chimney-pot”: a wide
turned-down collar is a healthier thing than a strangling stock,
and a short cloak much more comfortable than a sleeved overcoat,
even though the latter may have had “three capes”; a
cloak is easier to put on and off, lies lightly on the shoulder
in summer, and wrapped round one in winter keeps one perfectly
warm. A doublet, again, is simpler than a coat and
waistcoat; instead of two garments one has one; by not being open
also it protects the chest better.</p>
<p>Short loose trousers are in every way to be preferred to the
tight knee-breeches which often impede the proper circulation of
the blood; and finally, the soft leather boots which could be
worn above or below the knee, are more supple, and give
consequently more freedom, than the stiff Hessian which Mr.
Huyshe so praises. I say nothing about the question of
grace and picturesqueness, for I suppose that no one, not even
Mr. Huyshe, would prefer a maccaroni to a cavalier, a Lawrence to
a Vandyke, or the third George to the first Charles; but for
ease, warmth and comfort this seventeenth-century dress is
infinitely superior to anything that came after it, and I do not
think it is excelled by any preceding form of costume. I
sincerely trust that we may soon see in England some national
revival of it.</p>
<h2><a name="page66"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 66</span>MORE
RADICAL IDEAS UPON DRESS REFORM</h2>
<p style="text-align: center">(<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, November
11, 1884)</p>
<p>I <span class="smcap">have</span> been much interested at
reading the large amount of correspondence that has been called
forth by my recent lecture on Dress. It shows me that the
subject of dress reform is one that is occupying many wise and
charming people, who have at heart the principles of health,
freedom, and beauty in costume, and I hope that “H. B.
T.” and “Materfamilias” will have all the real
influence which their letters—excellent letters both of
them—certainly deserve.</p>
<p>I turn first to Mr. Huyshe’s second letter, and the
drawing that accompanies it; but before entering into any
examination of the theory contained in each, I think I should
state at once that I have absolutely no idea whether this
gentleman wears his hair long or short, or his cuffs back or
forward, or indeed what he is like at all. I hope he
consults his own comfort and wishes in everything which has to do
with his dress, and is allowed to enjoy that individualism in
apparel which he so eloquently claims for himself, and so
foolishly tries to deny to others; but I really could not take
Mr. Wentworth Huyshe’s personal appearance as any
intellectual basis for an investigation of the principles which
should guide the costume of a nation. I am not denying the
force, or even the popularity, of the ‘’Eave arf a
brick’ school of criticism, but I acknowledge it does not
interest me. The gamin in the gutter may be a necessity,
but the gamin in discussion is a nuisance. So I will
proceed at once to the real point at issue, the value of the late
eighteenth-century costume over that worn in the second quarter
of the seventeenth: the relative merits, that is, of the
principles contained in each. Now, as regards the
eighteenth-century costume, Mr. Wentworth Huyshe acknowledges
that he has had no practical experience of it at all; in fact he
makes a pathetic appeal to his friends to corroborate him in his
assertion, which I do not question for a moment, that he has
never been “guilty of the eccentricity” of wearing
himself the dress which he proposes for general adoption by
others. There is something so naive and so amusing about
this last passage in Mr. Huyshe’s letter that I am really
in doubt whether I am not doing him a wrong in regarding him as
having any serious, or sincere, views on the question of a
possible reform in dress; still, as irrespective of any attitude
of Mr. Huyshe’s in the matter, the subject is in itself an
interesting one, I think it is worth continuing, particularly as
I have myself worn this late eighteenth-century dress many times,
both in public and in private, and so may claim to have a very
positive right to speak on its comfort and suitability. The
particular form of the dress I wore was very similar to that
given in Mr. Godwin’s handbook, from a print of
Northcote’s, and had a certain elegance and grace about it
which was very charming; still, I gave it up for these
reasons:—After a further consideration of the laws of dress
I saw that a doublet is a far simpler and easier garment than a
coat and waistcoat, and, if buttoned from the shoulder, far
warmer also, and that tails have no place in costume, except on
some Darwinian theory of heredity; from absolute experience in
the matter I found that the excessive tightness of knee-breeches
is not really comfortable if one wears them constantly; and, in
fact, I satisfied myself that the dress is not one founded on any
real principles. The broad-brimmed hat and loose cloak,
which, as my object was not, of course, historical accuracy but
modern ease, I had always worn with the costume in question, I
have still retained, and find them most comfortable.</p>
<p>Well, although Mr. Huyshe has no real experience of the dress
he proposes, he gives us a drawing of it, which he labels,
somewhat prematurely, “An ideal dress.” An
ideal dress of course it is not; “passably
picturesque,” he says I may possibly think it; well,
passably picturesque it may be, but not beautiful, certainly,
simply because it is not founded on right principles, or, indeed,
on any principles at all. Picturesqueness one may get in a
variety of ways; ugly things that are strange, or unfamiliar to
us, for instance, may be picturesque, such as a late
sixteenth-century costume, or a Georgian house. Ruins,
again, may be picturesque, but beautiful they never can be,
because their lines are meaningless. Beauty, in fact, is to
be got only from the perfection of principles; and in “the
ideal dress” of Mr. Huyshe there are no ideas or principles
at all, much less the perfection of either. Let us examine
it, and see its faults; they are obvious to any one who desires
more than a “Fancy-dress ball” basis for
costume. To begin with, the hat and boots are all
wrong. Whatever one wears on the extremities, such as the
feet and head, should, for the sake of comfort, be made of a soft
material, and for the sake of freedom should take its shape from
the way one chooses to wear it, and not from any stiff,
stereotyped design of hat or boot maker. In a hat made on
right principles one should be able to turn the brim up or down
according as the day is dark or fair, dry or wet; but the hat
brim of Mr. Huyshe’s drawing is perfectly stiff, and does
not give much protection to the face, or the possibility of any
at all to the back of the head or the ears, in case of a cold
east wind; whereas the bycocket, a hat made in accordance with
the right laws, can be turned down behind and at the sides, and
so give the same warmth as a hood. The crown, again, of Mr.
Huyshe’s hat is far too high; a high crown diminishes the
stature of a small person, and in the case of any one who is tall
is a great inconvenience when one is getting in and out of
hansoms and railway carriages, or passing under a street awning:
in no case is it of any value whatsoever, and being useless it is
of course against the principles of dress.</p>
<p>As regards the boots, they are not quite so ugly or so
uncomfortable as the hat; still they are evidently made of stiff
leather, as otherwise they would fall down to the ankle, whereas
the boot should be made of soft leather always, and if worn high
at all must be either laced up the front or carried well over the
knee: in the latter case one combines perfect freedom for walking
together with perfect protection against rain, neither of which
advantages a short stiff boot will ever give one, and when one is
resting in the house the long soft boot can be turned down as the
boot of 1640 was. Then there is the overcoat: now, what are
the right principles of an overcoat? To begin with, it
should be capable of being easily put on or off, and worn over
any kind of dress; consequently it should never have narrow
sleeves, such as are shown in Mr. Huyshe’s drawing.
If an opening or slit for the arm is required it should be made
quite wide, and may be protected by a flap, as in that excellent
overall the modern Inverness cape; secondly, it should not be too
tight, as otherwise all freedom of walking is impeded. If
the young gentleman in the drawing buttons his overcoat he may
succeed in being statuesque, though that I doubt very strongly,
but he will never succeed in being swift; his <i>super-totus</i>
is made for him on no principle whatsoever; a <i>super-totus</i>,
or overall, should be capable of being worn long or short, quite
loose or moderately tight, just as the wearer wishes; he should
be able to have one arm free and one arm covered or both arms
free or both arms covered, just as he chooses for his convenience
in riding, walking, or driving; an overall again should never be
heavy, and should always be warm: lastly, it should be capable of
being easily carried if one wants to take it off; in fact, its
principles are those of freedom and comfort, and a cloak realizes
them all, just as much as an overcoat of the pattern suggested by
Mr. Huyshe violates them.</p>
<p>The knee-breeches are of course far too tight; any one who has
worn them for any length of time—any one, in fact, whose
views on the subject are not purely theoretical—will agree
with me there; like everything else in the dress, they are a
great mistake. The substitution of the jacket for the coat
and waistcoat of the period is a step in the right direction,
which I am glad to see; it is, however, far too tight over the
hips for any possible comfort. Whenever a jacket or doublet
comes below the waist it should be slit at each side. In
the seventeenth century the skirt of the jacket was sometimes
laced on by points and tags, so that it could be removed at will,
sometimes it was merely left open at the sides: in each case it
exemplified what are always the true principles of dress, I mean
freedom and adaptability to circumstances.</p>
<p>Finally, as regards drawings of this kind, I would point out
that there is absolutely no limit at all to the amount of
“passably picturesque” costumes which can be either
revived or invented for us; but that unless a costume is founded
on principles and exemplified laws, it never can be of any real
value to us in the reform of dress. This particular drawing
of Mr. Huyshe’s, for instance, proves absolutely nothing,
except that our grandfathers did not understand the proper laws
of dress. There is not a single rule of right costume which
is not violated in it, for it gives us stiffness, tightness and
discomfort instead of comfort, freedom and ease.</p>
<p>Now here, on the other hand, is a dress which, being founded
on principles, can serve us as an excellent guide and model; it
has been drawn for me, most kindly, by Mr. Godwin from the Duke
of Newcastle’s delightful book on horsemanship, a book
which is one of our best authorities on our best era of
costume. I do not of course propose it necessarily for
absolute imitation; that is not the way in which one should
regard it; it is not, I mean, a revival of a dead costume, but a
realization of living laws. I give it as an example of a
particular application of principles which are universally
right. This rationally dressed young man can turn his hat
brim down if it rains, and his loose trousers and boots down if
he is tired—that is, he can adapt his costume to
circumstances; then he enjoys perfect freedom, the arms and legs
are not made awkward or uncomfortable by the excessive tightness
of narrow sleeves and knee-breeches, and the hips are left quite
untrammelled, always an important point; and as regards comfort,
his jacket is not too loose for warmth, nor too close for
respiration; his neck is well protected without being strangled,
and even his ostrich feathers, if any Philistine should object to
them, are not merely dandyism, but fan him very pleasantly, I am
sure, in summer, and when the weather is bad they are no doubt
left at home, and his cloak taken out. <i>The value of the
dress is simply that every separate article of it expresses a
law</i>. My young man is consequently apparelled with
ideas, while Mr. Huyshe’s young man is stiffened with
facts; the latter teaches one nothing; from the former one learns
everything. I need hardly say that this dress is good, not
because it is seventeenth century, but because it is constructed
on the true principles of costume, just as a square lintel or
pointed arch is good, not because one may be Greek and the other
Gothic, but because each of them is the best method of spanning a
certain-sized opening, or resisting a certain weight. The
fact, however, that this dress was generally worn in England two
centuries and a half ago shows at least this, that the right laws
of dress have been understood and realized in our country, and so
in our country may be realized and understood again. As
regards the absolute beauty of this dress and its meaning, I
should like to say a few words more. Mr. Wentworth Huyshe
solemnly announces that “he and those who think with
him” cannot permit this question of beauty to be imported
into the question of dress; that he and those who think with him
take “practical views on the subject,” and so
on. Well, I will not enter here into a discussion as to how
far any one who does not take beauty and the value of beauty into
account can claim to be practical at all. The word
practical is nearly always the last refuge of the
uncivilized. Of all misused words it is the most evilly
treated. But what I want to point out is that beauty is
essentially organic; that is, it comes, not from without, but
from within, not from any added prettiness, but from the
perfection of its own being; and that consequently, as the body
is beautiful, so all apparel that rightly clothes it must be
beautiful also in its construction and in its lines.</p>
<p>I have no more desire to define ugliness than I have daring to
define beauty; but still I would like to remind those who mock at
beauty as being an unpractical thing of this fact, that an ugly
thing is merely a thing that is badly made, or a thing that does
not serve it purpose; that ugliness is want of fitness; that
ugliness is failure; that ugliness is uselessness, such as
ornament in the wrong place, while beauty, as some one finely
said, is the purgation of all superfluities. There is a
divine economy about beauty; it gives us just what is needful and
no more, whereas ugliness is always extravagant; ugliness is a
spendthrift and wastes its material; in fine, ugliness—and
I would commend this remark to Mr. Wentworth
Huyshe—ugliness, as much in costume as in anything else, is
always the sign that somebody has been unpractical. So the
costume of the future in England, if it is founded on the true
laws of freedom, comfort, and adaptability to circumstances,
cannot fail to be most beautiful also, because beauty is the sign
always of the rightness of principles, the mystical seal that is
set upon what is perfect, and upon what is perfect only.</p>
<p>As for your other correspondent, the first principle of dress
that all garments should be hung from the shoulders and not from
the waist seems to me to be generally approved of, although an
“Old Sailor” declares that no sailors or athletes
ever suspend their clothes from the shoulders, but always from
the hips. My own recollection of the river and running
ground at Oxford—those two homes of Hellenism in our little
Gothic town—is that the best runners and rowers (and my own
college turned out many) wore always a tight jersey, with short
drawers attached to it, the whole costume being woven in one
piece. As for sailors, it is true, I admit, and the bad
custom seems to involve that constant “hitching up”
of the lower garments which, however popular in transpontine
dramas, cannot, I think, but be considered an extremely awkward
habit; and as all awkwardness comes from discomfort of some kind,
I trust that this point in our sailor’s dress will be
looked to in the coming reform of our navy, for, in spite of all
protests, I hope we are about to reform everything, from
torpedoes to top-hats, and from crinolettes to cruises.</p>
<p>Then as regards clogs, my suggestion of them seems to have
aroused a great deal of terror. Fashion in her high-heeled
boots has screamed, and the dreadful word
“anachronism” has been used. Now, whatever is
useful cannot be an anachronism. Such a word is applicable
only to the revival of some folly; and, besides, in the England
of our own day clogs are still worn in many of our manufacturing
towns, such as Oldham. I fear that in Oldham they may not
be dreams of beauty; in Oldham the art of inlaying them with
ivory and with pearl may possibly be unknown; yet in Oldham they
serve their purpose. Nor is it so long since they were worn
by the upper classes of this country generally. Only a few
days ago I had the pleasure of talking to a lady who remembered
with affectionate regret the clogs of her girlhood; they were,
according to her, not too high nor too heavy, and were provided,
besides, with some kind of spring in the sole so as to make them
the more supple for the foot in walking. Personally, I
object to all additional height being given to a boot or shoe; it
is really against the proper principles of dress, although, if
any such height is to be given it should be by means of two
props; not one; but what I should prefer to see is some
adaptation of the divided skirt or long and moderately loose
knickerbockers. If, however, the divided skirt is to be of
any positive value, it must give up all idea of “being
identical in appearance with an ordinary skirt”; it must
diminish the moderate width of each of its divisions, and
sacrifice its foolish frills and flounces; the moment it imitates
a dress it is lost; but let it visibly announce itself as what it
actually is, and it will go far towards solving a real
difficulty. I feel sure that there will be found many
graceful and charming girls ready to adopt a costume founded on
these principles, in spite of Mr. Wentworth Huyshe’s
terrible threat that he will not propose to them as long as they
wear it, for all charges of a want of womanly character in these
forms of dress are really meaningless; every right article of
apparel belongs equally to both sexes, and there is absolutely no
such thing as a definitely feminine garment. One word of
warning I should like to be allowed to give: The over-tunic
should be made full and moderately loose; it may, if desired, be
shaped more or less to the figure, but in no case should it be
confined at the waist by any straight band or belt; on the
contrary, it should fall from the shoulder to the knee, or below
it, in fine curves and vertical lines, giving more freedom and
consequently more grace. Few garments are so absolutely
unbecoming as a belted tunic that reaches to the knees, a fact
which I wish some of our Rosalinds would consider when they don
doublet and hose; indeed, to the disregard of this artistic
principle is due the ugliness, the want of proportion, in the
Bloomer costume, a costume which in other respects is
sensible.</p>
<h2><a name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
80</span>COSTUME</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Are</span> we not all weary of him, that
venerable impostor fresh from the steps of the Piazza di Spagna,
who, in the leisure moments that he can spare from his customary
organ, makes the round of the studios and is waited for in
Holland Park? Do we not all recognize him, when, with the
gay <i>insouciance</i> of his nation, he reappears on the walls
of our summer exhibitions as everything that he is not, and as
nothing that he is, glaring at us here as a patriarch of Canaan,
here beaming as a brigand from the Abruzzi? Popular is he,
this poor peripatetic professor of posing, with those whose joy
it is to paint the posthumous portrait of the last philanthropist
who in his lifetime had neglected to be photographed,—yet
he is the sign of the decadence, the symbol of decay.</p>
<p>For all costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is
not the Fancy Ball. Where there is loveliness of dress,
there is no dressing up. And so, were our national attire
delightful in colour, and in construction simple and sincere;
were dress the expression of the loveliness that it shields and
of the swiftness and motion that it does not impede; did its
lines break from the shoulder instead of bulging from the waist;
did the inverted wineglass cease to be the ideal of form; were
these things brought about, as brought about they will be, then
would painting be no longer an artificial reaction against the
ugliness of life, but become, as it should be, the natural
expression of life’s beauty. Nor would painting
merely, but all the other arts also, be the gainers by a change
such as that which I propose; the gainers, I mean, through the
increased atmosphere of Beauty by which the artists would be
surrounded and in which they would grow up. For Art is not
to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not
what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real
schools should be the streets. There is not, for instance,
a single delicate line, or delightful proportion, in the dress of
the Greeks, which is not echoed exquisitely in their
architecture. A nation arrayed in stove-pipe hats and
dress-improvers might have built the Pantechnichon possibly, but
the Parthenon never. And finally, there is this to be said:
Art, it is true, can never have any other claim but her own
perfection, and it may be that the artist, desiring merely to
contemplate and to create, is wise in not busying himself about
change in others: yet wisdom is not always the best; there are
times when she sinks to the level of common-sense; and from the
passionate folly of those—and there are many—who
desire that Beauty shall be confined no longer to the
<i>bric-à-brac</i> of the collector and the dust of the
museum, but shall be, as it should be, the natural and national
inheritance of all,—from this noble unwisdom, I say, who
knows what new loveliness shall be given to life, and, under
these more exquisite conditions, what perfect artist born?
<i>Le milieu se renouvelant</i>, <i>l’art se
renouvelle</i>.</p>
<h2><a name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 83</span>THE
AMERICAN INVASION</h2>
<p style="text-align: center">(March 1887)</p>
<p>A <span class="smcap">terrible</span> danger is hanging over
the Americans in London. Their future and their reputation
this season depend entirely on the success of Buffalo Bill and
Mrs. Brown-Potter. The former is certain to draw; for
English people are far more interested in American barbarism than
they are in American civilization. When they sight Sandy
Hook they look to their rifles and ammunition; and, after dining
once at Delmonico’s, start off for Colorado or California,
for Montana or the Yellow Stone Park. Rocky Mountains charm
them more than riotous millionaires; they have been known to
prefer buffaloes to Boston. Why should they not? The
cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians
take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an
accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their
“Hub,” as they call it, is the paradise of
prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustle
and bores. Political life at Washington is like political
life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week,
but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can
dine in New York one could not dwell there. Better the Far
West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free
open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless
prairie and its boundless mendacity! This is what Buffalo
Bill is going to bring to London; and we have no doubt that
London will fully appreciate his show.</p>
<p>With regard to Mrs. Brown-Potter, as acting is no longer
considered absolutely essential for success on the English stage,
there is really no reason why the pretty bright-eyed lady who
charmed us all last June by her merry laugh and her nonchalant
ways, should not—to borrow an expression from her native
language—make a big boom and paint the town red. We
sincerely hope she will; for, on the whole, the American invasion
has done English society a great deal of good. American
women are bright, clever, and wonderfully cosmopolitan.
Their patriotic feelings are limited to an admiration for Niagara
and a regret for the Elevated Railway; and, unlike the men, they
never bore us with Bunkers Hill. They take their dresses
from Paris and their manners from Piccadilly, and wear both
charmingly. They have a quaint pertness, a delightful
conceit, a native self-assertion. They insist on being paid
compliments and have almost succeeded in making Englishmen
eloquent. For our aristocracy they have an ardent
admiration; they adore titles and are a permanent blow to
Republican principles. In the art of amusing men they are
adepts, both by nature and education, and can actually tell a
story without forgetting the point—an accomplishment that
is extremely rare among the women of other countries. It is
true that they lack repose and that their voices are somewhat
harsh and strident when they land first at Liverpool; but after a
time one gets to love those pretty whirlwinds in petticoats that
sweep so recklessly through society and are so agitating to all
duchesses who have daughters. There is something
fascinating in their funny, exaggerated gestures and their
petulant way of tossing the head. Their eyes have no magic
nor mystery in them, but they challenge us for combat; and when
we engage we are always worsted. Their lips seem made for
laughter and yet they never grimace. As for their voices
they soon get them into tune. Some of them have been known
to acquire a fashionable drawl in two seasons; and after they
have been presented to Royalty they all roll their R’s as
vigorously as a young equerry or an old lady-in-waiting.
Still, they never really lose their accent; it keeps peeping out
here and there, and when they chatter together they are like a
bevy of peacocks. Nothing is more amusing than to watch two
American girls greeting each other in a drawing-room or in the
Row. They are like children with their shrill staccato
cries of wonder, their odd little exclamations. Their
conversation sounds like a series of exploding crackers; they are
exquisitely incoherent and use a sort of primitive, emotional
language. After five minutes they are left beautifully
breathless and look at each other half in amusement and half in
affection. If a stolid young Englishman is fortunate enough
to be introduced to them he is amazed at their extraordinary
vivacity, their electric quickness of repartee, their
inexhaustible store of curious catchwords. He never really
understands them, for their thoughts flutter about with the sweet
irresponsibility of butterflies; but he is pleased and amused and
feels as if he were in an aviary. On the whole, American
girls have a wonderful charm and, perhaps, the chief secret of
their charm is that they never talk seriously except about
amusements. They have, however, one grave fault—their
mothers. Dreary as were those old Pilgrim Fathers who left
our shores more than two centuries ago to found a New England
beyond the seas, the Pilgrim Mothers who have returned to us in
the nineteenth century are drearier still.</p>
<p>Here and there, of course, there are exceptions, but as a
class they are either dull, dowdy or dyspeptic. It is only
fair to the rising generation of America to state that they are
not to blame for this. Indeed, they spare no pains at all
to bring up their parents properly and to give them a suitable,
if somewhat late, education. From its earliest years every
American child spends most of its time in correcting the faults
of its father and mother; and no one who has had the opportunity
of watching an American family on the deck of an Atlantic
steamer, or in the refined seclusion of a New York
boarding-house, can fail to have been struck by this
characteristic of their civilization. In America the young
are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves
the full benefits of their inexperience. A boy of only
eleven or twelve years of age will firmly but kindly point out to
his father his defects of manner or temper; will never weary of
warning him against extravagance, idleness, late hours,
unpunctuality, and the other temptations to which the aged are so
particularly exposed; and sometimes, should he fancy that he is
monopolizing too much of the conversation at dinner, will remind
him, across the table, of the new child’s adage,
“Parents should be seen, not heard.” Nor does
any mistaken idea of kindness prevent the little American girl
from censuring her mother whenever it is necessary. Often,
indeed, feeling that a rebuke conveyed in the presence of others
is more truly efficacious than one merely whispered in the quiet
of the nursery, she will call the attention of perfect strangers
to her mother’s general untidiness, her want of
intellectual Boston conversation, immoderate love of iced water
and green corn, stinginess in the matter of candy, ignorance of
the usages of the best Baltimore Society, bodily ailments, and
the like. In fact, it may be truly said that no American
child is ever blind to the deficiencies of its parents, no matter
how much it may love them.</p>
<p>Yet, somehow, this educational system has not been so
successful as it deserved. In many cases, no doubt, the
material with which the children had to deal was crude and
incapable of real development; but the fact remains that the
American mother is a tedious person. The American father is
better, for he is never seen in London. He passes his life
entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a
month by means of a telegram in cipher. The mother,
however, is always with us, and, lacking the quick imitative
faculty of the younger generation, remains uninteresting and
provincial to the last. In spite of her, however, the
American girl is always welcome. She brightens our dull
dinner parties for us and makes life go pleasantly by for a
season. In the race for coronets she often carries off the
prize; but, once she has gained the victory, she is generous and
forgives her English rivals everything, even their beauty.</p>
<p>Warned by the example of her mother that American women do not
grow old gracefully, she tries not to grow old at all and often
succeeds. She has exquisite feet and hands, is always
<i>bien chaussée et bien gantée</i> and can talk
brilliantly upon any subject, provided that she knows nothing
about it.</p>
<p>Her sense of humour keeps her from the tragedy of a <i>grande
passion</i>, and, as there is neither romance nor humility in her
love, she makes an excellent wife. What her ultimate
influence on English life will be it is difficult to estimate at
present; but there can be no doubt that, of all the factors that
have contributed to the social revolution of London, there are
few more important, and none more delightful, than the American
Invasion.</p>
<h2><a name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
90</span>SERMONS IN STONES AT BLOOMSBURY</h2>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">THE NEW
SCULPTURE ROOM AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">(October 1887)</p>
<p><span class="smcap">Through</span> the exertions of Sir
Charles Newton, to whom every student of classic art should be
grateful, some of the wonderful treasures so long immured in the
grimy vaults of the British Museum have at last been brought to
light, and the new Sculpture Room now opened to the public will
amply repay the trouble of a visit, even from those to whom art
is a stumbling-block and a rock of offence. For setting
aside the mere beauty of form, outline and mass, the grace and
loveliness of design and the delicacy of technical treatment,
here we have shown to us what the Greeks and Romans thought about
death; and the philosopher, the preacher, the practical man of
the world, and even the Philistine himself, cannot fail to be
touched by these “sermons in stones,” with their deep
significance, their fertile suggestion, their plain
humanity. Common tombstones they are, most of them, the
work not of famous artists but of simple handicraftsmen, only
they were wrought in days when every handicraft was an art.
The finest specimens, from the purely artistic point of view, are
undoubtedly the two <i>stelai</i> found at Athens. They are
both the tombstones of young Greek athletes. In one the
athlete is represented handing his <i>strigil</i> to his slave,
in the other the athlete stands alone, <i>strigil</i> in
hand. They do not belong to the greatest period of Greek
art, they have not the grand style of the Phidian age, but they
are beautiful for all that, and it is impossible not to be
fascinated by their exquisite grace and by the treatment which is
so simple in its means, so subtle in its effect. All the
tombstones, however, are full of interest. Here is one of
two ladies of Smyrna who were so remarkable in their day that the
city voted them honorary crowns; here is a Greek doctor examining
a little boy who is suffering from indigestion; here is the
memorial of Xanthippus who, probably, was a martyr to gout, as he
is holding in his hand the model of a foot, intended, no doubt,
as a votive offering to some god. A lovely <i>stele</i>
from Rhodes gives us a family group. The husband is on
horseback and is bidding farewell to his wife, who seems as if
she would follow him but is being held back by a little
child. The pathos of parting from those we love is the
central motive of Greek funeral art. It is repeated in
every possible form, and each mute marble stone seems to murmur
<i>χαîρε</i>. Roman art is
different. It introduces vigorous and realistic portraiture
and deals with pure family life far more frequently than Greek
art does. They are very ugly, those stern-looking Roman men
and women whose portraits are exhibited on their tombs, but they
seem to have been loved and respected by their children and their
servants. Here is the monument of Aphrodisius and Atilia, a
Roman gentleman and his wife, who died in Britain many centuries
ago, and whose tombstone was found in the Thames; and close by it
stands a <i>stele</i> from Rome with the busts of an old married
couple who are certainly marvellously ill-favoured. The
contrast between the abstract Greek treatment of the idea of
death and the Roman concrete realization of the individuals who
have died is extremely curious.</p>
<p>Besides the tombstones, the new Sculpture Room contains some
most fascinating examples of Roman decorative art under the
Emperors. The most wonderful of all, and this alone is
worth a trip to Bloomsbury, is a bas-relief representing a
marriage scene, Juno Pronuba is joining the hands of a handsome
young noble and a very stately lady. There is all the grace
of Perugino in this marble, all the grace of Raphael even.
The date of it is uncertain, but the particular cut of the
bridegroom’s beard seems to point to the time of the
Emperor Hadrian. It is clearly the work of Greek artists
and is one of the most beautiful bas-reliefs in the whole
Museum. There is something in it which reminds one of the
music and the sweetness of Propertian verse. Then we have
delightful friezes of children. One representing children
playing on musical instruments might have suggested much of the
plastic art of Florence. Indeed, as we view these marbles
it is not difficult to see whence the Renaissance sprang and to
what we owe the various forms of Renaissance art. The
frieze of the Muses, each of whom wears in her hair a feather
plucked from the wings of the vanquished sirens, is extremely
fine; there is a lovely little bas-relief of two cupids racing in
chariots; and the frieze of recumbent Amazons has some splendid
qualities of design. A frieze of children playing with the
armour of the god Mars should also be mentioned. It is full
of fancy and delicate humour.</p>
<p>We hope that some more of the hidden treasures will shortly be
catalogued and shown. In the vaults at present there is a
very remarkable bas-relief of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche,
and another representing the professional mourners weeping over
the body of the dead. The fine cast of the Lion of
Chæronea should also be brought up, and so should the
<i>stele</i> with the marvellous portrait of the Roman
slave. Economy is an excellent public virtue, but the
parsimony that allows valuable works of art to remain in the grim
and gloom of a damp cellar is little short of a detestable public
vice.</p>
<h2><a name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
119</span>L’ENVOI</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">An introduction to <i>Rose Leaf and Apple
Leaf</i> by Rennell Rodd, published by J. M. Stoddart and Co.,
Philadelphia, 1882.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">Amongst</span> the many young men in
England who are seeking along with me to continue and to perfect
the English Renaissance—<i>jeunes guerriers du drapeau
romantique</i>, as Gautier would have called us—there is
none whose love of art is more flawless and fervent, whose
artistic sense of beauty is more subtle and more
delicate—none, indeed, who is dearer to myself—than
the young poet whose verses I have brought with me to America;
verses full of sweet sadness, and yet full of joy; for the most
joyous poet is not he who sows the desolate highways of this
world with the barren seed of laughter, but he who makes his
sorrow most musical, this indeed being the meaning of joy in
art—that incommunicable element of artistic delight which,
in poetry, for instance, comes from what Keats called
“sensuous life of verse,” the element of song in the
singing, made so pleasurable to us by that wonder of motion which
often has its origin in mere musical impulse, and in painting is
to be sought for, from the subject never, but from the pictorial
charm only—the scheme and symphony of the colour, the
satisfying beauty of the design: so that the ultimate expression
of our artistic movement in painting has been, not in the
spiritual vision of the Pre-Raphaelites, for all their marvel of
Greek legend and their mystery of Italian song, but in the work
of such men as Whistler and Albert Moore, who have raised design
and colour to the ideal level of poetry and music. For the
quality of their exquisite painting comes from the mere inventive
and creative handling of line and colour, from a certain form and
choice of beautiful workmanship, which, rejecting all literary
reminiscence and all metaphysical idea, is in itself entirely
satisfying to the æsthetic sense—is, as the Greeks
would say, an end in itself; the effect of their work being like
the effect given to us by music; for music is the art in which
form and matter are always one—the art whose subject cannot
be separated from the method of its expression; the art which
most completely realizes for us the artistic ideal, and is the
condition to which all the other arts are constantly
aspiring.</p>
<p>Now, this increased sense of the absolutely satisfying value
of beautiful workmanship, this recognition of the primary
importance of the sensuous element in art, this love of art for
art’s sake, is the point in which we of the younger school
have made a departure from the teaching of Mr. Ruskin,—a
departure definite and different and decisive.</p>
<p>Master indeed of the knowledge of all noble living and of the
wisdom of all spiritual things will he be to us ever, seeing that
it was he who by the magic of his presence and the music of his
lips taught us at Oxford that enthusiasm for beauty which is the
secret of Hellenism, and that desire for creation which is the
secret of life, and filled some of us, at least, with the lofty
and passionate ambition to go forth into far and fair lands with
some message for the nations and some mission for the world, and
yet in his art criticism, his estimate of the joyous element of
art, his whole method of approaching art, we are no longer with
him; for the keystone to his æsthetic system is ethical
always. He would judge of a picture by the amount of noble
moral ideas it expresses; but to us the channels by which all
noble work in painting can touch, and does touch, the soul are
not those of truths of life or metaphysical truths. To him
perfection of workmanship seems but the symbol of pride, and
incompleteness of technical resource the image of an imagination
too limitless to find within the limits of form its complete
expression, or of love too simple not to stammer in its
tale. But to us the rule of art is not the rule of
morals. In an ethical system, indeed, of any gentle mercy
good intentions will, one is fain to fancy, have their
recognition; but of those that would enter the serene House of
Beauty the question that we ask is not what they had ever meant
to do, but what they have done. Their pathetic intentions
are of no value to us, but their realized creations only.
<i>Pour moi je préfère les poètes qui font
des vers</i>, <i>les médecins qui sachent
guérir</i>, <i>les peintres qui sanchent peindre</i>.</p>
<p>Nor, in looking at a work of art, should we be dreaming of
what it symbolises, but rather loving it for what it is.
Indeed, the transcendental spirit is alien to the spirit of
art. The metaphysical mind of Asia may create for itself
the monstrous and many-breasted idol, but to the Greek, pure
artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which
conforms most closely to the perfect facts of physical life
also. Nor, in its primary aspect, has a painting, for
instance, any more spiritual message or meaning for us than a
blue tile from the wall of Damascus, or a Hitzen vase. It
is a beautifully coloured surface, nothing more, and affects us
by no suggestion stolen from philosophy, no pathos pilfered from
literature, no feeling filched from a poet, but by its own
incommunicable artistic essence—by that selection of truth
which we call style, and that relation of values which is the
draughtsmanship of painting, by the whole quality of the
workmanship, the arabesque of the design, the splendour of the
colour, for these things are enough to stir the most divine and
remote of the chords which make music in our soul, and colour,
indeed, is of itself a mystical presence on things, and tone a
kind of sentiment . . . all these poems aim, as I said, at
producing a purely artistic effect, and have the rare and
exquisite quality that belongs to work of that kind; and I feel
that the entire subordination in our æsthetic movement of
all merely emotional and intellectual motives to the vital
informing poetic principle is the surest sign of our
strength.</p>
<p>But it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the
æsthetic demands of the age: there should be also about it,
if it is to give us any permanent delight, the impress of a
distinct individuality. Whatever work we have in the
nineteenth century must rest on the two poles of personality and
perfection. And so in this little volume, by separating the
earlier and more simple work from the work that is later and
stronger and possesses increased technical power and more
artistic vision, one might weave these disconnected poems, these
stray and scattered threads, into one fiery-coloured strand of
life, noting first a boy’s mere gladness of being young,
with all its simple joy in field and flower, in sunlight and in
song, and then the bitterness of sudden sorrow at the ending by
Death of one of the brief and beautiful friendships of
one’s youth, with all those unanswered lodgings and
questionings unsatisfied by which we vex, so uselessly, the
marble face of death; the artistic contrast between the
discontented incompleteness of the spirit and the complete
perfection of the style that expresses it forming the chief
element of the æsthetic charm of these particular
poems;—and then the birth of Love, and all the wonder and
the fear and the perilous delight of one on whose boyish brows
the little wings of love have beaten for the first time; and the
love-songs, so dainty and delicate, little swallow-flights of
music, and full of such fragrance and freedom that they might all
be sung in the open air and across moving water; and then autumn,
coming with its choirless woods and odorous decay and ruined
loveliness, Love lying dead; and the sense of the mere pity of
it.</p>
<p>One might stop there, for from a young poet one should ask for
no deeper chords of life than those that love and friendship make
eternal for us; and the best poems in the volume belong clearly
to a later time, a time when these real experiences become
absorbed and gathered up into a form which seems from such real
experiences to be the most alien and the most remote; when the
simple expression of joy or sorrow suffices no longer, and lives
rather in the stateliness of the cadenced metre, in the music and
colour of the linked words, than in any direct utterance; lives,
one might say, in the perfection of the form more than in the
pathos of the feeling. And yet, after the broken music of
love and the burial of love in the autumn woods, we can trace
that wandering among strange people, and in lands unknown to us,
by which we try so pathetically to heal the hurts of the life we
know, and that pure and passionate devotion to Art which one gets
when the harsh reality of life has too suddenly wounded one, and
is with discontent or sorrow marring one’s youth, just as
often, I think, as one gets it from any natural joy of living;
and that curious intensity of vision by which, in moments of
overmastering sadness and despair ungovernable, artistic things
will live in one’s memory with a vivid realism caught from
the life which they help one to forget—an old grey tomb in
Flanders with a strange legend on it, making one think how,
perhaps, passion does live on after death; a necklace of blue and
amber beads and a broken mirror found in a girl’s grave at
Rome, a marble image of a boy habited like Erôs, and with
the pathetic tradition of a great king’s sorrow lingering
about it like a purple shadow,—over all these the tired
spirit broods with that calm and certain joy that one gets when
one has found something that the ages never dull and the world
cannot harm; and with it comes that desire of Greek things which
is often an artistic method of expressing one’s desire for
perfection; and that longing for the old dead days which is so
modern, so incomplete, so touching, being, in a way, the inverted
torch of Hope, which burns the hand it should guide; and for many
things a little sadness, and for all things a great love; and
lastly, in the pinewood by the sea, once more the quick and vital
pulse of joyous youth leaping and laughing in every line, the
frank and fearless freedom of wave and wind waking into fire
life’s burnt-out ashes and into song the silent lips of
pain,—how clearly one seems to see it all, the long
colonnade of pines with sea and sky peeping in here and there
like a flitting of silver; the open place in the green, deep
heart of the wood with the little moss-grown altar to the old
Italian god in it; and the flowers all about, cyclamen in the
shadowy places, and the stars of the white narcissus lying like
snow-flakes over the grass, where the quick, bright-eyed lizard
starts by the stone, and the snake lies coiled lazily in the sun
on the hot sand, and overhead the gossamer floats from the
branches like thin, tremulous threads of gold,—the scene is
so perfect for its motive, for surely here, if anywhere, the real
gladness of life might be revealed to one’s youth—the
gladness that comes, not from the rejection, but from the
absorption, of all passion, and is like that serene calm that
dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, and which despair and
sorrow cannot touch, but intensify only.</p>
<p>In some such way as this we could gather up these strewn and
scattered petals of song into one perfect rose of life, and yet,
perhaps, in so doing, we might be missing the true quality of the
poems; one’s real life is so often the life that one does
not lead; and beautiful poems, like threads of beautiful silks,
may be woven into many patterns and to suit many designs, all
wonderful and all different: and romantic poetry, too, is
essentially the poetry of impressions, being like that latest
school of painting, the school of Whistler and Albert Moore, in
its choice of situation as opposed to subject; in its dealing
with the exceptions rather than with the types of life; in its
brief intensity; in what one might call its fiery-coloured
momentariness, it being indeed the momentary situations of life,
the momentary aspects of nature, which poetry and painting new
seek to render for us. Sincerity and constancy will the
artist, indeed, have always; but sincerity in art is merely that
plastic perfection of execution without which a poem or a
painting, however noble its sentiment or human its origin, is but
wasted and unreal work, and the constancy of the artist cannot be
to any definite rule or system of living, but to that principle
of beauty only through which the inconstant shadows of his life
are in their most fleeting moment arrested and made
permanent. He will not, for instance, in intellectual
matters acquiesce in that facile orthodoxy of our day which is so
reasonable and so artistically uninteresting, nor yet will he
desire that fiery faith of the antique time which, while it
intensified, yet limited the vision; still less will he allow the
calm of his culture to be marred by the discordant despair of
doubt or the sadness of a sterile scepticism; for the Valley
Perilous, where ignorant armies clash by night, is no
resting-place meet for her to whom the gods have assigned the
clear upland, the serene height, and the sunlit air,—rather
will he be always curiously testing new forms of belief, tinging
his nature with the sentiment that still lingers about some
beautiful creeds, and searching for experience itself, and not
for the fruits of experience; when he has got its secret, he will
leave without regret much that was once very precious to
him. “I am always insincere,” says Emerson
somewhere, “as knowing that there are other moods”:
“<i>Les émotions</i>,” wrote Théophile
Gautier once in a review of Arsène Houssaye, “<i>Les
émotions</i>, <i>ne se ressemblent pas</i>, <i>mais
être ému</i>—<i>voilà
l’important</i>.”</p>
<p>Now, this is the secret of the art of the modern romantic
school, and gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but
the real quality of all work which, like Mr. Rodd’s, aims,
as I said, at a purely artistic effect, cannot be described in
terms of intellectual criticism; it is too intangible for
that. One can perhaps convey it best in terms of the other
arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these poems
are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of
Venetian glass; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and as
single in natural motive as an etching by Whistler is, or one of
those beautiful little Greek figures which in the olive woods
round Tanagra men can still find, with the faint gilding and the
fading crimson not yet fled from hair and lips and raiment; and
many of them seem like one of Corot’s twilights just
passing into music; for not merely in visible colour, but in
sentiment also—which is the colour of poetry—may
there be a kind of tone.</p>
<p>But I think that the best likeness to the quality of this
young poet’s work I ever saw was in the landscape by the
Loire. We were staying once, he and I, at Amboise, that
little village with its grey slate roofs and steep streets and
gaunt, grim gateway, where the quiet cottages nestle like white
pigeons into the sombre clefts of the great bastioned rock, and
the stately Renaissance houses stand silent and apart—very
desolate now, but with some memory of the old days still
lingering about the delicately-twisted pillars, and the carved
doorways, with their grotesque animals, and laughing masks, and
quaint heraldic devices, all reminding one of a people who could
not think life real till they had made it fantastic. And
above the village, and beyond the bend of the river, we used to
go in the afternoon, and sketch from one of the big barges that
bring the wine in autumn and the wood in winter down to the sea,
or lie in the long grass and make plans <i>pour la gloire</i>,
<i>et pour ennuyer les Philistins</i>, or wander along the low,
sedgy banks, “matching our reeds in sportive
rivalry,” as comrades used in the old Sicilian days; and
the land was an ordinary land enough, and bare, too, when one
thought of Italy, and how the oleanders were robing the hillsides
by Genoa in scarlet, and the cyclamen filling with its purple
every valley from Florence to Rome; for there was not much real
beauty, perhaps, in it, only long, white dusty roads and straight
rows of formal poplars; but, now and then, some little breaking
gleam of broken light would lend to the grey field and the silent
barn a secret and a mystery that were hardly their own, would
transfigure for one exquisite moment the peasants passing down
through the vineyard, or the shepherd watching on the hill, would
tip the willows with silver and touch the river into gold; and
the wonder of the effect, with the strange simplicity of the
material, always seemed to me to be a little like the quality of
these the verses of my friend.</p>
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