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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Intentions, 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: Intentions
+
+
+Author: Oscar Wilde
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 26, 2014  [eBook #887]
+[This file was first posted on April 24, 1997]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTENTIONS***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen and Co edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                                INTENTIONS
+
+
+                                    BY
+                               OSCAR WILDE
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                            METHUEN & CO. LTD.
+                           36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
+                                  LONDON
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                _First Published_, _at 1s. net_, _in 1913_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_This Book was First Published_                        _1891_
+_Second Edition_                                       _1894_
+_First Published_ (_Third Edition_) _by Methuen        _1908_
+and Co._
+_Fourth Edition_                                       _1909_
+_Fifth Edition_                                        _1911_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                DEDICATED
+                                    TO
+                                MRS. CAREW
+                                    BY
+                      THE AUTHOR’S LITERARY EXECUTOR
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                 PAGE
+THE DECAY OF LYING                  1
+PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON            57
+THE CRITIC AS ARTIST               95
+THE TRUTH OF MASKS                221
+
+
+
+
+THE DECAY OF LYING:
+AN OBSERVATION
+
+
+                  _A DIALOGUE_.  _Persons_: _Cyril and_
+              _Vivian_.  _Scene_: _the Library of a country_
+                       _house in Nottinghamshire_.
+
+CYRIL (_coming in through the open window from the terrace_).  My dear
+Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library.  It is a perfectly
+lovely afternoon.  The air is exquisite.  There is a mist upon the woods,
+like the purple bloom upon a plum.  Let us go and lie on the grass and
+smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.
+
+VIVIAN.  Enjoy Nature!  I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that
+faculty.  People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved
+her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful
+study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our
+observation.  My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less
+we care for Nature.  What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of
+design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely
+unfinished condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as
+Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.  When I look at a
+landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects.  It is fortunate for us,
+however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art
+at all.  Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature
+her proper place.  As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure
+myth.  It is not to be found in Nature herself.  It resides in the
+imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at
+her.
+
+CYRIL.  Well, you need not look at the landscape.  You can lie on the
+grass and smoke and talk.
+
+VIVIAN.  But Nature is so uncomfortable.  Grass is hard and lumpy and
+damp, and full of dreadful black insects.  Why, even Morris’s poorest
+workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature
+can.  Nature pales before the furniture of ‘the street which from Oxford
+has borrowed its name,’ as the poet you love so much once vilely phrased
+it.  I don’t complain.  If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would
+never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.
+In a house we all feel of the proper proportions.  Everything is
+subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.  Egotism
+itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is
+entirely the result of indoor life.  Out of doors one becomes abstract
+and impersonal.  One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.  And then
+Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative.  Whenever I am walking in
+the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle
+that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch.
+Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.  Thinking is the
+most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die
+of any other disease.  Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is
+not catching.  Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our
+national stupidity.  I only hope we shall be able to keep this great
+historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid
+that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is
+incapable of learning has taken to teaching—that is really what our
+enthusiasm for education has come to.  In the meantime, you had better go
+back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave me to correct my
+proofs.
+
+CYRIL.  Writing an article!  That is not very consistent after what you
+have just said.
+
+VIVIAN.  Who wants to be consistent?  The dullard and the doctrinaire,
+the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of
+action, to the _reductio ad absurdum_ of practice.  Not I.  Like Emerson,
+I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’  Besides, my article
+is really a most salutary and valuable warning.  If it is attended to,
+there may be a new Renaissance of Art.
+
+CYRIL.  What is the subject?
+
+VIVIAN.  I intend to call it ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest.’
+
+CYRIL.  Lying!  I should have thought that our politicians kept up that
+habit.
+
+VIVIAN.  I assure you that they do not.  They never rise beyond the level
+of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to
+argue.  How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank,
+fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural
+disdain of proof of any kind!  After all, what is a fine lie?  Simply
+that which is its own evidence.  If a man is sufficiently unimaginative
+to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the
+truth at once.  No, the politicians won’t do.  Something may, perhaps, be
+urged on behalf of the Bar.  The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its
+members.  Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful.  They
+can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh
+from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries
+triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those
+clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakeably innocent.  But
+they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to
+precedent.  In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out.
+Newspapers, even, have degenerated.  They may now be absolutely relied
+upon.  One feels it as one wades through their columns.  It is always the
+unreadable that occurs.  I am afraid that there is not much to be said in
+favour of either the lawyer or the journalist.  Besides, what I am
+pleading for is Lying in art.  Shall I read you what I have written?  It
+might do you a great deal of good.
+
+CYRIL.  Certainly, if you give me a cigarette.  Thanks.  By the way, what
+magazine do you intend it for?
+
+VIVIAN.  For the _Retrospective Review_.  I think I told you that the
+elect had revived it.
+
+CYRIL.  Whom do you mean by ‘the elect’?
+
+VIVIAN.  Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course.  It is a club to which I
+belong.  We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we
+meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian.  I am afraid you are not
+eligible.  You are too fond of simple pleasures.
+
+CYRIL.  I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits, I
+suppose?
+
+VIVIAN.  Probably.  Besides, you are a little too old.  We don’t admit
+anybody who is of the usual age.
+
+CYRIL.  Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with each
+other.
+
+VIVIAN.  We are.  This is one of the objects of the club.  Now, if you
+promise not to interrupt too often, I will read you my article.
+
+CYRIL.  You will find me all attention.
+
+VIVIAN (_reading in a very clear_, _musical voice_).  THE DECAY OF LYING:
+A PROTEST.—One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously
+commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly
+the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.  The
+ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the
+modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
+The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner.
+He has his tedious _document humain_, his miserable little _coin de la
+création_, into which he peers with his microscope.  He is to be found at
+the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up
+his subject.  He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but
+insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between
+encyclopædias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having
+drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman,
+and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never,
+even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself.
+
+‘The lose that results to literature in general from this false ideal of
+our time can hardly be overestimated.  People have a careless way of
+talking about a “born liar,” just as they talk about a “born poet.”  But
+in both cases they are wrong.  Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Pinto
+saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the most careful
+study, the most disinterested devotion.  Indeed, they have their
+technique, just as the more material arts of painting and sculpture have,
+their subtle secrets of form and colour, their craft-mysteries, their
+deliberate artistic methods.  As one knows the poet by his fine music, so
+one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither
+case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice.  Here, as
+elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection.  But in modern days while
+the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if
+possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into
+disrepute.  Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for
+exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic
+surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into
+something really great and wonderful.  But, as a rule, he comes to
+nothing.  He either falls into careless habits of accuracy—’
+
+CYRIL.  My dear fellow!
+
+VIVIAN.  Please don’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence.  ‘He either
+falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the
+society of the aged and the well-informed.  Both things are equally fatal
+to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of
+anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty
+of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence,
+has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than
+himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no
+one can possibly believe in their probability.  This is no isolated
+instance that we are giving.  It is simply one example out of many; and
+if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our
+monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass
+away from the land.
+
+‘Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and
+fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively
+no other name for it.  There is such a thing as robbing a story of its
+reality by trying to make it too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so
+inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the
+transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of
+the _Lancet_.  As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the
+makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being
+suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he
+feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a
+footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.  Nor are our other
+novelists much better.  Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a
+painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of
+view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and
+caustic satire.  Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but
+then he writes at the top of his voice.  He is so loud that one cannot
+bear what he says.  Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing
+what is not worth finding.  He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm
+of a short-sighted detective.  As one turns over the pages, the suspense
+of the author becomes almost unbearable.  The horses of Mr. William
+Black’s phaeton do not soar towards the sun.  They merely frighten the
+sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.  On seeing them
+approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect.  Mrs. Oliphant prattles
+pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other
+wearisome things.  Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the
+altar of local colour.  He is like the lady in the French comedy who
+keeps talking about “le beau ciel d’Italie.”  Besides, he has fallen into
+the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes.  He is always telling us that
+to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked.  At times
+he is almost edifying.  _Robert Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece—a
+masterpiece of the “genre ennuyeux,” the one form of literature that the
+English people seems thoroughly to enjoy.  A thoughtful young friend of
+ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that
+goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and
+we can quite believe it.  Indeed it is only in England that such a book
+could be produced.  England is the home of lost ideas.  As for that great
+and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in
+the East-End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they
+find life crude, and leave it raw.
+
+‘In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as _Robert Elsmere_
+has been produced, things are not much better.  M. Guy de Maupassant,
+with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the
+few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering
+wound.  He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is
+ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears.  M.
+Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his
+pronunciamientos on literature, “L’homme de génie n’a jamais d’esprit,”
+is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be
+dull.  And how well he succeeds!  He is not without power.  Indeed at
+times, as in _Germinal_, there is something almost epic in his work.  But
+his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the
+ground of morals, but on the ground of art.  From any ethical standpoint
+it is just what it should be.  The author is perfectly truthful, and
+describes things exactly as they happen.  What more can any moralist
+desire?  We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our
+time against M. Zola.  It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being
+exposed.  But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of
+the author of _L’Assommoir_, _Nana_ and _Pot-Bouille_?  Nothing.  Mr.
+Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being
+like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola’s characters are
+much worse.  They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues.
+The record of their lives is absolutely without interest.  Who cares what
+happens to them?  In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and
+imaginative power.  We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an
+account of the doings of the lower orders.  M. Daudet is better.  He has
+wit, a light touch and an amusing style.  But he has lately committed
+literary suicide.  Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle with his “Il
+faut lutter pour l’art,” or for Valmajour with his eternal refrain about
+the nightingale, or for the poet in _Jack_ with his “mots cruels,” now
+that we have learned from _Vingt Ans de ma Vie littéraire_ that these
+characters were taken directly from life.  To us they seem to have
+suddenly lost all their vitality, all the few qualities they ever
+possessed.  The only real people are the people who never existed, and if
+a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at
+least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.
+The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are
+what they are, but that the author is what he is.  Otherwise the novel is
+not a work of art.  As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the _roman
+psychologique_, he commits the error of imagining that the men and women
+of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for an
+innumerable series of chapters.  In point of fact what is interesting
+about people in good society—and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the
+Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,—is the mask that each one
+of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.  It is a
+humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.
+In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little
+of Falstaff.  The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young
+prince his moments of coarse humour.  Where we differ from each other is
+purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious
+opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like.  The more
+one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear.  Sooner
+or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
+Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too
+well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most
+depressing and humiliating reality; and if a writer insists upon
+analysing the upper classes, he might just as well write of match-girls
+and costermongers at once.’  However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain
+you any further just here.  I quite admit that modern novels have many
+good points.  All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite
+unreadable.
+
+CYRIL.  That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I must say that
+I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures.  I like _The
+Deemster_, and _The Daughter of Heth_, and _Le Disciple_, and _Mr.
+Isaacs_, and as for _Robert Elsmere_, I am quite devoted to it.  Not that
+I can look upon it as a serious work.  As a statement of the problems
+that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated.  It
+is simply Arnold’s _Literature and Dogma_ with the literature left out.
+It is as much behind the age as Paley’s _Evidences_, or Colenso’s method
+of Biblical exegesis.  Nor could anything be less impressive than the
+unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so
+completely missing its true significance that he proposes to carry on the
+business of the old firm under the new name.  On the other hand, it
+contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful quotations,
+and Green’s philosophy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitter pill of
+the author’s fiction.  I also cannot help expressing my surprise that you
+have said nothing about the two novelists whom you are always reading,
+Balzac and George Meredith.  Surely they are realists, both of them?
+
+VIVIAN.  Ah!  Meredith!  Who can define him?  His style is chaos
+illumined by flashes of lightning.  As a writer he has mastered
+everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except
+tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate.  Somebody
+in Shakespeare—Touchstone, I think—talks about a man who is always
+breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might
+serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith’s method.  But whatever he
+is, he is not a realist.  Or rather I would say that he is a child of
+realism who is not on speaking terms with his father.  By deliberate
+choice he has made himself a romanticist.  He has refused to bow the knee
+to Baal, and after all, even if the man’s fine spirit did not revolt
+against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite
+sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance.  By its means
+he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
+wonderful roses.  As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of
+the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.  The latter he
+bequeathed to his disciples.  The former was entirely his own.  The
+difference between such a book as M. Zola’s _L’Assommoir_ and Balzac’s
+_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and
+imaginative reality.  ‘All Balzac’s characters;’ said Baudelaire, ‘are
+gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself.  All his
+fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams.  Each mind is a weapon loaded
+to the muzzle with will.  The very scullions have genius.’  A steady
+course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
+acquaintances to the shadows of shades.  His characters have a kind of
+fervent fiery-coloured existence.  They dominate us, and defy scepticism.
+One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de
+Rubempré.  It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to
+rid myself.  It haunts me in my moments of pleasure.  I remember it when
+I laugh.  But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was.  He created
+life, he did not copy it.  I admit, however, that he set far too high a
+value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of
+his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbô_ or
+_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de
+Bragelonne_.
+
+CYRIL.  Do you object to modernity of form, then?
+
+VIVIAN.  Yes.  It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result.  Pure
+modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising.  It cannot help being
+so.  The public imagine that, because they are interested in their
+immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should
+take them as her subject-matter.  But the mere fact that they are
+interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art.  The
+only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not
+concern us.  As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects
+us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to
+our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live,
+it is outside the proper sphere of art.  To art’s subject-matter we
+should be more or less indifferent.  We should, at any rate, have no
+preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind.  It is
+exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an
+admirable motive for a tragedy.  I do not know anything in the whole
+history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade.
+He wrote one beautiful book, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, a book as
+much above _Romola_ as _Romola_ is above _Daniel Deronda_, and wasted the
+rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public
+attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our
+private lunatic asylums.  Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all
+conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the
+poor-law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man
+with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of
+contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist,
+is really a sight for the angels to weep over.  Believe me, my dear
+Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and
+absolutely wrong.  We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the
+vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and
+hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside
+with Apollo.  Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our
+birthright for a mess of facts.
+
+CYRIL.  There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt that
+whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely model novel, we have
+rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it.  And this is perhaps the
+best rough test of what is literature and what is not.  If one cannot
+enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at
+all.  But what do you say about the return to Life and Nature?  This is
+the panacea that is always being recommended to us.
+
+VIVIAN.  I will read you what I say on that subject.  The passage comes
+later on in the article, but I may as well give it to you now:—
+
+‘The popular cry of our time is “Let us return to Life and Nature; they
+will recreate Art for us, and send the red blood coursing through her
+veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong.”
+But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meaning efforts.
+Nature is always behind the age.  And as for Life, she is the solvent
+that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.’
+
+CYRIL.  What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind the age?
+
+VIVIAN.  Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic.  What I mean is this.  If
+we take Nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to
+self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always
+old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date.  One touch of Nature may make
+the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of
+Art.  If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of
+phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to
+her.  She has no suggestions of her own.  Wordsworth went to the lakes,
+but he was never a lake poet.  He found in stones the sermons he had
+already hidden there.  He went moralising about the district, but his
+good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry.
+Poetry gave him ‘Laodamia,’ and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such
+as it is.  Nature gave him ‘Martha Ray’ and ‘Peter Bell,’ and the address
+to Mr. Wilkinson’s spade.
+
+CYRIL.  I think that view might be questioned.  I am rather inclined to
+believe in ‘the impulse from a vernal wood,’ though of course the
+artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of
+temperament that receives it, so that the return to Nature would come to
+mean simply the advance to a great personality.  You would agree with
+that, I fancy.  However, proceed with your article.
+
+VIVIAN (_reading_).  ‘Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely
+imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and
+non-existent.  This is the first stage.  Then Life becomes fascinated
+with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle.
+Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and
+refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents,
+imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable
+barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.  The third
+stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the
+wilderness.  That is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are
+now suffering.
+
+‘Take the case of the English drama.  At first in the hands of the monks
+Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological.  Then she
+enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life’s external forms,
+she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more
+terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than
+lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods,
+who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.
+To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language
+full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence,
+or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and
+enriched with lofty diction.  She clothed her children in strange raiment
+and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its
+marble tomb.  A new Cæsar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and
+with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river
+to Antioch.  Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.
+History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the
+dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple
+truth but complex beauty.  In this they were perfectly right.  Art itself
+is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit
+of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
+
+‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form.  Even in Shakespeare
+we can see the beginning of the end.  It shows itself by the gradual
+breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance
+given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation.
+The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the language is
+uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due
+to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the
+intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be
+suffered to find expression.  Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless
+artist.  He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s
+natural utterance.  He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative
+medium she surrenders everything.  Goethe says, somewhere—
+
+    In der Beschränkung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,
+
+“It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,” and the
+limitation, the very condition of any art is style.  However, we need not
+linger any longer over Shakespeare’s realism.  _The Tempest_ is the most
+perfect of palinodes.  All that we desired to point out was, that the
+magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within
+itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its
+strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from
+using life as an artistic method.  As the inevitable result of this
+substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an
+imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama.  The characters
+in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they
+have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life
+and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the
+gait, manner, costume and accent of real people; they would pass
+unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage.  And yet how wearisome the
+plays are!  They do not succeed in producing even that impression of
+reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing.
+As a method, realism is a complete failure.
+
+‘What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those
+arts that we call the decorative arts.  The whole history of these arts
+in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its
+frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its
+dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own
+imitative spirit.  Wherever the former has been paramount, as in
+Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe
+by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative
+work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic
+conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned
+for her delight.  But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
+work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting.  Modern
+tapestry, with its aërial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad
+expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty
+whatsoever.  The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable.  We
+are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we
+have returned to the method and spirit of the East.  Our rugs and carpets
+of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane
+worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have
+become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter.  A cultured
+Mahomedan once remarked to us, “You Christians are so occupied in
+misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of
+making an artistic application of the second.”  He was perfectly right,
+and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art
+in is not Life but Art.’
+
+And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the
+question very completely.
+
+‘It was not always thus.  We need not say anything about the poets, for
+they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have been really
+faithful to their high mission, and are universally recognised as being
+absolutely unreliable.  But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of
+the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modern sciolists to verify his
+history, may justly be called the “Father of Lies”; in the published
+speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his
+best; in Pliny’s _Natural History_; in Hanno’s _Periplus_; in all the
+early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas
+Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus,
+and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent _Prodigiorum et Ostentorum
+Chronicon_; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of
+Casanova; in Defoe’s _History of the Plague_; in Boswell’s _Life of
+Johnson_; in Napoleon’s despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle,
+whose _French Revolution_ is one of the most fascinating historical
+novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate
+position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness.
+Now, everything is changed.  Facts are not merely finding a footing-place
+in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded
+the kingdom of Romance.  Their chilling touch is over everything.  They
+are vulgarising mankind.  The crude commercialism of America, its
+materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things,
+and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely
+due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who,
+according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it
+is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the
+cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any
+other moral tale in the whole of literature.’
+
+CYRIL.  My dear boy!
+
+VIVIAN.  I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole
+thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute myth.  However,
+you must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic future
+either of America or of our own country.  Listen to this:—
+
+‘That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its
+close we have no doubt whatsoever.  Bored by the tedious and improving
+conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the
+genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences
+are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by
+probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the
+merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must
+return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.  Who he was
+who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the
+wandering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the
+purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat
+and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of our
+modern anthropologists, for all their much-boasted science, has had the
+ordinary courage to tell us.  Whatever was his name or race, he certainly
+was the true founder of social intercourse.  For the aim of the liar is
+simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.  He is the very basis of
+civilised society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions
+of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate
+at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand’s farcical comedies.
+
+‘Nor will he be welcomed by society alone.  Art, breaking from the
+prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false,
+beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great
+secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and
+absolutely a matter of style; while Life—poor, probable, uninteresting
+human life—tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert
+Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in
+general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own
+simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.
+
+‘No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer in the
+_Saturday Review_, will gravely censure the teller of fairy tales for his
+defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work
+by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and will hold up their
+ink-stained hands in horror if some honest gentleman, who has never been
+farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book of
+travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole
+history of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past.
+To excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of him
+who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his
+servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs
+of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood
+near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty
+Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters.  They
+will call upon Shakespeare—they always do—and will quote that hackneyed
+passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the
+mirror up to Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince
+the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.’
+
+CYRIL.  Ahem!  Another cigarette, please.
+
+VIVIAN.  My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic
+utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare’s real views upon art than
+the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals.  But let me
+get to the end of the passage:
+
+‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.  She
+is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.  She is a
+veil, rather than a mirror.  She has flowers that no forests know of,
+birds that no woodland possesses.  She makes and unmakes many worlds, and
+can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.  Hers are the “forms
+more real than living man,” and hers the great archetypes of which things
+that have existence are but unfinished copies.  Nature has, in her eyes,
+no laws, no uniformity.  She can work miracles at her will, and when she
+calls monsters from the deep they come.  She can bid the almond-tree
+blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.  At her
+word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of June, and
+the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills.  The
+dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile
+strangely at her when she comes near them.  She has hawk-faced gods that
+worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.’
+
+CYRIL.  I like that.  I can see it.  Is that the end?
+
+VIVIAN.  No.  There is one more passage, but it is purely practical.  It
+simply suggests some methods by which we could revive this lost art of
+Lying.
+
+CYRIL.  Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you a
+question.  What do you mean by saying that life, ‘poor, probable,
+uninteresting human life,’ will try to reproduce the marvels of art?  I
+can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror.
+You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked
+looking-glass.  But you don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that
+Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?
+
+VIVIAN.  Certainly I do.  Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are
+always dangerous things—it is none the less true that Life imitates art
+far more than Art imitates life.  We have all seen in our own day in
+England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented
+and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that
+whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees,
+here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the
+strange square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently
+loved, there the sweet maidenhood of ‘The Golden Stair,’ the blossom-like
+mouth and weary loveliness of the ‘Laus Amoris,’ the passion-pale face of
+Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in ‘Merlin’s
+Dream.’  And it has always been so.  A great artist invents a type, and
+Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an
+enterprising publisher.  Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England
+what they have given us.  They brought their types with them, and Life
+with her keen imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with
+models.  The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this,
+and set in the bride’s chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that
+she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at
+in her rapture or her pain.  They knew that Life gains from art not
+merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or
+soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours
+of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of
+Praxiteles.  Hence came their objection to realism.  They disliked it on
+purely social grounds.  They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly,
+and they were perfectly right.  We try to improve the conditions of the
+race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous
+bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders.  But these
+things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty.  For this, Art
+is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his
+studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they
+plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word,
+Life is Art’s best, Art’s only pupil.
+
+As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature.  The most
+obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of
+the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick
+Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into
+sweet-shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from
+the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and
+unloaded revolvers.  This interesting phenomenon, which always occurs
+after the appearance of a new edition of either of the books I have
+alluded to, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the
+imagination.  But this is a mistake.  The imagination is essentially
+creative, and always seeks for a new form.  The boy-burglar is simply the
+inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct.  He is Fact, occupied as
+Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him
+is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.
+Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern
+thought, but Hamlet invented it.  The world has become sad because a
+puppet was once melancholy.  The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no
+faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he
+does not believe in, is a purely literary product.  He was invented by
+Tourgénieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.  Robespierre came out of the
+pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the
+_débris_ of a novel.  Literature always anticipates life.  It does not
+copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.  The nineteenth century, as we
+know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.  Our Luciens de Rubempré, our
+Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of
+the _Comédie Humaine_.  We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and
+unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great
+novelist.  I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he
+had had any model for Becky Sharp.  She told me that Becky was an
+invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested
+by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and
+was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman.  I inquired what
+became of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years
+after the appearance of _Vanity Fair_, she ran away with the nephew of
+the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great
+splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s style, and entirely by
+Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s methods.  Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared
+to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and
+other gambling places.  The noble gentleman from whom the same great
+sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few months after _The
+Newcomer_ had reached a fourth edition, with the word ‘Adsum’ on his
+lips.  Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious psychological
+story of transformation, a friend of mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the
+north of London, and being anxious to get to a railway station, took what
+he thought would be a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a
+network of mean, evil-looking streets.  Feeling rather nervous he began
+to walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right
+between his legs.  It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and
+trampled upon it.  Being of course very much frightened and a little
+hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole street was full
+of rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants.  They
+surrounded him, and asked him his name.  He was just about to give it
+when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson’s
+story.  He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own person
+that terrible and well-written scene, and at having done accidentally,
+though in fact, what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate
+intent, that he ran away as hard as he could go.  He was, however, very
+closely followed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door of
+which happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant, who
+happened to be there, exactly what had occurred.  The humanitarian crowd
+were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and as
+soon as the coast was clear he left.  As he passed out, the name on the
+brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye.  It was ‘Jekyll.’  At
+least it should have been.
+
+Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course accidental.  In the
+following case the imitation was self-conscious.  In the year 1879, just
+after I had left Oxford, I met at a reception at the house of one of the
+Foreign Ministers a woman of very curious exotic beauty.  We became great
+friends, and were constantly together.  And yet what interested me most
+in her was not her beauty, but her character, her entire vagueness of
+character.  She seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the
+possibility of many types.  Sometimes she would give herself up entirely
+to art, turn her drawing-room into a studio, and spend two or three days
+a week at picture galleries or museums.  Then she would take to attending
+race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, and talk about nothing but
+betting.  She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics,
+and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy.  In fact,
+she was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all her
+transformations as was that wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of
+him.  One day a serial began in one of the French magazines.  At that
+time I used to read serial stories, and I well remember the shock of
+surprise I felt when I came to the description of the heroine.  She was
+so like my friend that I brought her the magazine, and she recognised
+herself in it immediately, and seemed fascinated by the resemblance.  I
+should tell you, by the way, that the story was translated from some dead
+Russian writer, so that the author had not taken his type from my friend.
+Well, to put the matter briefly, some months afterwards I was in Venice,
+and finding the magazine in the reading-room of the hotel, I took it up
+casually to see what had become of the heroine.  It was a most piteous
+tale, as the girl had ended by running away with a man absolutely
+inferior to her, not merely in social station, but in character and
+intellect also.  I wrote to my friend that evening about my views on John
+Bellini, and the admirable ices at Florian’s, and the artistic value of
+gondolas, but added a postscript to the effect that her double in the
+story had behaved in a very silly manner.  I don’t know why I added that,
+but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same
+thing.  Before my letter had reached her, she had run away with a man who
+deserted her in six months.  I saw her in 1884 in Paris, where she was
+living with her mother, and I asked her whether the story had had
+anything to do with her action.  She told me that she had felt an
+absolutely irresistible impulse to follow the heroine step by step in her
+strange and fatal progress, and that it was with a feeling of real terror
+that she had looked forward to the last few chapters of the story.  When
+they appeared, it seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them
+in life, and she did so.  It was a most clear example of this imitative
+instinct of which I was speaking, and an extremely tragic one.
+
+However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual instances.
+Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle.  All that I
+desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far
+more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously
+about it you will find that it is true.  Life holds the mirror up to Art,
+and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor,
+or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.  Scientifically
+speaking, the basis of life—the energy of life, as Aristotle would call
+it—is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting
+various forms through which this expression can be attained.  Life seizes
+on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt.  Young men have
+committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand
+because by his own hand Werther died.  Think of what we owe to the
+imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Cæsar.
+
+CYRIL.  The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make it
+complete you must show that Nature, no less than Life, is an imitation of
+Art.  Are you prepared to prove that?
+
+VIVIAN.  My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.
+
+CYRIL.  Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her effects
+from him?
+
+VIVIAN.  Certainly.  Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get
+those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring
+the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?  To whom,
+if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that
+brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved
+bridge and swaying barge?  The extraordinary change that has taken place
+in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a
+particular school of Art.  You smile.  Consider the matter from a
+scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am
+right.  For what is Nature?  Nature is no great mother who has borne us.
+She is our creation.  It is in our brain that she quickens to life.
+Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it,
+depends on the Arts that have influenced us.  To look at a thing is very
+different from seeing a thing.  One does not see anything until one sees
+its beauty.  Then, and then only, does it come into existence.  At
+present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets
+and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.
+There may have been fogs for centuries in London.  I dare say there were.
+But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them.  They did
+not exist till Art had invented them.  Now, it must be admitted, fogs are
+carried to excess.  They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and
+the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis.
+Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.  And so,
+let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.
+She has done so already, indeed.  That white quivering sunlight that one
+sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless
+violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces
+it quite admirably.  Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she
+gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pissaros.  Indeed there are
+moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time,
+when Nature becomes absolutely modern.  Of course she is not always to be
+relied upon.  The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position.  Art
+creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on
+to other things.  Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation
+can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect
+until we all become absolutely wearied of it.  Nobody of any real
+culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.
+Sunsets are quite old-fashioned.  They belong to the time when Turner was
+the last note in art.  To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism
+of temperament.  Upon the other hand they go on.  Yesterday evening Mrs.
+Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious
+sky, as she called it.  Of course I had to look at it.  She is one of
+those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing.  And what
+was it?  It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad
+period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and
+over-emphasised.  Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very
+often commits the same error.  She produces her false Renés and her sham
+Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on
+another a more than questionable Rousseau.  Still, Nature irritates one
+more when she does things of that kind.  It seems so stupid, so obvious,
+so unnecessary.  A false Vautrin might be delightful.  A doubtful Cuyp is
+unbearable.  However, I don’t want to be too hard on Nature.  I wish the
+Channel, especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry
+Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied,
+Nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.  That she imitates Art, I
+don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now.  It is the one thing
+that keeps her in touch with civilised man.  But have I proved my theory
+to your satisfaction?
+
+CYRIL.  You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better.  But
+even admitting this strange imitative instinct in Life and Nature, surely
+you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper of its age, the
+spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and
+under whose influence it is produced.
+
+VIVIAN.  Certainly not!  Art never expresses anything but itself.  This
+is the principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, more than that
+vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells,
+that makes music the type of all the arts.  Of course, nations and
+individuals, with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of
+existence, are always under the impression that it is of them that the
+Muses are talking, always trying to find in the calm dignity of
+imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always
+forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo but Marsyas.  Remote
+from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave,
+Art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the
+opening of the marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own
+history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding
+expression in a new form.  But it is not so.  The highest art rejects the
+burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh
+material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty
+passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness.  She
+develops purely on her own lines.  She is not symbolic of any age.  It is
+the ages that are her symbols.
+
+Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place and
+people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less
+it represents to us the spirit of its age.  The evil faces of the Roman
+emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in
+which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work, and we fancy
+that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of
+the ruin of the Empire.  But it was not so.  The vices of Tiberius could
+not destroy that supreme civilisation, any more than the virtues of the
+Antonines could save it.  It fell for other, for less interesting
+reasons.  The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to
+interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call
+the Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of
+Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland?  The more abstract,
+the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its
+age.  If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look
+at its architecture or its music.
+
+CYRIL.  I quite agree with you there.  The spirit of an age may be best
+expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract
+and ideal.  Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of an age, for
+its look, as the phrase goes, we must of course go to the arts of
+imitation.
+
+VIVIAN.  I don’t think so.  After all, what the imitative arts really
+give us are merely the various styles of particular artists, or of
+certain schools of artists.  Surely you don’t imagine that the people of
+the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on mediæval
+stained glass, or in mediæval stone and wood carving, or on mediæval
+metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminated MSS.  They were probably very
+ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or
+fantastic in their appearance.  The Middle Ages, as we know them in art,
+are simply a definite form of style, and there is no reason at all why an
+artist with this style should not be produced in the nineteenth century.
+No great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would
+cease to be an artist.  Take an example from our own day.  I know that
+you are fond of Japanese things.  Now, do you really imagine that the
+Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence?
+If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all.  The Japanese
+people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual
+artists.  If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great
+native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see
+that there is not the slightest resemblance between them.  The actual
+people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English
+people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing
+curious or extraordinary about them.  In fact the whole of Japan is a
+pure invention.  There is no such country, there are no such people.  One
+of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the
+Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese.  All he saw,
+all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans.  He
+was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful
+exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell’s Gallery showed only too well.  He did
+not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of
+style, an exquisite fancy of art.  And so, if you desire to see a
+Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio.  On
+the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of
+certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of
+their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go
+some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you
+cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it
+anywhere.  Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the
+ancient Greeks.  Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek
+people were like?  Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the
+stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those
+marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same
+building?  If you judge from the art, they certainly were so.  But read
+an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance.  You will find that the
+Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair
+yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly
+fashionable or fallen creature of our own day.  The fact is that we look
+back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very
+fortunately, has never once told us the truth.
+
+CYRIL.  But modern portraits by English painters, what of them?  Surely
+they are like the people they pretend to represent?
+
+VIVIAN.  Quite so.  They are so like them that a hundred years from now
+no one will believe in them.  The only portraits in which one believes
+are portraits where there is very little of the sitter, and a very great
+deal of the artist.  Holbein’s drawings of the men and women of his time
+impress us with a sense of their absolute reality.  But this is simply
+because Holbein compelled life to accept his conditions, to restrain
+itself within his limitations, to reproduce his type, and to appear as he
+wished it to appear.  It is style that makes us believe in a
+thing—nothing but style.  Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed
+to absolute oblivion.  They never paint what they see.  They paint what
+the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
+
+CYRIL.  Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end of your
+article.
+
+VIVIAN.  With pleasure.  Whether it will do any good I really cannot say.
+Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible.  Why,
+even Sleep has played us false, and has closed up the gates of ivory, and
+opened the gates of horn.  The dreams of the great middle classes of this
+country, as recorded in Mr. Myers’s two bulky volumes on the subject, and
+in the Transactions of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing
+things that I have ever read.  There is not even a fine nightmare among
+them.  They are commonplace, sordid and tedious.  As for the Church, I
+cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the
+presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the
+supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that
+mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination.  But in the
+English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but
+through his capacity for disbelief.  Ours is the only Church where the
+sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the
+ideal apostle.  Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable
+works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is
+sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University
+to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah’s ark, or
+Balaam’s ass, or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear
+him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect.
+The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to
+be regretted.  It is really a degrading concession to a low form of
+realism.  It is silly, too.  It springs from an entire ignorance of
+psychology.  Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe
+the improbable.  However, I must read the end of my article:—
+
+‘What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive
+this old art of Lying.  Much of course may be done, in the way of
+educating the public, by amateurs in the domestic circle, at literary
+lunches, and at afternoon teas.  But this is merely the light and
+graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard at Cretan
+dinner-parties.  There are many other forms.  Lying for the sake of
+gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance—lying with a
+moral purpose, as it is usually called—though of late it has been rather
+looked down upon, was extremely popular with the antique world.  Athena
+laughs when Odysseus tells her “his words of sly devising,” as Mr.
+William Morris phrases it, and the glory of mendacity illumines the pale
+brow of the stainless hero of Euripidean tragedy, and sets among the
+noble women of the past the young bride of one of Horace’s most exquisite
+odes.  Later on, what at first had been merely a natural instinct was
+elevated into a self-conscious science.  Elaborate rules were laid down
+for the guidance of mankind, and an important school of literature grew
+up round the subject.  Indeed, when one remembers the excellent
+philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question, one cannot help
+regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheap and
+condensed edition of the works of that great casuist.  A short primer,
+“When to Lie and How,” if brought out in an attractive and not too
+expensive a form, would no doubt command a large sale, and would prove of
+real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people.  Lying
+for the sake of the improvement of the young, which is the basis of home
+education, still lingers amongst us, and its advantages are so admirably
+set forth in the early books of Plato’s _Republic_ that it is unnecessary
+to dwell upon them here.  It is a mode of lying for which all good
+mothers have peculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still further
+development, and has been sadly overlooked by the School Board.  Lying
+for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in Fleet Street,
+and the profession of a political leader-writer is not without its
+advantages.  But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it
+certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity.
+The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for
+its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already
+pointed out, Lying in Art.  Just as those who do not love Plato more than
+Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do
+not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.  The
+solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx
+in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy, _La Chimère_, dances round
+it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.  It may not hear
+her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the
+commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try
+to borrow her wings.
+
+‘And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be!
+Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning
+over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to
+the land.  The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes.
+Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the
+high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when
+books on geography were actually readable.  Dragons will wander about the
+waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the
+air.  We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the
+toad’s head.  Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our
+stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful
+and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen,
+of things that are not and that should be.  But before this comes to pass
+we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.’
+
+CYRIL.  Then we must entirely cultivate it at once.  But in order to
+avoid making any error I want you to tell me briefly the doctrines of the
+new æsthetics.
+
+VIVIAN.  Briefly, then, they are these.  Art never expresses anything but
+itself.  It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops
+purely on its own lines.  It is not necessarily realistic in an age of
+realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith.  So far from being the
+creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the
+only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.
+Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps, and revives some antique form,
+as happened in the archaistic movement of late Greek Art, and in the
+pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day.  At other times it entirely
+anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes
+another century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy.  In no case
+does it reproduce its age.  To pass from the art of a time to the time
+itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.
+
+The second doctrine is this.  All bad art comes from returning to Life
+and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.  Life and Nature may
+sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of
+any real service to art they must be translated into artistic
+conventions.  The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it
+surrenders everything.  As a method Realism is a complete failure, and
+the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and
+modernity of subject-matter.  To us, who live in the nineteenth century,
+any century is a suitable subject for art except our own.  The only
+beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.  It is, to have
+the pleasure of quoting myself, exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us
+that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy.  Besides, it is
+only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.  M. Zola sits down to
+give us a picture of the Second Empire.  Who cares for the Second Empire
+now?  It is out of date.  Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism
+is always in front of Life.
+
+The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates
+Life.  This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from
+the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and
+that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise
+that energy.  It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but
+it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the
+history of Art.
+
+It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates
+Art.  The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have
+already seen through poetry, or in paintings.  This is the secret of
+Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature’s weakness.
+
+The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
+things, is the proper aim of Art.  But of this I think I have spoken at
+sufficient length.  And now let us go out on the terrace, where ‘droops
+the milk-white peacock like a ghost,’ while the evening star ‘washes the
+dusk with silver.’  At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive
+effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to
+illustrate quotations from the poets.  Come!  We have talked long enough.
+
+
+
+
+PEN, PENCIL AND POISON
+A STUDY IN GREEN
+
+
+IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men
+of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.
+As a rule this must necessarily be so.  That very concentration of vision
+and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic
+temperament is in itself a mode of limitation.  To those who are
+preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much
+importance.  Yet there are many exceptions to this rule.  Rubens served
+as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin
+secretary to Cromwell.  Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the
+humourists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire
+nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their
+country; and Charles Lamb’s friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the
+subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic
+temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a
+poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose,
+an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful,
+but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle
+and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.
+
+This remarkable man, so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison,’ as a
+great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick,
+in 1794.  His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray’s
+Inn and Hatton Garden.  His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr.
+Griffiths, the editor and founder of the _Monthly Review_, the partner in
+another literary speculation of Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of
+whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller, but ‘a gentleman who
+dealt in books,’ the friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the
+most well-known men of his day.  Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him
+birth, at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the
+_Gentleman’s Magazine_ tells us of her ‘amiable disposition and numerous
+accomplishments,’ and adds somewhat quaintly that ‘she is supposed to
+have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person
+of either sex now living.’  His father did not long survive his young
+wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his
+grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George
+Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned.  His boyhood was passed
+at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those many fine Georgian mansions
+that have unfortunately disappeared before the inroads of the suburban
+builder, and to its lovely gardens and well-timbered park he owed that
+simple and impassioned love of nature which never left him all through
+his life, and which made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual
+influences of Wordsworth’s poetry.  He went to school at Charles Burney’s
+academy at Hammersmith.  Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of
+music, and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn
+out his most remarkable pupil.  He seems to have been a man of a good
+deal of culture, and in after years Mr. Wainewright often spoke of him
+with much affection as a philosopher, an archæologist, and an admirable
+teacher who, while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not
+forget the importance of early moral training.  It was under Mr. Burney
+that he first developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us
+that a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays
+great talent and natural feeling.  Indeed, painting was the first art
+that fascinated him.  It was not till much later that he sought to find
+expression by pen or poison.
+
+Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams
+of the romance and chivalry of a soldier’s life, and to have become a
+young guardsman.  But the reckless dissipated life of his companions
+failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made
+for other things.  In a short time he wearied of the service.  ‘Art,’ he
+tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and
+strange fervour, ‘Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high
+influence the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and
+tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to
+the simple-hearted.’  But Art was not the only cause of the change.  ‘The
+writings of Wordsworth,’ he goes on to say, ‘did much towards calming the
+confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations.  I wept over
+them tears of happiness and gratitude.’  He accordingly left the army,
+with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, and
+returned to Linden House, full of this new-born enthusiasm for culture.
+A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was ‘broken like a
+vessel of clay,’ prostrated him for a time.  His delicately strung
+organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain
+on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain.  He shrank from
+suffering as a thing that mars and maims human life, and seems to have
+wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many
+great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged.  But he was
+young—only twenty-five years of age—and he soon passed out of the ‘dead
+black waters,’ as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic
+culture.  As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost
+to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up literature as
+an art.  ‘I said with John Woodvil,’ he cries, ‘it were a life of gods to
+dwell in such an element,’ to see and hear and write brave things:—
+
+    ‘These high and gusty relishes of life
+    Have no allayings of mortality.’
+
+It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance
+of a man who had a true passion for letters.  ‘To see and hear and write
+brave things,’ this was his aim.
+
+Scott, the editor of the _London Magazine_, struck by the young man’s
+genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he
+exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of
+articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonym
+he began to contribute to the literature of his day.  _Janus
+Weathercock_, _Egomet Bonmot_, and _Van Vinkvooms_, were some of the
+grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to
+reveal his levity.  A mask tells us more than a face.  These disguises
+intensified his personality.  In an incredibly short time he seems to
+have made his mark.  Charles Lamb speaks of ‘kind, light-hearted
+Wainewright,’ whose prose is ‘capital.’  We hear of him entertaining
+Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet
+John Clare, and others, at _a petit-dîner_.  Like Disraeli, he determined
+to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique
+cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well
+known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new
+manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite
+white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being
+different from others.  There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de
+Rubempré.  At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel.  De Quincey saw him
+once.  It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s.  ‘Amongst the company, all
+literary men, sat a murderer,’ he tells us, and he goes on to describe
+how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman,
+and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table
+at the young writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to
+him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on ‘what sudden
+growth of another interest’ would have changed his mood, had he known of
+what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even
+then guilty.
+
+His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr.
+Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside his
+achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us
+hardly justifies his reputation.
+
+But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by
+the vulgar test of production.  This young dandy sought to be somebody,
+rather than to do something.  He recognised that Life itself is in art,
+and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.
+Nor is his work without interest.  We hear of William Blake stopping in
+the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be
+‘very fine.’  His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been
+realised.  He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
+culture that are regarded by many as true essentials.  He writes about La
+Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance.  He loves
+Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of _Cupid
+and Psyche_, and the _Hypnerotomachia_, and book-binding and early
+editions, and wide-margined proofs.  He is keenly sensitive to the value
+of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the
+rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live.  He had that
+curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a
+subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity,
+if not a decadence of morals.  Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of
+cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that ‘sweet marble monster’
+of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.
+
+There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for
+decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself from the
+false taste of his time.  But it is clear that he was one of the first to
+recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote of æsthetic eclecticism, I
+mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age
+or place, of school or manner.  He saw that in decorating a room, which
+is to be, not a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim
+at any archæological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves
+with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy.  In this artistic
+perception he was perfectly right.  All beautiful things belong to the
+same age.
+
+And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate
+fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted figures and the
+faint ΚΑΛΟΣ finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving
+of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michael Angelo, or of the ‘Pastoral’ of
+Giorgione.  Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp
+from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, ‘cased in a
+cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with
+small brilliants and rubies,’ and close by it ‘squats a little ugly
+monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing
+Sicily.’  Some dark antique bronzes contrast with the pale gleam of two
+noble _Christi Crucifixi_, one carved in ivory, the other moulded in
+wax.’  He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze
+_bonbonnière_ with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized
+‘brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,’ his citron morocco letter-case,
+and his ‘pomona-green’ chair.
+
+One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts and
+engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over his fine
+collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which
+he was a warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique
+gems and cameos, ‘the head of Alexander on an onyx of two strata,’ or
+‘that superb _altissimo relievo_ on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.’  He was
+always a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful
+suggestions as to the best means of forming a collection.  Indeed, while
+fully appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of
+reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that he says
+about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.
+
+As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex
+impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step in
+æsthetic criticism is to realise one’s own impressions.  He cared nothing
+for abstract discussions on the nature of the Beautiful, and the
+historical method, which has since yielded such rich fruit, did not
+belong to his day, but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art’s
+first appeal is neither to the intellect nor to the emotions, but purely
+to the artistic temperament, and he more than once points out that this
+temperament, this ‘taste,’ as he calls it, being unconsciously guided and
+made perfect by frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a
+form of right judgment.  Of course there are fashions in art just as
+there are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free
+ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of novelty.  He
+certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to
+form any fair estimate of contemporary work.  But, on the whole, his
+taste was good and sound.  He admired Turner and Constable at a time when
+they were not so much thought of as they are now, and saw that for the
+highest landscape art we require more than ‘mere industry and accurate
+transcription.’  Of Crome’s ‘Heath Scene near Norwich’ he remarks that it
+shows ‘how much a subtle observation of the elements, in their wild
+moods, does for a most uninteresting flat,’ and of the popular type of
+landscape of his day he says that it is ‘simply an enumeration of hill
+and dale, stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses;
+little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which
+rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through rifted
+clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of the real
+painter, are not.’  He had a thorough dislike of what is obvious or
+commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie at
+dinner, he cared as little for Sir David’s pictures as he did for Mr.
+Crabbe’s poems.  With the imitative and realistic tendencies of his day
+he had no sympathy and he tells us frankly that his great admiration for
+Fuseli was largely due to the fact that the little Swiss did not consider
+it necessary that an artist should paint only what he sees.  The
+qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and
+dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power.  Upon the
+other hand, he was not a doctrinaire.  ‘I hold that no work of art can be
+tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be
+consistent with itself is the question.’  This is one of his excellent
+aphorisms.  And in criticising painters so different as Landseer and
+Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical,
+he is trying ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’
+
+However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease in his
+criticisms of contemporary work.  ‘The present,’ he says, ‘is about as
+agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first perusal. . . . Modern
+things dazzle me.  I must look at them through Time’s telescope.  Elia
+complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain; “print,” as
+he excellently says, “settles it.”  Fifty years’ toning does the same
+thing to a picture.’  He is happier when he is writing about Watteau and
+Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and
+Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things.
+What is Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of
+the Renaissance were always dear to him.  He saw what our English school
+could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies of pointing
+out to the young student the artistic possibilities that lie dormant in
+Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work.  In his judgments on the
+great Italian Masters, says De Quincey, ‘there seemed a tone of sincerity
+and of native sensibility, as in one who spoke for himself, and was not
+merely a copier from books.’  The highest praise that we can give to him
+is that he tried to revive style as a conscious tradition.  But he saw
+that no amount of art lectures or art congresses, or ‘plans for advancing
+the fine arts,’ will ever produce this result.  The people, he says very
+wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have ‘the
+best models constantly before their eyes.’
+
+As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely
+technical in his art criticisms.  Of Tintoret’s ‘St. George delivering
+the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,’ he remarks:—
+
+    The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from
+    the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the full hues
+    of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the
+    purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saint,
+    besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the foreground
+    in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle.
+
+And elsewhere he talks learnedly of ‘a delicate Schiavone, various as a
+tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,’ of ‘a glowing portrait, remarkable
+for _morbidezza_, by the scarce Moroni,’ and of another picture being
+‘pulpy in the carnations.’
+
+But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic
+whole, and tries to translate those impressions into words, to give, as
+it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect.
+He was one of the first to develop what has been called the
+art-literature of the nineteenth century, that form of literature which
+has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning, its two most perfect exponents.
+His description of Lancret’s _Repas Italien_, in which ‘a dark-haired
+girl, “amorous of mischief,” lies on the daisy-powdered grass,’ is in
+some respects very charming.  Here is his account of ‘The Crucifixion,’
+by Rembrandt.  It is extremely characteristic of his style—
+
+    Darkness—sooty, portentous darkness—shrouds the whole scene: only
+    above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky
+    ceiling, a rainy deluge—‘sleety-flaw, discoloured water’—streams down
+    amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than
+    that palpable night.  Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the
+    darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt—the air is stagnant—a
+    muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and some of that
+    miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill.  The horses snuff the
+    coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear.  The moment
+    rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by His own weight,
+    fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from
+    His slit veins, His temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His
+    black tongue parched with the fiery death-fever, Jesus cries, ‘I
+    thirst.’  The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.
+
+    His head sinks, and the sacred corpse ‘swings senseless of the
+    cross.’  A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air and
+    vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea
+    rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves.  Earth yawns,
+    and the graves give up their dwellers.  The dead and the living are
+    mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy
+    city.  New prodigies await them there.  The veil of the temple—the
+    unpierceable veil—is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that
+    dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries—the fatal ark with the
+    tables and seven-branched candelabrum—is disclosed by the light of
+    unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude.
+
+    Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right.  It
+    would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing veil
+    of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting
+    imagination may speculate.  At present it is like a thing in another
+    world.  A dark gulf is betwixt us.  It is not tangible by the body.
+    We can only approach it in the spirit.
+
+In this passage, written, the author tells us, ‘in awe and reverence,’
+there is much that is terrible, and very much that is quite horrible, but
+it is not without a certain crude form of power, or, at any rate, a
+certain crude violence of words, a quality which this age should highly
+appreciate, as it is its chief defect.  It is pleasanter, however, to
+pass to this description of Giulio Romano’s ‘Cephalus and Procris’:—
+
+    We should read Moschus’s lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before
+    looking at this picture, or study the picture as a preparation for
+    the lament.  We have nearly the same images in both.  For either
+    victim the high groves and forest dells murmur; the flowers exhale
+    sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale mourns on the craggy
+    lands, and the swallow in the long-winding vales; ‘the satyrs, too,
+    and fauns dark-veiled groan,’ and the fountain nymphs within the wood
+    melt into tearful waters.  The sheep and goats leave their pasture;
+    and oreads, ‘who love to scale the most inaccessible tops of all
+    uprightest rocks,’ hurry down from the song of their wind-courting
+    pines; while the dryads bend from the branches of the meeting trees,
+    and the rivers moan for white Procris, ‘with many-sobbing streams,’
+
+                   Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.
+
+    The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling
+    horn of Aurora’s love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight on
+    the top of Hymettus.  The foreground of our subject is a grassy
+    sunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of
+    land-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping roots and
+    stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing
+    out light-green shoots.  This bank rises rather suddenly on the right
+    to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the entrance of
+    which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees
+    that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone, parting the
+    rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on thorns
+    and flowers with jealousy-stung foot—now helpless, heavy, void of all
+    motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.
+
+    From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
+    forward with loud cries—
+
+    And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
+    And put strange pity in their horned countenance.
+
+    Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
+    death.  On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with ‘vans
+    dejected’ holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan
+    people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing their
+    children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along from the
+    left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on
+    whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her
+    grief-telling waters.  Above and more remote than the Ephidryad,
+    another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned
+    pillars of an unshorn grove.  The centre of the picture is filled by
+    shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is ‘the vast
+    strength of the ocean stream,’ from whose floor the extinguisher of
+    stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-washed steeds to
+    behold the death-pangs of her rival.
+
+Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable.
+The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent.  Much of
+the best modern literature springs from the same aim.  In a very ugly and
+sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
+
+His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied.  In everything connected
+with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and
+strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and
+scene-painting.  ‘In art,’ he says in one of his essays, ‘whatever is
+worth doing at all is worth doing well’; and he points out that once we
+allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where
+the line is to be drawn.  In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on
+a famous occasion, he was ‘on the side of the angels.’  He was one of the
+first to admire Keats and Shelley—‘the tremulously-sensitive and poetical
+Shelley,’ as he calls him.  His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and
+profound.  He thoroughly appreciated William Blake.  One of the best
+copies of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that is now in
+existence was wrought specially for him.  He loved Alain Chartier, and
+Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and
+Petrarch.  And to him all the arts were one.  ‘Our critics,’ he remarks
+with much wisdom, ‘seem hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds
+of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the serious
+study of one art co-generates a proportionate perfection in the other’;
+and he says elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo
+talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his
+listeners.  To his fellow-contributors in the _London Magazine_ he was
+always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham,
+Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a
+friend.  Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way,
+and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their
+subject:—
+
+    What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety
+    of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart as ever sent
+    tears to the eyes.
+
+    How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most
+    seasonably out of season.  His talk without affectation was
+    compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity.  Like
+    grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets.
+    He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the
+    _fashion for men of genius_ was a standing dish.  Sir Thomas Browne
+    was a ‘bosom cronie’ of his; so was Burton, and old Fuller.  In his
+    amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many-folio
+    odour; and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he
+    induced light dreams.  He would deliver critical touches on these,
+    like one inspired, but it was good to let him choose his own game; if
+    another began even on the acknowledged pets he was liable to
+    interrupt, or rather append, in a mode difficult to define whether as
+    misapprehensive or mischievous.  One night at C-’s, the above
+    dramatic partners were the temporary subject of chat.  Mr. X.
+    commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don’t know
+    which of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who told him
+    ‘_That_ was nothing; the lyrics were the high things—the lyrics!’
+
+One side of his literary career deserves especial notice.  Modern
+journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the
+early part of this century.  He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and
+delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations.  To have a
+style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest
+achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street
+leader-writers, and this school _Janus Weathercock_ may be said to have
+invented.  He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to
+make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely
+journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what
+he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in
+what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for
+some popular newspaper of our own time.  This being the least valuable
+side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence.  A
+publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of
+the illegalities of his private life.
+
+Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature.  ‘I hold
+three things in high estimation,’ he says somewhere: ‘to sit lazily on an
+eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees
+while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the
+consciousness of neighbourhood.  The country gives them all to me.’  He
+writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating
+Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening,’ just to catch the fine quality of the moment;
+about smothering his face ‘in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May
+dews’; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine ‘pass
+slowly homeward through the twilight,’ and hearing ‘the distant clank of
+the sheep-bell.’  One phrase of his, ‘the polyanthus glowed in its cold
+bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken
+panel,’ is curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage
+is rather pretty in its way:—
+
+    The short tender grass was covered with marguerites—‘such that men
+    called _daisies_ in our town’—thick as stars on a summer’s night.
+    The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high
+    dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard
+    the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown seeds.
+    The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a
+    cloud streaked the calm æther; only round the horizon’s edge streamed
+    a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village
+    with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding
+    whiteness.  I thought of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written in March.’
+
+However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned
+these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was
+also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle
+and secret poisoners of this or any age.  How he first became fascinated
+by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he
+carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods
+that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.  Even in later days,
+too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about
+‘The Excursion,’ and the ‘Poems founded on the Affections.’  There is no
+doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine.  In one of
+the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which served to show
+off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry
+crystals of the Indian _nux vomica_, a poison, one of his biographers
+tells us, ‘nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of
+almost infinite dilution.’  His murders, says De Quincey, were more than
+were ever made known judicially.  This is no doubt so, and some of them
+are worthy of mention.  His first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas
+Griffiths.  He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a
+place to which he had always been very much attached.  In the August of
+the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife’s mother, and in the
+following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his
+sister-in-law.  Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained.  It
+may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power
+that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.
+But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his
+wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had insured
+her life in various offices.  The circumstances were as follows.  On the
+12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden
+House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street.  With
+them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie.  On the
+evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night
+Helen sickened.  The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of
+Hanover Square, was called in to attend her.  She lived till Monday, the
+20th, when, after the doctor’s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright
+brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk.  When they
+returned Helen Abercrombie was dead.  She was about twenty years of age,
+a tall graceful girl with fair hair.  A very charming red-chalk drawing
+of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much
+his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter
+for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration.  De Quincey
+says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder.  Let us
+hope that she was not.  Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.
+
+The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined
+to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want
+of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in
+the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one
+decision should govern all the cases.  The trial, however, did not come
+on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately
+given in the companies’ favour.  The judge on the occasion was Lord
+Abinger.  _Egomet Bonmot_ was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William
+Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for
+the other side.  The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present
+at either of the trials.  The refusal of the companies to give him the
+£18,000 had placed him in a position of most painful pecuniary
+embarrassment.  Indeed, a few months after the murder of Helen
+Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the streets of
+London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends.
+This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he
+thought it better to go abroad till he could come to some practical
+arrangement with his creditors.  He accordingly went to Boulogne on a
+visit to the father of the young lady in question, and while he was there
+induced him to insure his life with the Pelican Company for £3000.  As
+soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
+executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they
+sat together one evening after dinner.  He himself did not gain any
+monetary advantage by doing this.  His aim was simply to revenge himself
+on the first office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin.
+His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at
+once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany,
+and was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a
+beautiful country house at St. Omer.  From this he moved to Paris, where
+he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others
+talk of his ‘skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all
+who knew him.’  In 1837 he returned to England privately.  Some strange
+mad fascination brought him back.  He followed a woman whom he loved.
+
+It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in
+Covent Garden.  His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and he
+prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen.  Thirteen years
+before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc
+Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a power of attorney,
+which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had
+inherited from his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement.  He
+knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to
+England he was imperilling his life.  Yet he returned.  Should one
+wonder?  It was said that the woman was very beautiful.  Besides, she did
+not love him.
+
+It was by a mere accident that he was discovered.  A noise in the street
+attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in modern life, he
+pushed aside the blind for a moment.  Some one outside called out,
+‘That’s Wainewright, the Bank-forger.’  It was Forrester, the Bow Street
+runner.
+
+On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey.  The following
+report of the proceedings appeared in the _Times_:—
+
+    Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
+    Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing
+    mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of
+    attorney for £2259, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company
+    of the Bank of England.
+
+    There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he
+    pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin
+    in the course of the morning.  On being brought before the judges,
+    however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and
+    then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a
+    capital nature.
+
+    The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other
+    indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea
+    of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at
+    the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation
+    for life.
+
+He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.
+In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself
+‘lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death’ for having been
+unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the
+British Museum in order to complete his collection.  The sentence now
+passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death.  He complained
+bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of
+reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own,
+having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was,
+had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,
+was at least a _circonstance attenuante_.  The permanence of personality
+is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law
+solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner.  There is,
+however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was
+inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the
+prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.
+
+While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across
+him by chance.  They had been going over the prisons of London, searching
+for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of
+Wainewright.  He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but
+Macready was ‘horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in
+former years, and at whose table he had dined.’
+
+Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of
+fashionable lounge.  Many men of letters went down to visit their old
+literary comrade.  But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom
+Charles Lamb admired.  He seems to have grown quite cynical.
+
+To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
+and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
+all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: ‘Sir, you City men enter on
+your speculations, and take the chances of them.  Some of your
+speculations succeed, some fail.  Mine happen to have failed, yours
+happen to have succeeded.  That is the only difference, sir, between my
+visitor and me.  But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have
+succeeded to the last.  I have been determined through life to hold the
+position of a gentleman.  I have always done so.  I do so still.  It is
+the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take
+his morning’s turn of sweeping it out.  I occupy a cell with a bricklayer
+and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’  When a friend
+reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
+shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very
+thick ankles.’
+
+From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from
+there in the _Susan_ to Van Diemen’s Land along with three hundred other
+convicts.  The voyage seems to have been most distasteful to him, and in
+a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of ‘the
+companion of poets and artists’ being compelled to associate with
+‘country bumpkins.’  The phrase that he applies to his companions need
+not surprise us.  Crime in England is rarely the result of sin.  It is
+nearly always the result of starvation.  There was probably no one on
+board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a
+psychologically interesting nature.
+
+His love of art, however, never deserted him.  At Hobart Town he started
+a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his
+conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm.  Nor did he
+give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in
+which he tried to make away with people who had offended him.  But his
+hand seems to have lost its cunning.  Both of his attempts were complete
+failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian
+society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir
+John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave.  In it he speaks of
+himself as being ‘tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and
+realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of the
+exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.’  His request,
+however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled himself by
+making those marvellous _Paradis Artificiels_ whose secret is only known
+to the eaters of opium.  In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living
+companion being a cat, for which he had evinced at extraordinary
+affection.
+
+His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art.  They gave
+a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work
+certainly lacked.  In a note to the _Life of Dickens_, Forster mentions
+that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who
+held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young
+lady from his clever brush; and it is said that ‘he had contrived to put
+the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice,
+kind-hearted girl.’  M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young
+man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish
+impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which
+bear a curious resemblance to his victim.  The development of Mr.
+Wainewright’s style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive.  One can
+fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.
+
+This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary
+London, and made so brilliant a _début_ in life and letters, is
+undoubtedly a most interesting study.  Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest
+biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this
+memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is
+of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretence and
+assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power.  This seems
+to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view.  The fact of a man being a
+poisoner is nothing against his prose.  The domestic virtues are not the
+true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement
+for second-rate artists.  It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his
+critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his
+published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in
+the bad sense of that bad word.  Here and there he is distinctly vulgar
+in expression, and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the true
+artist.  But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he
+lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought ‘capital’ has no
+small historic interest.  That he had a sincere love of art and nature
+seems to me quite certain.  There is no essential incongruity between
+crime and culture.  We cannot re-write the whole of history for the
+purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
+
+Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form
+any purely artistic judgment about him.  It is impossible not to feel a
+strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or
+Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol.  But had the man worn a costume
+and spoken a language different from our own, had he lived in imperial
+Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the
+seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and
+this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced
+estimate of his position and value.  I know that there are many
+historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think
+it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute
+their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful
+schoolmaster.  This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that
+the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it
+will make its appearance wherever it is not required.  Nobody with the
+true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius,
+or censuring Cæsar Borgia.  These personages have become like the puppets
+of a play.  They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they
+do not harm us.  They are not in immediate relation to us.  We have
+nothing to fear from them.  They have passed into the sphere of art and
+science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or
+disapproval.  And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb’s friend.  At
+present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be treated in that
+fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming
+studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens
+of Mr. John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee,
+and other distinguished writers.  However, Art has not forgotten him.  He
+is the hero of Dickens’s _Hunted Down_, the Varney of Bulwer’s
+_Lucretia_; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some
+homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison.’  To be
+suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
+WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE
+IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING
+
+
+              _A DIALOGUE_.  _Part I._  _Persons_: _Gilbert_
+           _and Ernest_.  _Scene_: _the library of a house in_
+               _Piccadilly_, _overlooking the Green Park_.
+
+GILBERT (_at the Piano_).  My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?
+
+ERNEST (_looking up_).  At a capital story that I have just come across
+in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.
+
+GILBERT.  What is the book?  Ah! I see.  I have not read it yet.  Is it
+good?
+
+ERNEST.  Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over the
+pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs.
+They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their
+memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however,
+is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English
+public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to
+it.
+
+GILBERT.  Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives
+everything except genius.  But I must confess that I like all memoirs.  I
+like them for their form, just as much as for their matter.  In
+literature mere egotism is delightful.  It is what fascinates us in the
+letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and
+Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné.  Whenever we come across it, and,
+strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not
+easily forget it.  Humanity will always love Rousseau for having
+confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant
+nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the
+green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
+the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given
+it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
+scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his
+shame.  The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter
+very little.  He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or
+a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own
+secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to
+silence.  The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented—if that
+can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual
+problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I
+think, survive.  But the world will never weary of watching that troubled
+soul in its progress from darkness to darkness.  The lonely church at
+Littlemore, where ‘the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are
+few,’ will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow
+snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that
+gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower’s sure recurrence a prophecy
+that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his days—a
+prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be
+fulfilled.  Yes; autobiography is irresistible.  Poor, silly, conceited
+Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into the circle of the
+Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the better part of valour,
+bustles about among them in that ‘shaggy purple gown with gold buttons
+and looped lace’ which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at
+his ease, and prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the
+Indian blue petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the ‘good hog’s
+hars-let,’ and the ‘pleasant French fricassee of veal’ that he loved to
+eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his ‘gadding after
+beauties,’ and his reciting of _Hamlet_ on a Sunday, and his playing of
+the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things.  Even in
+actual life egotism is not without its attractions.  When people talk to
+us about others they are usually dull.  When they talk to us about
+themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them
+up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of
+which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.
+
+ERNEST.  There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say.  But
+do you seriously propose that every man should become his own Boswell?
+What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and Recollections
+in that case?
+
+GILBERT.  What has become of them?  They are the pest of the age, nothing
+more and nothing less.  Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and
+it is always Judas who writes the biography.
+
+ERNEST.  My dear fellow!
+
+GILBERT.  I am afraid it is true.  Formerly we used to canonise our
+heroes.  The modern method is to vulgarise them.  Cheap editions of great
+books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely
+detestable.
+
+ERNEST.  May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?
+
+GILBERT.  Oh! to all our second-rate _littérateurs_.  We are overrun by a
+set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house
+along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as
+mutes.  But we won’t talk about them.  They are the mere body-snatchers
+of literature.  The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and
+the soul is out of their reach.  And now, let me play Chopin to you, or
+Dvorák?  Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorák?  He writes passionate,
+curiously-coloured things.
+
+ERNEST.  No; I don’t want music just at present.  It is far too
+indefinite.  Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner last
+night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect, she
+insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in the German
+language.  Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad to say that it does
+not sound in the smallest degree like German.  There are forms of
+patriotism that are really quite degrading.  No; Gilbert, don’t play any
+more.  Turn round and talk to me.  Talk to me till the white-horned day
+comes into the room.  There is something in your voice that is wonderful.
+
+GILBERT (_rising from the piano_).  I am not in a mood for talking
+to-night.  I really am not.  How horrid of you to smile!  Where are the
+cigarettes?  Thanks.  How exquisite these single daffodils are!  They
+seem to be made of amber and cool ivory.  They are like Greek things of
+the best period.  What was the story in the confessions of the remorseful
+Academician that made you laugh?  Tell it to me.  After playing Chopin, I
+feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and
+mourning over tragedies that were not my own.  Music always seems to me
+to produce that effect.  It creates for one a past of which one has been
+ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden
+from one’s tears.  I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace
+life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly
+discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed
+through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic
+loves, or great renunciations.  And so tell me this story, Ernest.  I
+want to be amused.
+
+ERNEST.  Oh!  I don’t know that it is of any importance.  But I thought
+it a really admirable illustration of the true value of ordinary
+art-criticism.  It seems that a lady once gravely asked the remorseful
+Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated picture of ‘A Spring-Day
+at Whiteley’s,’ or, ‘Waiting for the Last Omnibus,’ or some subject of
+that kind, was all painted by hand?
+
+GILBERT.  And was it?
+
+ERNEST.  You are quite incorrigible.  But, seriously speaking, what is
+the use of art-criticism?  Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create
+a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which
+we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be
+wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of
+selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a
+momentary perfection.  It seems to me that the imagination spreads, or
+should spread, a solitude around it, and works best in silence and in
+isolation.  Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of
+criticism?  Why should those who cannot create take upon themselves to
+estimate the value of creative work?  What can they know about it?  If a
+man’s work is easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .
+
+GILBERT.  And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is wicked.
+
+ERNEST.  I did not say that.
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! but you should have.  Nowadays, we have so few mysteries
+left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.  The members
+of the Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad Church Party,
+or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott’s Great Writers Series, seem to me to
+spend their time in trying to explain their divinity away.  Where one had
+hoped that Browning was a mystic they have sought to show that he was
+simply inarticulate.  Where one had fancied that he had something to
+conceal, they have proved that he had but little to reveal.  But I speak
+merely of his incoherent work.  Taken as a whole the man was great.  He
+did not belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the
+Titan.  He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could sing.  His
+work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from
+emotion to form, but from thought to chaos.  Still, he was great.  He has
+been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking,
+and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him,
+but rather the processes by which thought moves.  It was the machine he
+loved, not what the machine makes.  The method by which the fool arrives
+at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.  So
+much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he
+despised language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of
+expression.  Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill
+creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real
+artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a
+spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may
+be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and
+suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had
+knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man’s utterance to the speech of
+gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in
+Robert Browning’s hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made
+him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often
+with his tongue in his cheek.  There are moments when he wounds us by
+monstrous music.  Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the
+strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no
+Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory
+horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh.  Yet, he
+was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from
+it men and women that live.  He is the most Shakespearian creature since
+Shakespeare.  If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could
+stammer through a thousand mouths.  Even now, as I am speaking, and
+speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the
+pageant of his persons.  There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks
+still burning from some girl’s hot kiss.  There, stands dread Saul with
+the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.  Mildred Tresham is
+there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben
+Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed’s.  The spawn of Setebos gibbers in
+the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima’s haggard
+face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself.  Pale as the white
+satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous
+eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as
+he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go
+down.  Yes, Browning was great.  And as what will he be remembered?  As a
+poet?  Ah, not as a poet!  He will be remembered as a writer of fiction,
+as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.
+His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not
+answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what
+more should an artist do?  Considered from the point of view of a creator
+of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet.  Had he been
+articulate, he might have sat beside him.  The only man who can touch the
+hem of his garment is George Meredith.  Meredith is a prose Browning, and
+so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
+
+ERNEST.  There is something in what you say, but there is not everything
+in what you say.  In many points you are unjust.
+
+GILBERT.  It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.  But let us
+return to the particular point at issue.  What was it that you said?
+
+ERNEST.  Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no
+art-critics.
+
+GILBERT.  I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest.  It has
+all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.
+
+ERNEST.  It is true.  Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that
+petulant manner.  It is quite true.  In the best days of art there were
+no art-critics.  The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great
+white-limbed Hermes that slept within it.  The waxers and gilders of
+images gave tone and texture to the statue, and the world, when it saw
+it, worshipped and was dumb.  He poured the glowing bronze into the mould
+of sand, and the river of red metal cooled into noble curves and took the
+impress of the body of a god.  With enamel or polished jewels he gave
+sight to the sightless eyes.  The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath
+his graver.  And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit
+portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who passed by,
+δια λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες αβρως αιθέρος, became conscious of a new
+influence that had come across their lives, and dreamily, or with a sense
+of strange and quickening joy, went to their homes or daily labour, or
+wandered, it may be, through the city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow
+where young Phædrus bathed his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass,
+beneath the tall wind—whispering planes and flowering _agnus castus_,
+began to think of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed
+awe.  In those days the artist was free.  From the river valley he took
+the fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone,
+fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to the
+dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty tombs on
+the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and the fading
+crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.  On a wall of
+fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron,
+he pictured one who trod with tired feet the purple white-starred fields
+of asphodel, one ‘in whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan War,’
+Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or figured Odysseus, the wise and
+cunning, bound by tight cords to the mast-step, that he might listen
+without hurt to the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear
+river of Acheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed;
+or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at
+Marathon, or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little
+Salaminian bay.  He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment
+and prepared cedar.  Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted
+with wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated
+irons making it firm.  Panel and marble and linen canvas became wonderful
+as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her own image, was still,
+and dared not speak.  All life, indeed, was his, from the merchants
+seated in the market-place to the cloaked shepherd lying on the hill;
+from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon, to
+the king whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon
+oil-bright shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans.  Men and women, with
+pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passed before him.  He watched them,
+and their secret became his.  Through form and colour he re-created a
+world.
+
+All subtle arts belonged to him also.  He held the gem against the
+revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for Adonis, and
+across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds.  He beat out the
+gold into roses, and strung them together for necklace or armlet.  He
+beat out the gold into wreaths for the conqueror’s helmet, or into
+palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the royal dead.  On the
+back of the silver mirror he graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or
+love-sick Phædra with her nurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting
+poppies in her hair.  The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from
+the silent wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands.  He decorated the
+base and stem and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated
+acanthus, or curved and crested wave.  Then in black or red he painted
+lads wrestling, or in the race: knights in full armour, with strange
+heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped chariot
+over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or working their
+miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their pain.  Sometimes he
+would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground of white the languid
+bridegroom and his bride, with Eros hovering round them—an Eros like one
+of Donatello’s angels, a little laughing thing with gilded or with azure
+wings.  On the curved side he would write the name of his friend.  ΚΑΛΟΣ
+ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ or ΚΑΛΟΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΗΣ tells us the story of his days.  Again, on
+the rim of the wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion
+at rest, as his fancy willed it.  From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed
+Aphrodite at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Mænads in his train,
+Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained feet, while,
+satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated skins, or shook
+that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted fir-cone, and wreathed
+with dark ivy.  And no one came to trouble the artist at his work.  No
+irresponsible chatter disturbed him.  He was not worried by opinions.  By
+the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no Higginbotham.  By the
+Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing
+provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth.
+By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the
+industrious prattle of what they do not understand.  On the reed-grown
+banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism
+monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in the
+dock.  The Greeks had no art-critics.
+
+GILBERT.  Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are terribly
+unsound.  I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of
+some one older than yourself.  That is always a dangerous thing to do,
+and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it
+absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.  As for modern
+journalism, it is not my business to defend it.  It justifies its own
+existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the
+vulgarest.  I have merely to do with literature.
+
+ERNEST.  But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
+
+GILBERT.  Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.  That
+is all.  But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no
+art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd.  It would be more just to
+say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.
+
+ERNEST.  Really?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, a nation of art-critics.  But I don’t wish to destroy the
+delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the relation of the
+Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his age.  To give an
+accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper
+occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of
+parts and culture.  Still less do I desire to talk learnedly.  Learned
+conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession
+of the mentally unemployed.  And, as for what is called improving
+conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more
+foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the
+criminal classes.  No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by
+Dvorák.  The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, and the
+heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.  Don’t let us
+discuss anything solemnly.  I am but too conscious of the fact that we
+are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live
+in terror of not being misunderstood.  Don’t degrade me into the position
+of giving you useful information.  Education is an admirable thing, but
+it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth
+knowing can be taught.  Through the parted curtains of the window I see
+the moon like a clipped piece of silver.  Like gilded bees the stars
+cluster round her.  The sky is a hard hollow sapphire.  Let us go out
+into the night.  Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
+still.  Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear
+the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?
+
+ERNEST.  You are horribly wilful.  I insist on your discussing this
+matter with me.  You have said that the Greeks were a nation of
+art-critics.  What art-criticism have they left us?
+
+GILBERT.  My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism
+had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none
+the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they
+invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of
+everything else.  For, after all, what is our primary debt to the Greeks?
+Simply the critical spirit.  And, this spirit, which they exercised on
+questions of religion and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics
+and education, they exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of
+the two supreme and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless
+system of criticism that the world has ever seen.
+
+ERNEST.  But what are the two supreme and highest arts?
+
+GILBERT.  Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life.
+The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not
+realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.  The principles
+of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that
+we can hardly understand them.  Recognising that the most perfect art is
+that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they
+elaborated the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere
+material of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system
+of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain;
+studying, for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as
+scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint,
+and, I need hardly say, with much keener æsthetic instinct.  In this they
+were right, as they were right in all things.  Since the introduction of
+printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the
+middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a tendency in
+literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the
+ear which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it
+should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide
+always.  Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most
+perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far
+more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and
+there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and
+richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.  We, in fact, have
+made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a
+form of elaborate design.  The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded
+writing simply as a method of chronicling.  Their test was always the
+spoken word in its musical and metrical relations.  The voice was the
+medium, and the ear the critic.  I have sometimes thought that the story
+of Homer’s blindness might be really an artistic myth, created in
+critical days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the great poet
+is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with
+the eyes of the soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his
+song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself
+till he has caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the
+words that are winged with light.  Certainly, whether this be so or not,
+it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that
+England’s great poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous
+splendour of his later verse.  When Milton could no longer write he began
+to sing.  Who would match the measures of _Comus_ with the measures of
+_Samson Agonistes_, or of _Paradise Lost_ or _Regained_?  When Milton
+became blind he composed, as every one should compose, with the voice
+purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days became that mighty
+many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all the stateliness
+of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have its swiftness, and is the one
+imperishable inheritance of English literature sweeping through all the
+ages, because above them, and abiding with us ever, being immortal in its
+form.  Yes: writing has done much harm to writers.  We must return to the
+voice.  That must be our test, and perhaps then we shall be able to
+appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism.
+
+As it now is, we cannot do so.  Sometimes, when I have written a piece of
+prose that I have been modest enough to consider absolutely free from
+fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I may have been guilty of
+the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachic movements, a
+crime for which a learned critic of the Augustan age censures with most
+just severity the brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias.  I grow
+cold when I think of it, and wonder to myself if the admirable ethical
+effect of the prose of that charming writer, who once in a spirit of
+reckless generosity towards the uncultivated portion of our community
+proclaimed the monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life,
+will not some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the pæons
+have been wrongly placed.
+
+ERNEST.  Ah! now you are flippant.
+
+GILBERT.  Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that the
+Greeks had no art-critics?  I can understand it being said that the
+constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but not that
+the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not criticise.  You will
+not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art criticism from Plato to
+Plotinus.  The night is too lovely for that, and the moon, if she heard
+us, would put more ashes on her face than are there already.  But think
+merely of one perfect little work of æsthetic criticism, Aristotle’s
+_Treatise on Poetry_.  It is not perfect in form, for it is badly
+written, consisting perhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or
+of isolated fragments destined for some larger book, but in temper and
+treatment it is perfect, absolutely.  The ethical effect of art, its
+importance to culture, and its place in the formation of character, had
+been done once for all by Plato; but here we have art treated, not from
+the moral, but from the purely æsthetic point of view.  Plato had, of
+course, dealt with many definitely artistic subjects, such as the
+importance of unity in a work of art, the necessity for tone and harmony,
+the æsthetic value of appearances, the relation of the visible arts to
+the external world, and the relation of fiction to fact.  He first
+perhaps stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet
+satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth,
+and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the
+Kosmos.  The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may
+seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysical sphere
+of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer them to the
+sphere of art, and you will find that they are still vital and full of
+meaning.  It may be that it is as a critic of Beauty that Plato is
+destined to live, and that by altering the name of the sphere of his
+speculation we shall find a new philosophy.  But Aristotle, like Goethe,
+deals with art primarily in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy,
+for instance, and investigating the material it uses, which is language,
+its subject-matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is
+action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are those of
+theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is plot, and its
+final æsthetic appeal, which is to the sense of beauty realised through
+the passions of pity and awe.  That purification and spiritualising of
+the nature which he calls κάθαρσις is, as Goethe saw, essentially
+æsthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied.  Concerning himself
+primarily with the impression that the work of art produces, Aristotle
+sets himself to analyse that impression, to investigate its source, to
+see how it is engendered.  As a physiologist and psychologist, he knows
+that the health of a function resides in energy.  To have a capacity for
+a passion and not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and
+limited.  The mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the
+bosom of much ‘perilous stuff,’ and by presenting high and worthy objects
+for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the man; nay,
+not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him also into noble
+feelings of which he might else have known nothing, the word κάθαρσις
+having, it has sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of
+initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to fancy,
+its true and only meaning here.  This is of course a mere outline of the
+book.  But you see what a perfect piece of æsthetic criticism it is.  Who
+indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so well?  After reading it,
+one does not wonder any longer that Alexandria devoted itself so largely
+to art-criticism, and that we find the artistic temperaments of the day
+investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great
+Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon,
+that sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or
+the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual
+life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value
+of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper
+subject-matter for the artist.  Indeed, I fear that the inartistic
+temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature
+and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such
+accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or
+from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own,
+fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they
+have been robbed.  And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks
+chattered about painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had
+their private views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts
+guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and
+lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their
+art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.  Why,
+even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought their
+dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid them very
+handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices.  Whatever, in fact, is
+modern in our life we owe to the Greeks.  Whatever is an anachronism is
+due to mediævalism.  It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system
+of art-criticism, and how fine their critical instinct was, may be seen
+from the fact that the material they criticised with most care was, as I
+have already said, language.  For the material that painter or sculptor
+uses is meagre in comparison with that of words.  Words have not merely
+music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any
+that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and
+plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in
+marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs
+also, are theirs indeed alone.  If the Greeks had criticised nothing but
+language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world.
+To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of
+all the arts.
+
+But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud.  Out
+of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion’s eye.  She is afraid
+that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, of Quinctilian and
+Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of all those who in the
+antique world wrote or lectured upon art matters.  She need not be
+afraid.  I am tired of my expedition into the dim, dull abyss of facts.
+There is nothing left for me now but the divine μονόχρονος ηδονή of
+another cigarette.  Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one
+unsatisfied.
+
+ERNEST.  Try one of mine.  They are rather good.  I get them direct from
+Cairo.  The only use of our _attachés_ is that they supply their friends
+with excellent tobacco.  And as the moon has hidden herself, let us talk
+a little longer.  I am quite ready to admit that I was wrong in what I
+said about the Greeks.  They were, as you have pointed out, a nation of
+art-critics.  I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them.  For
+the creative faculty is higher than the critical.  There is really no
+comparison between them.
+
+GILBERT.  The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary.  Without the
+critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the
+name.  You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and
+delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us,
+and gives to it a momentary perfection.  Well, that spirit of choice,
+that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of
+its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this
+critical faculty can create anything at all in art.  Arnold’s definition
+of literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form, but
+it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the critical element
+in all creative work.
+
+ERNEST.  I should have said that great artists work unconsciously, that
+they were ‘wiser than they knew,’ as, I think, Emerson remarks somewhere.
+
+GILBERT.  It is really not so, Ernest.  All fine imaginative work is
+self-conscious and deliberate.  No poet sings because he must sing.  At
+least, no great poet does.  A great poet sings because he chooses to
+sing.  It is so now, and it has always been so.  We are sometimes apt to
+think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler,
+fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early
+poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical
+quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song.
+The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are
+bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed
+the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to
+sing to the shepherds in the vale.  But in this we are merely lending to
+other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own.  Our
+historical sense is at fault.  Every century that produces poetry is, so
+far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most
+natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most
+self-conscious effort.  Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without
+self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are
+one.
+
+ERNEST.  I see what you mean, and there is much in it.  But surely you
+would admit that the great poems of the early world, the primitive,
+anonymous collective poems, were the result of the imagination of races,
+rather than of the imagination of individuals?
+
+GILBERT.  Not when they became poetry.  Not when they received a
+beautiful form.  For there is no art where there is no style, and no
+style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.  No doubt
+Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had
+chronicles and plays and novels from which to work, but they were merely
+his rough material.  He took them, and shaped them into song.  They
+become his, because he made them lovely.  They were built out of music,
+
+       And so not built at all,
+    And therefore built for ever.
+
+The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels
+that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that
+it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.
+Indeed, I am inclined to think that each myth and legend that seems to us
+to spring out of the wonder, or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was
+in its origin the invention of one single mind.  The curiously limited
+number of the myths seems to me to point to this conclusion.  But we must
+not go off into questions of comparative mythology.  We must keep to
+criticism.  And what I want to point out is this.  An age that has no
+criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and
+confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no
+art at all.  There have been critical ages that have not been creative,
+in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in which the spirit of man has
+sought to set in order the treasures of his treasure-house, to separate
+the gold from the silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over the
+jewels, and to give names to the pearls.  But there has never been a
+creative age that has not been critical also.  For it is the critical
+faculty that invents fresh forms.  The tendency of creation is to repeat
+itself.  It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that
+springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.  There is
+really not a single form that art now uses that does not come to us from
+the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were either
+stereotyped or invented or made perfect.  I say Alexandria, not merely
+because it was there that the Greek spirit became most self-conscious,
+and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and theology, but because it
+was to that city, and not to Athens, that Rome turned for her models, and
+it was through the survival, such as it was, of the Latin language that
+culture lived at all.  When, at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned
+upon Europe, the soil had been in some measure prepared for it.  But, to
+get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome and usually
+inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to
+the Greek critical spirit.  To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire
+drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll,
+the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the
+oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and
+the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that word.  In fact, we owe it
+everything, except the sonnet, to which, however, some curious parallels
+of thought-movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism,
+to which no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham Scotch
+dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has recently proposed
+should be made the basis for a final and unanimous effort on the part of
+our second-rate poets to make themselves really romantic.  Each new
+school, as it appears, cries out against criticism, but it is to the
+critical faculty in man that it owes its origin.  The mere creative
+instinct does not innovate, but reproduces.
+
+ERNEST.  You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of the
+creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory.  But what of
+criticism outside creation?  I have a foolish habit of reading
+periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly
+valueless.
+
+GILBERT.  So is most modern creative work also.  Mediocrity weighing
+mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother—that
+is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us from
+time to time.  And yet, I feel I am a little unfair in this matter.  As a
+rule, the critics—I speak, of course, of the higher class, of those in
+fact who write for the sixpenny papers—are far more cultured than the
+people whose work they are called upon to review.  This is, indeed, only
+what one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation
+than creation does.
+
+ERNEST.  Really?
+
+GILBERT.  Certainly.  Anybody can write a three-volumed novel.  It merely
+requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.  The
+difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty of
+sustaining any standard.  Where there is no style a standard must be
+impossible.  The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the
+reporters of the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the
+doings of the habitual criminals of art.  It is sometimes said of them
+that they do not read all through the works they are called upon to
+criticise.  They do not.  Or at least they should not.  If they did so,
+they would become confirmed misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase
+from one of the pretty Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the
+rest of their lives.  Nor is it necessary.  To know the vintage and
+quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.  It must be
+perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or
+worth nothing.  Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the
+instinct for form.  Who wants to wade through a dull volume?  One tastes
+it, and that is quite enough—more than enough, I should imagine.  I am
+aware that there are many honest workers in painting as well as in
+literature who object to criticism entirely.  They are quite right.
+Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age.  It brings us
+no new element of pleasure.  It suggests no fresh departure of thought,
+or passion, or beauty.  It should not be spoken of.  It should be left to
+the oblivion that it deserves.
+
+ERNEST.  But, my dear fellow—excuse me for interrupting you—you seem to
+me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too
+far.  For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult
+to do a thing than to talk about it.
+
+GILBERT.  More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it?  Not at
+all.  That is a gross popular error.  It is very much more difficult to
+talk about a thing than to do it.  In the sphere of actual life that is
+of course obvious.  Anybody can make history.  Only a great man can write
+it.  There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share
+with the lower animals.  It is only by language that we rise above them,
+or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child,
+of thought.  Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in
+its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be
+that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have
+nothing whatsoever to do.  No, Ernest, don’t talk about action.  It is a
+blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of
+whose nature it is unconscious.  It is a thing incomplete in its essence,
+because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always
+at variance with its aim.  Its basis is the lack of imagination.  It is
+the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
+
+ERNEST.  Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball.  You
+hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy.  You do
+nothing but re-write history.
+
+GILBERT.  The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.  That is not
+the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit.  When we have
+fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise
+that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of
+action.  He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their
+results.  From the field in which he thought that he had sown thorns, we
+have gathered our vintage, and the fig-tree that he planted for our
+pleasure is as barren as the thistle, and more bitter.  It is because
+Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find
+its way.
+
+ERNEST.  You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious aim is
+a delusion?
+
+GILBERT.  It is worse than a delusion.  If we lived long enough to see
+the results of our actions it may be that those who call themselves good
+would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls
+evil stirred by a noble joy.  Each little thing that we do passes into
+the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make
+them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new
+civilisation, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone
+before.  But men are the slaves of words.  They rage against Materialism,
+as they call it, forgetting that there has been no material improvement
+that has not spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if
+any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world’s faculties in
+barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds.
+What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress.  Without it the
+world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.  By its
+curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race.  Through its
+intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of
+type.  In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one
+with the higher ethics.  And as for the virtues!  What are the virtues?
+Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little about chastity, and it may be
+that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not to their own purity,
+that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom from stain.  Charity,
+as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been
+compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.  The mere
+existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much
+nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect
+development.  It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.
+Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and
+self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that
+old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the
+world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its
+altars in the land.  Virtues!  Who knows what the virtues are?  Not you.
+Not I.  Not any one.  It is well for our vanity that we slay the
+criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had
+gained by his crime.  It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his
+martyrdom.  He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
+
+ERNEST.  Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note.  Let us go back to the more
+gracious fields of literature.  What was it you said?  That it was more
+difficult to talk about a thing than to do it?
+
+GILBERT (_after a pause_).  Yes: I believe I ventured upon that simple
+truth.  Surely you see now that I am right?  When man acts he is a
+puppet.  When he describes he is a poet.  The whole secret lies in that.
+It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy Ilion to send the notched
+arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl against the shield of hide and
+flamelike brass the long ash-handled spear.  It was easy for the
+adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian carpets for her lord, and then, as
+he lay couched in the marble bath, to throw over his head the purple net,
+and call to her smooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the
+heart that should have broken at Aulis.  For Antigone even, with Death
+waiting for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the
+tainted air at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the
+wretched naked corse that had no tomb.  But what of those who wrote about
+these things?  What of those who gave them reality, and made them live
+for ever?  Are they not greater than the men and women they sing of?
+‘Hector that sweet knight is dead,’ and Lucian tells us how in the dim
+under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen, and marvelled that
+it was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships were launched,
+those beautiful mailed men laid low, those towered cities brought to
+dust.  Yet, every day the swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the
+battlements, and looks down at the tide of war.  The greybeards wonder at
+her loveliness, and she stands by the side of the king.  In his chamber
+of stained ivory lies her leman.  He is polishing his dainty armour, and
+combing the scarlet plume.  With squire and page, her husband passes from
+tent to tent.  She can see his bright hair, and hears, or fancies that
+she hears, that clear cold voice.  In the courtyard below, the son of
+Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass.  The white arms of Andromache
+are around his neck.  He sets his helmet on the ground, lest their babe
+should be frightened.  Behind the embroidered curtains of his pavilion
+sits Achilles, in perfumed raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver
+the friend of his soul arrays himself to go forth to the fight.  From a
+curiously carven chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his
+ship-side, the Lord of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that
+the lip of man had never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and
+with fresh water cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black
+wine its burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon the
+ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophets worshipped,
+and prays to Him, and knows not that he prays in vain, and that by the
+hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous’ son, Euphorbus, whose
+love-locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid, the lion-hearted,
+Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his doom.  Phantoms, are
+they?  Heroes of mist and mountain?  Shadows in a song?  No: they are
+real.  Action!  What is action?  It dies at the moment of its energy.  It
+is a base concession to fact.  The world is made by the singer for the
+dreamer.
+
+ERNEST.  While you talk it seems to me to be so.
+
+GILBERT.  It is so in truth.  On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the
+lizard like a thing of green bronze.  The owl has built her nest in the
+palace of Priam.  Over the empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with
+their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced, oily sea, οινοψ πόντος, as
+Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great
+galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely
+tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his
+net.  Yet, every morning the doors of the city are thrown open, and on
+foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors go forth to battle, and
+mock their enemies from behind their iron masks.  All day long the fight
+rages, and when night comes the torches gleam by the tents, and the
+cresset burns in the hall.  Those who live in marble or on painted panel,
+know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its
+beauty, but limited to one note of passion or one mood of calm.  Those
+whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of
+courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering.  The seasons come and
+go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years
+pass by before them.  They have their youth and their manhood, they are
+children, and they grow old.  It is always dawn for St. Helena, as
+Veronese saw her at the window.  Through the still morning air the angels
+bring her the symbol of God’s pain.  The cool breezes of the morning lift
+the gilt threads from her brow.  On that little hill by the city of
+Florence, where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the
+solstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly
+can the slim naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of
+clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the
+chords.  It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free
+among the silver poplars of France.  In eternal twilight they move, those
+frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch
+the dew-drenched grass they tread on.  But those who walk in epos, drama,
+or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons wax and
+wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and from
+sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting day with all its gold and
+shadow.  For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the
+Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her
+raiment for their pleasure.  The statue is concentrated to one moment of
+perfection.  The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual
+element of growth or change.  If they know nothing of death, it is
+because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death
+belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and
+who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall
+from a past of glory or of shame.  Movement, that problem of the visible
+arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone.  It is Literature that
+shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.
+
+ERNEST.  Yes; I see now what you mean.  But, surely, the higher you place
+the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.
+
+GILBERT.  Why so?
+
+ERNEST.  Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo of rich
+music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form.  It may, indeed, be that life
+is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms are mean and its
+heroisms ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature to create,
+from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be
+more marvellous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common
+eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek to realise their
+perfection.  But surely, if this new world has been made by the spirit
+and touch of a great artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect
+that there will be nothing left for the critic to do.  I quite understand
+now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far more difficult to talk
+about a thing than to do it.  But it seems to me that this sound and
+sensible maxim, which is really extremely soothing to one’s feelings, and
+should be adopted as its motto by every Academy of Literature all over
+the world, applies only to the relations that exist between Art and Life,
+and not to any relations that there may be between Art and Criticism.
+
+GILBERT.  But, surely, Criticism is itself an art.  And just as artistic
+creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed,
+without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really
+creative in the highest sense of the word.  Criticism is, in fact, both
+creative and independent.
+
+ERNEST.  Independent?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes; independent.  Criticism is no more to be judged by any low
+standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or
+sculptor.  The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that
+he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour,
+or the unseen world of passion and of thought.  He does not even require
+for the perfection of his art the finest materials.  Anything will serve
+his purpose.  And just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the
+silly wife of a small country doctor in the squalid village of
+Yonville-l’Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a
+classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or
+of no importance, such as the pictures in this year’s Royal Academy, or
+in any year’s Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris’s poems, M.
+Ohnet’s novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic
+can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of
+contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct
+with intellectual subtlety.  Why not?  Dulness is always an irresistible
+temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent _Bestia
+Trionfans_ that calls wisdom from its cave.  To an artist so creative as
+the critic, what does subject-matter signify?  No more and no less than
+it does to the novelist and the painter.  Like them, he can find his
+motives everywhere.  Treatment is the test.  There is nothing that has
+not in it suggestion or challenge.
+
+ERNEST.  But is Criticism really a creative art?
+
+GILBERT.  Why should it not be?  It works with materials, and puts them
+into a form that is at once new and delightful.  What more can one say of
+poetry?  Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation.
+For just as the great artists, from Homer and Æschylus, down to
+Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their
+subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale,
+so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified
+for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already
+added.  Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the
+purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than
+creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself,
+and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would
+put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.  Certainly, it is never
+trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude.  No ignoble considerations
+of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of
+domestic or public life, affect it ever.  One may appeal from fiction
+unto fact.  But from the soul there is no appeal.
+
+ERNEST.  From the soul?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, from the soul.  That is what the highest criticism really
+is, the record of one’s own soul.  It is more fascinating than history,
+as it is concerned simply with oneself.  It is more delightful than
+philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not
+vague.  It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not
+with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s
+physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods
+and imaginative passions of the mind.  I am always amused by the silly
+vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that
+the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate
+work.  The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it
+is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his
+fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will
+prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will
+turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though
+the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn.  His sole aim is to
+chronicle his own impressions.  It is for him that pictures are painted,
+books written, and marble hewn into form.
+
+ERNEST.  I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.
+
+GILBERT.  Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all
+revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her
+Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the
+Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as
+in itself it really is.  But this is a very serious error, and takes no
+cognisance of Criticism’s most perfect form, which is in its essence
+purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret
+of another.  For the highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive
+but as impressive purely.
+
+ERNEST.  But is that really so?
+
+GILBERT.  Of course it is.  Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on
+Turner are sound or not?  What does it matter?  That mighty and majestic
+prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so
+rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best,
+in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art
+as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted
+canvases in England’s Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at
+times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on
+account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in
+those long-cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though
+through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual
+and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,
+with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think,
+even as Literature is the greater art.  Who, again, cares whether Mr.
+Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo
+never dreamed of?  The painter may have been merely the slave of an
+archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool
+galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange
+figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in
+some faint light under sea,’ I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than the
+rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many
+times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep
+seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange
+webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of
+Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her
+but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with
+which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and
+the hands.’  And I say to my friend, ‘The presence that thus so strangely
+rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand
+years man had come to desire’; and he answers me, ‘Hers is the head upon
+which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little
+weary.’
+
+And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and
+reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the
+music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that
+flute-player’s music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle
+and poisonous curves.  Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had
+any one told him of this picture that ‘all the thoughts and experience of
+the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to
+refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the
+lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition
+and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
+Borgias?’  He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none
+of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
+arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious
+colour-harmonies of blue and green.  And it is for this very reason that
+the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.  It
+treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.  It
+does not confine itself—let us at least suppose so for the moment—to
+discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.
+And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing
+is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in
+his soul who wrought it.  Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the
+beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and
+sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital
+portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of
+what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.  The longer I
+study, Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts
+is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may be
+marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention
+on the part of the artist.  For when the work is finished it has, as it
+were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other
+than that which was put into its lips to say.  Sometimes, when I listen
+to the overture to _Tannhäuser_, I seem indeed to see that comely knight
+treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass, and to hear the voice of
+Venus calling to him from the caverned hill.  But at other times it
+speaks to me of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my
+own life, or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of
+loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions that
+man has not known, and so has sought for.  To-night it may fill one with
+that ΕΡΩΣ ΤΩΝ ΑΔΥΝΑΤΩΝ, that _Amour de l’Impossible_, which falls like a
+madness on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so
+that they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in
+the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain, grow faint and swoon or
+stumble.  To-morrow, like the music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us,
+the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it may perform the office of a
+physician, and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that
+is wounded, and ‘bring the soul into harmony with all right things.’  And
+what is true about music is true about all the arts.  Beauty has as many
+meanings as man has moods.  Beauty is the symbol of symbols.  Beauty
+reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.  When it shows us
+itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
+
+ERNEST.  But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?
+
+GILBERT.  It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the
+individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form
+which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood
+incompletely.
+
+ERNEST.  The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and
+the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really
+is not; that is your theory, I believe?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, that is my theory.  To the critic the work of art is
+simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily
+bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.  The one
+characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever
+one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty,
+that gives to creation its universal and æsthetic element, makes the
+critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things
+which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or
+painted the panel or graved the gem.
+
+It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the
+highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures
+that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the
+anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature
+or history.  But this is not so.  Indeed, pictures of this kind are far
+too intelligible.  As a class, they rank with illustrations, and, even
+considered from this point of view are failures, as they do not stir the
+imagination, but set definite bounds to it.  For the domain of the
+painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of the
+poet.  To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not
+merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to
+also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of
+colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought.
+The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the
+body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only through
+conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical
+equivalents that he can deal with psychology.  And how inadequately does
+he do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban of the Moor for the
+noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of
+Lear!  Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him.  Most of our elderly
+English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the
+domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and
+striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is
+invisible, the splendour of what is not seen.  Their pictures are, as a
+natural consequence, insufferably tedious.  They have degraded the
+invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking
+at is the obvious.  I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of
+the same subject.  They have always done so and will always do so.  But
+while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must
+be pictorial always.  For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in
+nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen.
+
+And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate
+the critic.  He will turn from them to such works as make him brood and
+dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion,
+and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider
+world.  It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that
+he cannot realise his ideal.  But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of
+most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely.  For, when
+the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
+becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than
+itself.  This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.  Music
+can never reveal its ultimate secret.  This, also, is the explanation of
+the value of limitations in art.  The sculptor gladly surrenders
+imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because
+by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation
+of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a
+realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual.  It is
+through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and
+so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty
+of reason, but to the æsthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both
+reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both
+to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking
+whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very
+complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the
+ultimate impression itself.  You see, then, how it is that the æsthetic
+critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to
+deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks
+rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their
+imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation
+final.  Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will
+have to the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such
+resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the painter
+of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between
+Nature and the work of the decorative artist.  Just as on the flowerless
+carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to look
+on, though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the
+pearl and purple of the sea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at
+Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is
+made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock’s tail,
+though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
+work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of
+whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows
+us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty,
+and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the
+problem of Art’s unity.
+
+But I see it is time for supper.  After we have discussed some Chambertin
+and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of the critic
+considered in the light of the interpreter.
+
+ERNEST.  Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally be allowed
+to see the object as in itself it really is.
+
+GILBERT.  I am not quite sure.  Perhaps I may admit it after supper.
+There is a subtle influence in supper.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
+WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE
+OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING
+
+
+             _A DIALOGUE_: _Part II._  _Persons_: _the same_.
+                           _Scene_: _the same_.
+
+ERNEST.  The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect, and
+now let us return to the point at issue.
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! don’t let us do that.  Conversation should touch
+everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.  Let us talk about
+_Moral Indignation_, _its Cause and Cure_, a subject on which I think of
+writing: or about _The Survival of Thersites_, as shown by the English
+comic papers; or about any topic that may turn up.
+
+ERNEST.  No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism.  You have told
+me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as expressive, but as
+impressive purely, and is consequently both creative and independent, is
+in fact an art by itself, occupying the same relation to creative work
+that creative work does to the visible world of form and colour, or the
+unseen world of passion and of thought.  Well, now, tell me, will not the
+critic be sometimes a real interpreter?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses.  He can
+pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, to an
+analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I
+hold it to be, there are many delightful things to be said and done.  Yet
+his object will not always be to explain the work of art.  He may seek
+rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker,
+that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike.
+Ordinary people are ‘terribly at ease in Zion.’  They propose to walk arm
+in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, ‘Why
+should we read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton?  We can read
+the plays and the poems.  That is enough.’  But an appreciation of Milton
+is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate
+scholarship.  And he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must
+understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance
+and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he
+must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between
+the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school
+of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and
+Marlowe’s greater son; he must know the materials that were at
+Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the
+conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the
+literary criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons;
+he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed
+verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the
+connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of
+the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan
+London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true
+position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.
+The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as
+a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by
+one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name.  Rather, he will
+look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify,
+and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of
+men.
+
+And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens.  The critic will indeed be
+an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the sense of one who
+simply repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips
+to say.  For, just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign
+nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life
+that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by
+intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the
+personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality
+enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes,
+the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.
+
+ERNEST.  I would have said that personality would have been a disturbing
+element.
+
+GILBERT.  No; it is an element of revelation.  If you wish to understand
+others you must intensify your own individualism.
+
+ERNEST.  What, then, is the result?
+
+GILBERT.  I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by definite
+example.  It seems to me that, while the literary critic stands of course
+first, as having the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material,
+each of the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned to it.  The actor is
+a critic of the drama.  He shows the poet’s work under new conditions,
+and by a method special to himself.  He takes the written word, and
+action, gesture and voice become the media of revelation.  The singer or
+the player on lute and viol is the critic of music.  The etcher of a
+picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of
+a new material its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the
+relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the
+critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from
+that of the work itself, and the employment of a new material is a
+critical as well as a creative element.  Sculpture, too, has its critic,
+who may be either the carver of a gem, as he was in Greek days, or some
+painter like Mantegna, who sought to reproduce on canvas the beauty of
+plastic line and the symphonic dignity of processional bas-relief.  And
+in the case of all these creative critics of art it is evident that
+personality is an absolute essential for any real interpretation.  When
+Rubinstein plays to us the _Sonata Appassionata_ of Beethoven, he gives
+us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven
+absolutely—Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and
+made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality.  When a
+great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience.  His own
+individuality becomes a vital part of the interpretation.  People
+sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not
+Shakespeare’s; and this fallacy—for it is a fallacy—is, I regret to say,
+repeated by that charming and graceful writer who has lately deserted the
+turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the
+author of _Obiter Dicta_.  In point of fact, there is no such thing as
+Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a
+work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life.  There
+are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.
+
+ERNEST.  As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is only to
+personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of the two
+comes right interpretative criticism.
+
+ERNEST.  The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will give no
+less than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows?
+
+GILBERT.  He will be always showing us the work of art in some new
+relation to our age.  He will always be reminding us that great works of
+art are living things—are, in fact, the only things that live.  So much,
+indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that, as civilisation
+progresses and we become more highly organised, the elect spirits of each
+age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less
+interested in actual life, and _will seek to gain their impressions
+almost entirely from what Art has touched_.  For life is terribly
+deficient in form.  Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the
+wrong people.  There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its
+tragedies seem to culminate in farce.  One is always wounded when one
+approaches it.  Things last either too long, or not long enough.
+
+ERNEST.  Poor life!  Poor human life!  Are you not even touched by the
+tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.
+
+GILBERT.  Too quickly touched by them, I fear.  For when one looks back
+upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled
+with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a
+dream and an illusion.  What are the unreal things, but the passions that
+once burned one like fire?  What are the incredible things, but the
+things that one has faithfully believed?  What are the improbable things?
+The things that one has done oneself.  No, Ernest; life cheats us with
+shadows, like a puppet-master.  We ask it for pleasure.  It gives it to
+us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train.  We come across some
+noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our
+days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place,
+and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we
+find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at
+the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and
+so madly kissed.
+
+ERNEST.  Life then is a failure?
+
+GILBERT.  From the artistic point of view, certainly.  And the chief
+thing that makes life a failure from this artistic point of view is the
+thing that lends to life its sordid security, the fact that one can never
+repeat exactly the same emotion.  How different it is in the world of
+Art!  On a shelf of the bookcase behind you stands the _Divine Comedy_,
+and I know that, if I open it at a certain place, I shall be filled with
+a fierce hatred of some one who has never wronged me, or stirred by a
+great love for some one whom I shall never see.  There is no mood or
+passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her
+secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are going to be.  We
+can choose our day and select our hour.  We can say to ourselves,
+‘To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley
+of the shadow of death,’ and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood,
+and the Mantuan stands by our side.  We pass through the gate of the
+legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the horror of
+another world.  The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces and their
+cowls of gilded lead.  Out of the ceaseless winds that drive them, the
+carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh, and the
+glutton lashed by the rain.  We break the withered branches from the tree
+in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds
+with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries.  Out of a
+horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame
+the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of
+that bed becomes ours for a moment.  Through the dim purple air fly those
+who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit
+of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the
+semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false
+coin.  He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry and gaping
+lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water
+that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentine hills.  Sinon,
+the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him.  He smites him in the face, and
+they wrangle.  We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil
+chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by giants where great
+Nimrod blows his horn.  Terrible things are in store for us, and we go to
+meet them in Dante’s raiment and with Dante’s heart.  We traverse the
+marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat through the slimy
+waves.  He calls to us, and we reject him.  When we hear the voice of his
+agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our scorn.
+We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, in which traitors stick like
+straws in glass.  Our foot strikes against the head of Bocca.  He will
+not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming
+skull.  Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his face that he may weep
+a little.  We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered his
+dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from him;
+such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who more base than he who has
+mercy for the condemned of God?  In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man
+who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew Cæsar.  We
+tremble, and come forth to re-behold the stars.
+
+In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holy mountain rises
+into the pure light of day.  There is peace for us, and for those who for
+a season abide in it there is some peace also, though, pale from the
+poison of the Maremma, Madonna Pia passes before us, and Ismene, with the
+sorrow of earth still lingering about her, is there.  Soul after soul
+makes us share in some repentance or some joy.  He whom the mourning of
+his widow taught to drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us of Nella
+praying in her lonely bed, and we learn from the mouth of Buonconte how a
+single tear may save a dying sinner from the fiend.  Sordello, that noble
+and disdainful Lombard, eyes us from afar like a couchant lion.  When he
+learns that Virgil is one of Mantua’s citizens, he falls upon his neck,
+and when he learns that he is the singer of Rome he falls before his
+feet.  In that valley whose grass and flowers are fairer than cleft
+emerald and Indian wood, and brighter than scarlet and silver, they are
+singing who in the world were kings; but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg
+do not move to the music of the others, and Philip of France beats his
+breast and Henry of England sits alone.  On and on we go, climbing the
+marvellous stair, and the stars become larger than their wont, and the
+song of the kings grows faint, and at length we reach the seven trees of
+gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise.  In a griffin-drawn chariot
+appears one whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiled in white, and
+mantled in green, and robed in a vesture that is coloured like live fire.
+The ancient flame wakes within us.  Our blood quickens through terrible
+pulses.  We recognise her.  It is Beatrice, the woman we have worshipped.
+The ice congealed about our heart melts.  Wild tears of anguish break
+from us, and we bow our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have
+sinned.  When we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of
+the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress
+of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven.  Out of that eternal
+pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us.  Her beauty
+troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing that falls through
+water, she passes away, we gaze after her with wistful eyes.  The sweet
+planet of Venus is full of lovers.  Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the
+lady of Sordello’s heart, is there, and Folco, the passionate singer of
+Provence, who in sorrow for Azalais forsook the world, and the
+Canaanitish harlot whose soul was the first that Christ redeemed.
+Joachim of Flora stands in the sun, and, in the sun, Aquinas recounts the
+story of St. Francis and Bonaventure the story of St. Dominic.  Through
+the burning rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida approaches.  He tells us of the
+arrow that is shot from the bow of exile, and how salt tastes the bread
+of another, and how steep are the stairs in the house of a stranger.  In
+Saturn the soul sings not, and even she who guides us dare not smile.  On
+a ladder of gold the flames rise and fall.  At last, we see the pageant
+of the Mystical Rose.  Beatrice fixes her eyes upon the face of God to
+turn them not again.  The beatific vision is granted to us; we know the
+Love that moves the sun and all the stars.
+
+Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make ourselves one
+with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altar with him, and share
+his rapture and his scorn.  And if we grow tired of an antique time, and
+desire to realise our own age in all its weariness and sin, are there not
+books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us
+live in a score of shameful years?  Close to your hand lies a little
+volume, bound in some Nile-green skin that has been powdered with gilded
+nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory.  It is the book that Gautier
+loved, it is Baudelaire’s masterpiece.  Open it at that sad madrigal that
+begins
+
+    Que m’importe que tu sois sage?
+    Sois belle! et sois triste!
+
+and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never
+worshipped joy.  Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures himself, let
+its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts, and you
+will become for a moment what he was who wrote it; nay, not for a moment
+only, but for many barren moonlit nights and sunless sterile days will a
+despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you, and the misery
+of another gnaw your heart away.  Read the whole book, suffer it to tell
+even one of its secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to
+know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent of
+strange crimes of which it is guiltless, and to make atonement for
+terrible pleasures that it has never known.  And then, when you are tired
+of these flowers of evil, turn to the flowers that grow in the garden of
+Perdita, and in their dew-drenched chalices cool your fevered brow, and
+let their loveliness heal and restore your soul; or wake from his
+forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and bid the lover of Heliodore
+make you music, for he too has flowers in his song, red pomegranate
+blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh, ringed daffodils and dark blue
+hyacinths, and marjoram and crinkled ox-eyes.  Dear to him was the
+perfume of the bean-field at evening, and dear to him the odorous
+eared-spikenard that grew on the Syrian hills, and the fresh green thyme,
+the wine-cup’s charm.  The feet of his love as she walked in the garden
+were like lilies set upon lilies.  Softer than sleep-laden poppy petals
+were her lips, softer than violets and as scented.  The flame-like crocus
+sprang from the grass to look at her.  For her the slim narcissus stored
+the cool rain; and for her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that
+wooed them.  And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus was as fair
+as she was.
+
+It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion.  We sicken with the
+same maladies as the poets, and the singer lends us his pain.  Dead lips
+have their message for us, and hearts that have fallen to dust can
+communicate their joy.  We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine, and
+we follow Manon Lescaut over the whole world.  Ours is the love-madness
+of the Tyrian, and the terror of Orestes is ours also.  There is no
+passion that we cannot feel, no pleasure that we may not gratify, and we
+can choose the time of our initiation and the time of our freedom also.
+Life!  Life!  Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our
+experience.  It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its
+utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which
+is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.
+It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the
+meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
+
+ERNEST.  Must we go, then, to Art for everything?
+
+GILBERT.  For everything.  Because Art does not hurt us.  The tears that
+we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is
+the function of Art to awaken.  We weep, but we are not wounded.  We
+grieve, but our grief is not bitter.  In the actual life of man, sorrow,
+as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection.  But the
+sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may
+quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks.  It is through
+Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through
+Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid
+perils of actual existence.  This results not merely from the fact that
+nothing that one can imagine is worth doing, and that one can imagine
+everything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, like the
+forces of the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy.  One can
+feel so much, and no more.  And how can it matter with what pleasure life
+tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one’s
+soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed
+one has found the true secret of joy, and wept away one’s tears over
+their deaths who, like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio, can never
+die?
+
+ERNEST.  Stop a moment.  It seems to me that in everything that you have
+said there is something radically immoral.
+
+GILBERT.  All art is immoral.
+
+ERNEST.  All art?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes.  For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art,
+and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that
+practical organisation of life that we call society.  Society, which is
+the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of
+human energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy
+stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, of each of its
+citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour to the
+common weal, and toil and travail that the day’s work may be done.
+Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.  The
+beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its
+eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this
+dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one
+at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public,
+and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas
+‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilised
+being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.  They mean well, no
+doubt, these honest beaming folk.  Perhaps that is the reason why they
+are so excessively tedious.  But some one should teach them that while,
+in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any
+citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the
+proper occupation of man.
+
+ERNEST.  Contemplation?
+
+GILBERT.  Contemplation.  I said to you some time ago that it was far
+more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.  Let me say to you
+now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world,
+the most difficult and the most intellectual.  To Plato, with his passion
+for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.  To Aristotle, with his
+passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also.  It was
+to this that the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of
+mediæval days.
+
+ERNEST.  We exist, then, to do nothing?
+
+GILBERT.  It is to do nothing that the elect exist.  Action is limited
+and relative.  Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at
+ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.  But we who are
+born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too
+critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite
+pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life
+itself.  To us the _città divina_ is colourless, and the _fruitio Dei_
+without meaning.  Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and
+religious ecstasy is out of date.  The world through which the Academic
+philosopher becomes ‘the spectator of all time and of all existence’ is
+not really an ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas.  When we
+enter it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought.  The courts
+of the city of God are not open to us now.  Its gates are guarded by
+Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our nature
+is most divine.  It is enough that our fathers believed.  They have
+exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.  Their legacy to us is the
+scepticism of which they were afraid.  Had they put it into words, it
+might not live within us as thought.  No, Ernest, no.  We cannot go back
+to the saint.  There is far more to be learned from the sinner.  We
+cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray.  Who,
+as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single
+rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high?
+What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision
+of Böhme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg’s
+blinded eyes?  Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one
+daffodil of the field, far less than the meanest of the visible arts,
+for, just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind
+expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the
+lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike.
+To the æsthetic temperament the vague is always repellent.  The Greeks
+were a nation of artists, because they were spared the sense of the
+infinite.  Like Aristotle, like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire
+the concrete, and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.
+
+ERNEST.  What then do you propose?
+
+GILBERT.  It seems to me that with the development of the critical spirit
+we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective
+life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true
+meaning of the word modernity.  For he to whom the present is the only
+thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.  To
+realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has
+preceded it and that has contributed to its making.  To know anything
+about oneself one must know all about others.  There must be no mood with
+which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make
+alive.  Is this impossible?  I think not.  By revealing to us the
+absolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self-imposed
+and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the scientific principle
+of Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative
+life.  It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to
+act.  It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written
+upon the wall the prophecy of our doom.  We may not watch it, for it is
+within us.  We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.
+It is Nemesis without her mask.  It is the last of the Fates, and the
+most terrible.  It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know.
+
+And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has robbed
+energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the subjective
+sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow,
+with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange temperaments and subtle
+susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference,
+complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other,
+and passions that war against themselves.  And so, it is not our own life
+that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within
+us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual,
+created for our service, and entering into us for our joy.  It is
+something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has
+made its abode.  It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of
+curious sins.  It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter.  It
+fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we
+cannot gain.  One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us.  It can lead
+us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of
+familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the
+perfection of our development.  It can help us to leave the age in which
+we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled
+from their air.  It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and
+to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are.  The
+pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain.  Theocritus
+blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd.  In
+the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armour
+of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen.  We have whispered the
+secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained
+raiment of Villon have put our shame into song.  We can see the dawn
+through Shelley’s eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows
+amorous of our youth.  Ours is the anguish of Atys, and ours the weak
+rage and noble sorrows of the Dane.  Do you think that it is the
+imagination that enables us to live these countless lives?  Yes: it is
+the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity.  It is
+simply concentrated race-experience.
+
+ERNEST.  But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?
+
+GILBERT.  The culture that this transmission of racial experiences makes
+possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may
+be said to be one with it.  For who is the true critic but he who bears
+within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations,
+and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure?
+And who the true man of culture, if not he who by fine scholarship and
+fastidious rejection has made instinct self-conscious and intelligent,
+and can separate the work that has distinction from the work that has it
+not, and so by contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets
+of style and school, and understands their meanings, and listens to their
+voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the
+real root, as it is the real flower, of the intellectual life, and thus
+attains to intellectual clarity, and, having learned ‘the best that is
+known and thought in the world,’ lives—it is not fanciful to say so—with
+those who are the Immortals.
+
+Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not
+_doing_ but _being_, and not _being_ merely, but _becoming_—that is what
+the critical spirit can give us.  The gods live thus: either brooding
+over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus
+fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragicomedy of
+the world that they have made.  We, too, might live like them, and set
+ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man
+and nature afford.  We might make ourselves spiritual by detaching
+ourselves from action, and become perfect by the rejection of energy.  It
+has often seemed to me that Browning felt something of this.  Shakespeare
+hurls Hamlet into active life, and makes him realise his mission by
+effort.  Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised
+his mission by thought.  Incident and event were to him unreal or
+unmeaning.  He made the soul the protagonist of life’s tragedy, and
+looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play.  To us, at any
+rate, the ΒΙΟΣ ΘΕΩΡΗΤΙΚΟΣ is the true ideal.  From the high tower of
+Thought we can look out at the world.  Calm, and self-centred, and
+complete, the æsthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a
+venture can pierce between the joints of his harness.  He at least is
+safe.  He has discovered how to live.
+
+Is such a mode of life immoral?  Yes: all the arts are immoral, except
+those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite to
+action of evil or of good.  For action of every kind belongs to the
+sphere of ethics.  The aim of art is simply to create a mood.  Is such a
+mode of life unpractical?  Ah! it is not so easy to be unpractical as the
+ignorant Philistine imagines.  It were well for England if it were so.
+There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as
+this country of ours.  With us, Thought is degraded by its constant
+association with practice.  Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of
+actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor
+narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant
+section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously
+claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any
+one thing?  Each of the professions means a prejudice.  The necessity for
+a career forces every one to take sides.  We live in the age of the
+overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so
+industrious that they become absolutely stupid.  And, harsh though it may
+sound, I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom.  The
+sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.
+
+ERNEST.  A charming doctrine, Gilbert.
+
+GILBERT.  I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minor merit
+of being true.  That the desire to do good to others produces a plentiful
+crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which it is the cause.  The
+prig is a very interesting psychological study, and though of all poses a
+moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is
+something.  It is a formal recognition of the importance of treating life
+from a definite and reasoned standpoint.  That Humanitarian Sympathy wars
+against Nature, by securing the survival of the failure, may make the man
+of science loathe its facile virtues.  The political economist may cry
+out against it for putting the improvident on the same level as the
+provident, and so robbing life of the strongest, because most sordid,
+incentive to industry.  But, in the eyes of the thinker, the real harm
+that emotional sympathy does is that it limits knowledge, and so prevents
+us from solving any single social problem.  We are trying at present to
+stave off the coming crisis, the coming revolution as my friends the
+Fabianists call it, by means of doles and alms.  Well, when the
+revolution or crisis arrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall
+know nothing.  And so, Ernest, let us not be deceived.  England will
+never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions.  There is
+more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for
+so fair a land.  What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the
+moment, and think beyond the day.  Those who try to lead the people can
+only do so by following the mob.  It is through the voice of one crying
+in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.
+
+But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of beholding,
+and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, there is something that
+is egotistic.  If you think so, do not say so.  It takes a thoroughly
+selfish age, like our own, to deify self-sacrifice.  It takes a
+thoroughly grasping age, such as that in which we live, to set above the
+fine intellectual virtues, those shallow and emotional virtues that are
+an immediate practical benefit to itself.  They miss their aim, too,
+these philanthropists and sentimentalists of our day, who are always
+chattering to one about one’s duty to one’s neighbour.  For the
+development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and
+where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard
+is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost.  If you meet at dinner
+a man who has spent his life in educating himself—a rare type in our
+time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met with—you rise from
+table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched
+and sanctified your days.  But oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man
+who has spent his life in trying to educate others!  What a dreadful
+experience that is!  How appalling is that ignorance which is the
+inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions!  How limited
+in range the creature’s mind proves to be!  How it wearies us, and must
+weary himself, with its endless repetitions and sickly reiteration!  How
+lacking it is in any element of intellectual growth!  In what a vicious
+circle it always moves!
+
+ERNEST.  You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert.  Have you had this
+dreadful experience, as you call it, lately?
+
+GILBERT.  Few of us escape it. People say that the schoolmaster is
+abroad.  I wish to goodness he were.  But the type of which, after all,
+he is only one, and certainly the least important, of the
+representatives, seems to me to be really dominating our lives; and just
+as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the
+nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in
+trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate
+himself.  No, Ernest, self-culture is the true ideal of man.  Goethe saw
+it, and the immediate debt that we owe to Goethe is greater than the debt
+we owe to any man since Greek days.  The Greeks saw it, and have left us,
+as their legacy to modern thought, the conception of the contemplative
+life as well as the critical method by which alone can that life be truly
+realised.  It was the one thing that made the Renaissance great, and gave
+us Humanism.  It is the one thing that could make our own age great also;
+for the real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or
+unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes,
+or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the
+fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.
+
+I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment,
+still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years to come, unpopular
+with the crowd.  It is so easy for people to have sympathy with
+suffering.  It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.
+Indeed, so little do ordinary people understand what thought really is,
+that they seem to imagine that, when they have said that a theory is
+dangerous, they have pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such
+theories that have any true intellectual value.  An idea that is not
+dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
+
+ERNEST.  Gilbert, you bewilder me.  You have told me that all art is, in
+its essence, immoral.  Are you going to tell me now that all thought is,
+in its essence, dangerous?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, in the practical sphere it is so.  The security of society
+lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability
+of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any
+intelligence amongst its members.  The great majority of people being
+fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that
+splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage
+so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any
+question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a
+rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act
+in accordance with the dictates of reason.  But let us turn from the
+practical sphere, and say no more about the wicked philanthropists, who,
+indeed, may well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of the
+Yellow River Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such well-meaning
+and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous virtue
+that there is in man.  They are a wearisome topic, and I am anxious to
+get back to the sphere in which criticism is free.
+
+ERNEST.  The sphere of the intellect?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes.  You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in his
+own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be merely of
+value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some new mood
+of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps
+greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of a fresh medium of
+expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect.  Well, you
+seemed to be a little sceptical about the theory.  But perhaps I wronged
+you?
+
+ERNEST.  I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit that I feel
+very strongly that such work as you describe the critic producing—and
+creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to be—is, of necessity,
+purely subjective, whereas the greatest work is objective always,
+objective and impersonal.
+
+GILBERT.  The difference between objective and subjective work is one of
+external form merely.  It is accidental, not essential.  All artistic
+creation is absolutely subjective.  The very landscape that Corot looked
+at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind; and those great
+figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to possess an actual
+existence of their own, apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned
+them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves, not
+as they thought they were, but as they thought they were not; and by such
+thinking came in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to
+be.  For out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation
+what in the creator was not.  Nay, I would say that the more objective a
+creation appears to be, the more subjective it really is.  Shakespeare
+might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of
+London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each
+other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out
+of his passion.  They were elements of his nature to which he gave
+visible form, impulses that stirred so strongly within him that he had,
+as it were perforce, to suffer them to realise their energy, not on the
+lower plane of actual life, where they would have been trammelled and
+constrained and so made imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art
+where Love can indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can
+stab the eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave,
+and make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one’s father’s spirit,
+beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete steel from misty
+wall to wall.  Action being limited would have left Shakespeare
+unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it is because he did nothing
+that he has been able to achieve everything, so it is because he never
+speaks to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us
+absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament far more
+completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets, even, in which he
+bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart.  Yes, the objective
+form is the most subjective in matter.  Man is least himself when he
+talks in his own person.  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the
+truth.
+
+ERNEST.  The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form, will
+necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the artist, who
+has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.
+
+GILBERT.  Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if he recognises that
+each mode of criticism is, in its highest development, simply a mood, and
+that we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.
+The æsthetic critic, constant only to the principle of beauty in all
+things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions, winning from the
+various schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before
+foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods.
+What other people call one’s past has, no doubt, everything to do with
+them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself.  The man who regards
+his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to.
+When one has found expression for a mood, one has done with it.  You
+laugh; but believe me it is so.  Yesterday it was Realism that charmed
+one.  One gained from it that _nouveau frisson_ which it was its aim to
+produce.  One analysed it, explained it, and wearied of it.  At sunset
+came the _Luministe_ in painting, and the _Symboliste_ in poetry, and the
+spirit of mediævalism, that spirit which belongs not to time but to
+temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia, and stirred us for a moment
+by the terrible fascination of pain.  To-day the cry is for Romance, and
+already the leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple
+hill-tops walks Beauty with slim gilded feet.  The old modes of creation
+linger, of course.  The artists reproduce either themselves or each
+other, with wearisome iteration.  But Criticism is always moving on, and
+the critic is always developing.
+
+Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of
+expression.  The method of the drama is his, as well as the method of the
+epos.  He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking to Marvel on
+the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord Brooke
+discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks; or adopt narration, as
+Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary Portraits—is not that
+the title of the book?—presents to us, under the fanciful guise of
+fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of criticism, one on the painter
+Watteau, another on the philosophy of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan
+elements of the early Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the
+most suggestive, on the source of that Aufklärung, that enlightening
+which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to which our own culture
+owes so great a debt.  Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary form
+which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from
+Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, the
+creative critics of the world have always employed, can never lose for
+the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.  By its means he can
+both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and
+reality to every mood.  By its means he can exhibit the object from each
+point of view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us
+things, gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect
+that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the
+central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more
+completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller
+completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the
+delicate charm of chance.
+
+ERNEST.  By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and
+convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! it is so easy to convert others.  It is so difficult to
+convert oneself.  To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak
+through lips different from one’s own.  To know the truth one must
+imagine myriads of falsehoods.  For what is Truth?  In matters of
+religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived.  In matters of
+science, it is the ultimate sensation.  In matters of art, it is one’s
+last mood.  And you see now, Ernest, that the critic has at his disposal
+as many objective forms of expression as the artist has.  Ruskin put his
+criticism into imaginative prose, and is superb in his changes and
+contradictions; and Browning put his into blank verse and made painter
+and poet yield us their secret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater
+fiction, and Rossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of
+Giorgione and the design of Ingres, and his own design and colour also,
+feeling, with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that
+the ultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium that of
+words.
+
+ERNEST.  Well, now that you have settled that the critic has at his
+disposal all objective forms, I wish you would tell me what are the
+qualities that should characterise the true critic.
+
+GILBERT.  What would you say they were?
+
+ERNEST.  Well, I should say that a critic should above all things be
+fair.
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! not fair.  A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of
+the word.  It is only about things that do not interest one that one can
+give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an
+unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.  The man who sees both
+sides of a question, is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.  Art is
+a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by
+emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine
+moods and exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a
+scientific formula or a theological dogma.  It is to the soul that Art
+speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of
+the body.  One should, of course, have no prejudices; but, as a great
+Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago, it is one’s business in such
+matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences one ceases to
+be fair.  It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire
+all schools of Art.  No; fairness is not one of the qualities of the true
+critic.  It is not even a condition of criticism.  Each form of Art with
+which we come in contact dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of
+every other form.  We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in
+question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret.  For the
+time, we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed.
+
+ERNEST.  The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will he not?
+
+GILBERT.  Rational?  There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest.  One is
+to dislike it.  The other, to like it rationally.  For Art, as Plato saw,
+and not without regret, creates in listener and spectator a form of
+divine madness.  It does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others
+inspired.  Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals.  If one loves
+Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and
+against such love, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out.
+There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty.  It is too splendid to
+be sane.  Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always
+seem to the world to be pure visionaries.
+
+ERNEST.  Well, at least, the critic will be sincere.
+
+GILBERT.  A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it
+is absolutely fatal.  The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in
+his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in
+every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited
+to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped mode of looking at
+things.  He will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand
+different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh
+points of view.  Through constant change, and through constant change
+alone, he will find his true unity.  He will not consent to be the slave
+of his own opinions.  For what is mind but motion in the intellectual
+sphere?  The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.  You
+must not be frightened by word, Ernest.  What people call insincerity is
+simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
+
+ERNEST.  I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.
+
+GILBERT.  Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity and
+fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least on the borderland of
+morals, and the first condition of criticism is that the critic should be
+able to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are
+absolutely distinct and separate.  When they are confused, Chaos has come
+again.  They are too often confused in England now, and though our modern
+Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their
+extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment.  It
+is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find
+expression.  I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of
+modern journalism.  By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps
+us in touch with the ignorance of the community.  By carefully
+chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what
+very little importance such events really are.  By invariably discussing
+the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for
+culture, and what are not.  But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to
+write articles upon modern art.  When it does this it stultifies itself.
+And yet Tartuffe’s articles and Chadband’s notes do this good, at least.
+They serve to show how extremely limited is the area over which ethics,
+and ethical considerations, can claim to exercise influence.  Science is
+out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.
+Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things
+beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.  To morals belong the lower and
+less intellectual spheres.  However, let these mouthing Puritans pass;
+they have their comic side.  Who can help laughing when an ordinary
+journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal
+of the artist?  Some limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be
+placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers.  For they give
+us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life.  They chronicle, with
+degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the
+conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details
+of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.  But the
+artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet transforms them into
+shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows
+their colour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical import
+also, and builds out of them a world more real than reality itself, and
+of loftier and more noble import—who shall set limits to him?  Not the
+apostles of that new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity ‘writ
+large.’  Not the apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine
+of the hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly.  The mere suggestion
+is ridiculous.  Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed to the
+discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the true critic.
+
+ERNEST.  And what are they?  Tell me yourself.
+
+GILBERT.  Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic—a
+temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various
+impressions that beauty gives us.  Under what conditions, and by what
+means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not
+discuss at present.  It is sufficient to note that it exists, and that
+there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above
+them, separate from the reason and of nobler import, separate from the
+soul and of equal value—a sense that leads some to create, and others,
+the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely.  But to be purified
+and made perfect, this sense requires some form of exquisite environment.
+Without this it starves, or is dulled.  You remember that lovely passage
+in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with
+what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings, telling us
+how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds,
+so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the
+reception of the beauty that is spiritual.  Insensibly, and without
+knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of beauty which,
+as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education.
+By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temperament as
+will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to
+the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine
+instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveliness.
+Ultimately, in its due course, this taste is to become critical and
+self-conscious, but at first it is to exist purely as a cultivated
+instinct, and ‘he who has received this true culture of the inner man
+will with clear and certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in
+art or nature, and with a taste that cannot err, while he praises, and
+finds his pleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and so
+becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now in
+the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why’:
+and so, when, later on, the critical and self-conscious spirit develops
+in him, he ‘will recognise and salute it as a friend with whom his
+education has made him long familiar.’  I need hardly say, Ernest, how
+far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the
+smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one
+ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of
+beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the
+development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of
+the critical spirit.
+
+Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the
+dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter
+in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice
+singing in Waynfleete’s chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the
+strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to
+a finer gold the tower’s gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church
+staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling’s shadowy fans, or pass through the
+sculptured gateway of Laud’s building in the College of St. John.  Nor is
+it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed
+and trained and perfected.  All over England there is a Renaissance of
+the decorative Arts.  Ugliness has had its day.  Even in the houses of
+the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are not rich have
+been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in.  Caliban, poor noisy
+Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to make mows at a thing, the
+thing ceases to exist.  But if he mocks no longer, it is because he has
+been met with mockery, swifter and keener than his own, and for a moment
+has been bitterly schooled into that silence which should seal for ever
+his uncouth distorted lips.  What has been done up to now, has been
+chiefly in the clearing of the way.  It is always more difficult to
+destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is
+vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage
+but also contempt.  Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure, done.
+We have got rid of what was bad.  We have now to make what is beautiful.
+And though the mission of the æsthetic movement is to lure people to
+contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet, as the creative instinct is
+strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt who leads in art, there is no
+reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not become
+almost as mighty in its way as was that new birth of Art that woke many
+centuries ago in the cities of Italy.
+
+Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the
+decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that teach
+us.  Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at.  At least,
+some of them are.  But they are quite impossible to live with; they are
+too clever, too assertive, too intellectual.  Their meaning is too
+obvious, and their method too clearly defined.  One exhausts what they
+have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as
+one’s relations.  I am very fond of the work of many of the Impressionist
+painters of Paris and London.  Subtlety and distinction have not yet left
+the school.  Some of their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one
+of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier’s immortal _Symphonie en Blanc
+Majeur_, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have
+suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.
+For a class that welcomes the incompetent with sympathetic eagerness, and
+that confuses the bizarre with the beautiful, and vulgarity with truth,
+they are extremely accomplished.  They can do etchings that have the
+brilliancy of epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes, and
+as for their portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them, no
+one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm which
+belongs to works of pure fiction.  But even the Impressionists, earnest
+and industrious as they are, will not do.  I like them.  Their white
+keynote, with its variations in lilac, was an era in colour.  Though the
+moment does not make the man, the moment certainly makes the
+Impressionist, and for the moment in art, and the ‘moment’s monument,’ as
+Rossetti phrased it, what may not be said?  They are suggestive also.  If
+they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least given
+great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may
+have all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to
+be ever sensible.  Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it
+were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the illiterate, and
+are always prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their
+unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by a
+vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and
+only modest thing about them.  One tires, at the end, of the work of
+individuals whose individuality is always noisy, and generally
+uninteresting.  There is far more to be said in favour of that newer
+school at Paris, the _Archaicistes_, as they call themselves, who,
+refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather, do not
+find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the
+imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour, and
+rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see,
+try to see something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual
+and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as
+far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic
+purpose.  They, at any rate, work under those decorative conditions that
+each art requires for its perfection, and have sufficient æsthetic
+instinct to regret those sordid and stupid limitations of absolute
+modernity of form which have proved the ruin of so many of the
+Impressionists.  Still, the art that is frankly decorative is the art to
+live with.  It is, of all our visible arts, the one art that creates in
+us both mood and temperament.  Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and
+unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand
+different ways.  The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of
+lines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind.  The repetitions of
+pattern give us rest.  The marvels of design stir the imagination.  In
+the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements
+of culture.  Nor is this all.  By its deliberate rejection of Nature as
+the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary
+painter, decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the reception of
+true imaginative work, but develops in it that sense of form which is the
+basis of creative no less than of critical achievement.  For the real
+artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to
+thought and passion.  He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to
+himself, ‘I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,’
+but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain
+modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is
+to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete.  From
+time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet,
+because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has ‘nothing to say.’
+But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result
+would be tedious.  It is just because he has no new message, that he can
+do beautiful work.  He gains his inspiration from form, and from form
+purely, as an artist should.  A real passion would ruin him.  Whatever
+actually occurs is spoiled for art.  All bad poetry springs from genuine
+feeling.  To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be
+inartistic.
+
+ERNEST.  I wonder do you really believe what you say?
+
+GILBERT.  Why should you wonder?  It is not merely in art that the body
+is the soul.  In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of things.
+The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Plato tells us, both
+rhythm and harmony into the mind.  Forms are the food of faith, cried
+Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that make us admire and
+know the man.  He was right, though he may not have known how terribly
+right he was.  The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational,
+but because they are repeated.  Yes: Form is everything.  It is the
+secret of life.  Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to
+you.  Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy.  Do you
+wish to love?  Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning
+from which the world fancies that they spring.  Have you a grief that
+corrodes your heart?  Steep yourself in the Language of grief, learn its
+utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that
+mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, which is the
+birth of passion, is also the death of pain.  And so, to return to the
+sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not merely the critical
+temperament, but also the æsthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that
+reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty.  Start with
+the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be
+revealed to you, and remember that in criticism, as in creation,
+temperament is everything, and that it is, not by the time of their
+production, but by the temperaments to which they appeal, that the
+schools of art should be historically grouped.
+
+ERNEST.  Your theory of education is delightful.  But what influence will
+your critic, brought up in these exquisite surroundings, possess?  Do you
+really think that any artist is ever affected by criticism?
+
+GILBERT.  The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own
+existence.  He will represent the flawless type.  In him the culture of
+the century will see itself realised.  You must not ask of him to have
+any aim other than the perfecting of himself.  The demand of the
+intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel itself alive.  The
+critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will
+concern himself not with the individual, but with the age, which he will
+seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it
+new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his
+nobler moods.  The actual art of to-day will occupy him less than the art
+of to-morrow, far less than the art of yesterday, and as for this or that
+person at present toiling away, what do the industrious matter?  They do
+their best, no doubt, and consequently we get the worst from them.  It is
+always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.  And
+besides, my dear Ernest, when a man reaches the age of forty, or becomes
+a Royal Academician, or is elected a member of the Athenæum Club, or is
+recognised as a popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at
+suburban railway stations, one may have the amusement of exposing him,
+but one cannot have the pleasure of reforming him.  And this is, I dare
+say, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation is a
+much more painful process than punishment, is indeed punishment in its
+most aggravated and moral form—a fact which accounts for our entire
+failure as a community to reclaim that interesting phenomenon who is
+called the confirmed criminal.
+
+ERNEST.  But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry, and
+the painter of painting?  Each art must appeal primarily to the artist
+who works in it.  His judgment will surely be the most valuable?
+
+GILBERT.  The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic temperament.
+Art does not address herself to the specialist.  Her claim is that she is
+universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one.  Indeed, so far
+from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really
+great artist can never judge of other people’s work at all, and can
+hardly, in fact, judge of his own.  That very concentration of vision
+that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of
+fine appreciation.  The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his
+own goal.  The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around
+him.  The gods are hidden from each other.  They can recognise their
+worshippers.  That is all.
+
+ERNEST.  You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty of work
+different from his own.
+
+GILBERT.  It is impossible for him to do so.  Wordsworth saw in
+_Endymion_ merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his
+dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth’s message, being repelled by
+its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature,
+could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake,
+and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him.  The realism of Euripides
+was hateful to Sophokles.  Those droppings of warm tears had no music for
+him.  Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not understand the
+method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of
+Gainsborough.  Bad artists always admire each other’s work.  They call it
+being large-minded and free from prejudice.  But a truly great artist
+cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any
+conditions other than those that he has selected.  Creation employs all
+its critical faculty within its own sphere.  It may not use it in the
+sphere that belongs to others.  It is exactly because a man cannot do a
+thing that he is the proper judge of it.
+
+ERNEST.  Do you really mean that?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens, the
+vision.
+
+ERNEST.  But what about technique?  Surely each art has its separate
+technique?
+
+GILBERT.  Certainly: each art has its grammar and its materials.  There
+is no mystery about either, and the incompetent can always be correct.
+But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and certain, to
+find their true realisation they must be touched by the imagination into
+such beauty that they will seem an exception, each one of them.
+Technique is really personality.  That is the reason why the artist
+cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the æsthetic
+critic can understand it.  To the great poet, there is only one method of
+music—his own.  To the great painter, there is only one manner of
+painting—that which he himself employs.  The æsthetic critic, and the
+æsthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and modes.  It is to him
+that Art makes her appeal.
+
+ERNEST.  Well, I think I have put all my questions to you.  And now I
+must admit—
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! don’t say that you agree with me.  When people agree with
+me I always feel that I must be wrong.
+
+ERNEST.  In that case I certainly won’t tell you whether I agree with you
+or not.  But I will put another question.  You have explained to me that
+criticism is a creative art.  What future has it?
+
+GILBERT.  It is to criticism that the future belongs.  The subject-matter
+at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and
+variety.  Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted the obvious.
+If creation is to last at all, it can only do so on the condition of
+becoming far more critical than it is at present.  The old roads and
+dusty highways have been traversed too often.  Their charm has been worn
+away by plodding feet, and they have lost that element of novelty or
+surprise which is so essential for romance.  He who would stir us now by
+fiction must either give us an entirely new background, or reveal to us
+the soul of man in its innermost workings.  The first is for the moment
+being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling.  As one turns over the pages of
+his _Plain Tales from the Hills_, one feels as if one were seated under a
+palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.  The bright
+colours of the bazaars dazzle one’s eyes.  The jaded, second-rate
+Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings.  The
+mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism
+to what he tells us.  From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is
+a genius who drops his aspirates.  From the point of view of life, he is
+a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
+Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy.  Mr. Kipling knows its essence
+and its seriousness.  He is our first authority on the second-rate, and
+has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real
+works of art.  As for the second condition, we have had Browning, and
+Meredith is with us.  But there is still much to be done in the sphere of
+introspection.  People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid.
+As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough.  We
+have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all.  In one single
+ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and
+more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of _Le
+Rouge et le Noir_, have sought to track the soul into its most secret
+places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.  Still, there is a
+limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it is possible that
+a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal to
+that creative faculty to which it seeks to supply fresh material.  I
+myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed.  It springs from too
+primitive, too natural an impulse.  However this may be, it is certain
+that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always
+diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily.
+There are always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view.  The
+duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world
+advances.  There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it
+is now.  It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of
+the point at which it has arrived.
+
+Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism.  You might just as
+well have asked me the use of thought.  It is Criticism, as Arnold points
+out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age.  It is
+Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that makes the mind a
+fine instrument.  We, in our educational system, have burdened the memory
+with a load of unconnected facts, and laboriously striven to impart our
+laboriously-acquired knowledge.  We teach people how to remember, we
+never teach them how to grow.  It has never occurred to us to try and
+develop in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and
+discernment.  The Greeks did this, and when we come in contact with the
+Greek critical intellect, we cannot but be conscious that, while our
+subject-matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs,
+theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can be
+interpreted.  England has done one thing; it has invented and established
+Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the
+community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.  But
+Wisdom has always been hidden from it.  Considered as an instrument of
+thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped.  The only thing that
+can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.
+
+It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture possible.
+It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a
+finer essence.  Who that desires to retain any sense of form could
+struggle through the monstrous multitudinous books that the world has
+produced, books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls?  The
+thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands
+of Criticism.  Nay more, where there is no record, and history is either
+lost, or was never written, Criticism can re-create the past for us from
+the very smallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as the man
+of science can from some tiny bone, or the mere impress of a foot upon a
+rock, re-create for us the winged dragon or Titan lizard that once made
+the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth out of his cave, and
+make Leviathan swim once more across the startled sea.  Prehistoric
+history belongs to the philological and archæological critic.  It is to
+him that the origins of things are revealed.  The self-conscious deposits
+of an age are nearly always misleading.  Through philological criticism
+alone we know more of the centuries of which no actual record has been
+preserved, than we do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls.
+It can do for us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics.  It
+can give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming.  It can
+do for us what History cannot do.  It can tell us what man thought before
+he learned how to write.  You have asked me about the influence of
+Criticism.  I think I have answered that question already; but there is
+this also to be said.  It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan.  The
+Manchester school tried to make men realise the brotherhood of humanity,
+by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace.  It sought to degrade
+the wonderful world into a common market-place for the buyer and the
+seller.  It addressed itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed.  War
+followed upon war, and the tradesman’s creed did not prevent France and
+Germany from clashing together in blood-stained battle.  There are others
+of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or to the
+shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics.  They have their
+Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and their proposals for
+unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among those who have never
+read history.  But mere emotional sympathy will not do.  It is too
+variable, and too closely connected with the passions; and a board of
+arbitrators who, for the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived
+of the power of putting their decisions into execution, will not be of
+much avail.  There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and that is
+Justice without her sword in her hand.  When Right is not Might, it is
+Evil.
+
+No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the greed
+for gain could do so.  It is only by the cultivation of the habit of
+intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to
+race-prejudices.  Goethe—you will not misunderstand what I say—was a
+German of the Germans.  He loved his country—no man more so.  Its people
+were dear to him; and he led them.  Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon
+trampled upon vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent.  ‘How can one
+write songs of hatred without hating?’ he said to Eckermann, ‘and how
+could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a
+nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe
+so great a part of my own cultivation?’  This note, sounded in the modern
+world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the
+cosmopolitanism of the future.  Criticism will annihilate
+race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the
+variety of its forms.  If we are tempted to make war upon another nation,
+we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own
+culture, and possibly its most important element.  As long as war is
+regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.  When it is
+looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.  The change will of
+course be slow, and people will not be conscious of it.  They will not
+say ‘We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,’ but
+because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.
+Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than
+those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist.  It will give us
+the peace that springs from understanding.
+
+Nor is this all.  It is Criticism that, recognising no position as final,
+and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or
+school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its
+own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it to be
+unattainable.  How little we have of this temper in England, and how much
+we need it!  The English mind is always in a rage.  The intellect of the
+race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate
+politicians or third-rate theologians.  It was reserved for a man of
+science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of
+which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect.  The author
+of the _Origin of Species_ had, at any rate, the philosophic temper.  If
+one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can
+but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne.  We
+are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.
+Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown
+amongst us.  People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful,
+but the stupid, who are our shame.  There is no sin except stupidity.
+
+ERNEST.  Ah! what an antinomian you are!
+
+GILBERT.  The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always.
+To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously
+quite easy.  It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a
+certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for
+middle-class respectability.  Æsthetics are higher than ethics.  They
+belong to a more spiritual sphere.  To discern the beauty of a thing is
+the finest point to which we can arrive.  Even a colour-sense is more
+important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right
+and wrong.  Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious
+civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to
+natural selection.  Ethics, like natural selection, make existence
+possible.  Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and
+wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and
+change.  And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to
+that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those
+to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the
+ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the
+soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being
+an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a
+richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought,
+acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the
+uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile.  Is this dangerous?  Yes;
+it is dangerous—all ideas, as I told you, are so.  But the night wearies,
+and the light flickers in the lamp.  One more thing I cannot help saying
+to you.  You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing.  The
+nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of
+the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of
+Nature, the other the critic of the books of God.  Not to recognise this
+is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress
+of the world.  Creation is always behind the age.  It is Criticism that
+leads us.  The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.
+
+ERNEST.  And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this spirit
+possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?
+
+GILBERT.  Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet pensive
+Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and amaranth are
+blooming, he will sit contented ‘in that deep, motionless quiet which
+mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.’  He will look out upon the world
+and know its secret.  By contact with divine things he will become
+divine.  His will be the perfect life, and his only.
+
+ERNEST.  You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert.  You
+have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do
+it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the
+world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought
+dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the
+highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the
+artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do a
+thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is
+unfair, insincere, and not rational.  My friend, you are a dreamer.
+
+GILBERT.  Yes: I am a dreamer.  For a dreamer is one who can only find
+his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before
+the rest of the world.
+
+ERNEST.  His punishment?
+
+GILBERT.  And his reward.  But, see, it is dawn already.  Draw back the
+curtains and open the windows wide.  How cool the morning air is!
+Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver.  A faint purple
+mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple.
+It is too late to sleep.  Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the
+roses.  Come!  I am tired of thought.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRUTH OF MASKS
+A NOTE ON ILLUSION
+
+
+IN many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made on
+that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian
+revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics
+that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes of
+his actors, and that, could he see Mrs. Langtry’s production of _Antony
+and Cleopatra_, he would probably say that the play, and the play only,
+is the thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella.  While,
+as regards any historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article
+in the _Nineteenth Century_, has laid it down as a dogma of art that
+archæology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of
+Shakespeare’s plays, and the attempt to introduce it one of the stupidest
+pedantries of an age of prigs.
+
+Lord Lytton’s position I shall examine later on; but, as regards the
+theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about the
+costume-wardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to study Shakespeare’s
+method will see that there is absolutely no dramatist of the French,
+English, or Athenian stage who relies so much for his illusionist effects
+on the dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself.
+
+Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty of
+costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques and dances,
+purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye; and we have
+still his stage-directions for the three great processions in _Henry the
+Eighth_, directions which are characterised by the most extraordinary
+elaborateness of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in
+Anne Boleyn’s hair.  Indeed it would be quite easy for a modern manager
+to reproduce these pageants absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed;
+and so accurate were they that one of the court officials of the time,
+writing an account of the last performance of the play at the Globe
+Theatre to a friend, actually complains of their realistic character,
+notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of the Garter in
+the robes and insignia of the order as being calculated to bring ridicule
+on the real ceremonies; much in the same spirit in which the French
+Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful actor, M.
+Christian, from appearing in uniform, on the plea that it was prejudicial
+to the glory of the army that a colonel should be caricatured.  And
+elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English
+stage under Shakespeare’s influence was attacked by the contemporary
+critics, not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic
+tendencies of realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are
+always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.
+
+The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare
+appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to
+poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing
+certain dramatic effects.  Many of his plays, such as _Measure for
+Measure_, _Twelfth Night_, _The Two Gentleman of Verona_, _All’s Well
+that Ends Well_, _Cymbeline_, and others, depend for their illusion on
+the character of the various dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the
+delightful scene in _Henry the Sixth_, on the modern miracles of healing
+by faith, loses all its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and
+the _dénoûment_ of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ hinges on the colour of
+Anne Page’s gown.  As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises the
+instances are almost numberless.  Posthumus hides his passion under a
+peasant’s garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot’s rags; Portia wears
+the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired in ‘all points as a
+man’; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen to the Youth Fidele;
+Jessica flees from her father’s house in boy’s dress, and Julia ties up
+her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry
+the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim;
+Prince Hal and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits, and then
+in white aprons and leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as
+for Falstaff, does he not come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as
+Herne the Hunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?
+
+Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of
+intensifying dramatic situation less numerous.  After slaughter of
+Duncan, Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep; Timon
+ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richard flatters the
+London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and, as soon as he
+has stepped in blood to the throne, marches through the streets in crown
+and George and Garter; the climax of _The Tempest_ is reached when
+Prospero, throwing off his enchanter’s robes, sends Ariel for his hat and
+rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in
+_Hamlet_ changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects; and
+as for Juliet, a modern playwright would probably have laid her out in
+her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare
+arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault
+‘a feasting presence full of light,’ turns the tomb into a bridal
+chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo’s speech of the triumph
+of Beauty over Death.
+
+Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo’s
+stockings, the pattern on a wife’s handkerchief, the sleeve of a young
+soldier, and a fashionable woman’s bonnets, become in Shakespeare’s hands
+points of actual dramatic importance, and by some of them the action of
+the play in question is conditioned absolutely.  Many other dramatists
+have availed themselves of costume as a method of expressing directly to
+the audience the character of a person on his entrance, though hardly so
+brilliantly as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles,
+whose dress, by the way, only an archæologist can understand; the fun of
+a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of
+shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine
+clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups,
+may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always
+played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but
+nobody from the mere details of apparel and adornment has ever drawn such
+irony of contrast, such immediate and tragic effect, such pity and such
+pathos, as Shakespeare himself.  Armed cap-à-pie, the dead King stalks on
+the battlements of Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark;
+Shylock’s Jewish gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded
+and embittered nature writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of
+no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert—
+
+    Have you the heart? when your head did but ache,
+    I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
+    (The best I had, a princess wrought it me)
+    And I did never ask it you again;
+
+and Orlando’s blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre note in that
+exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feeling that
+underlies Rosalind’s fanciful wit and wilful jesting.
+
+    Last night ’twas on my arm; I kissed it;
+    I hope it be not gone to tell my lord
+    That I kiss aught but he,
+
+says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already on its
+way to Rome to rob her of her husband’s faith; the little Prince passing
+to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle’s girdle; Duncan sends a
+ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own murder, and the ring of
+Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant into a wife’s comedy.  The great
+rebel York dies with a paper crown on his head; Hamlet’s black suit is a
+kind of colour-motive in the piece, like the mourning of the Chimène in
+the _Cid_; and the climax of Antony’s speech is the production of Cæsar’s
+cloak:—
+
+             I remember
+    The first time ever Cæsar put it on.
+    ’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,
+    The day he overcame the Nervii:—
+    Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
+    See what a rent the envious Casca made:
+    Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . .
+    Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
+    Our Cæsar’s vesture wounded?
+
+The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as pathetic
+as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of Lear’s wandering on
+the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic attire; and when
+Cloten, stung by the taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her
+husband’s raiment, arrays himself in that husband’s very garb to work
+upon her the deed of shame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of
+modern French realism, nothing even in _Thérèse Raquin_, that masterpiece
+of horror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with
+this strange scene in _Cymbeline_.
+
+In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are those
+suggested by costume.  Rosalind’s
+
+    Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet
+    and hose in my disposition?
+
+Constance’s
+
+    Grief fills the place of my absent child,
+    Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
+
+and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth—
+
+    Ah! cut my lace asunder!—
+
+are only a few of the many examples one might quote.  One of the finest
+effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the last act of
+_Lear_, tearing the plume from Kent’s cap and applying it to Cordelia’s
+lips when he came to the line,
+
+                        This feather stirs; she lives!
+
+Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked, I
+remember, some fur from his archæologically-incorrect ermine for the same
+business; but Salvini’s was the finer effect of the two, as well as the
+truer.  And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last act of _Richard the
+Third_ have not, I am sure, forgotten how much the agony and terror of
+his dream was intensified, by contrast, through the calm and quiet that
+preceded it, and the delivery of such lines as
+
+    What, is my beaver easier than it was?
+    And all my armour laid into my tent?
+    Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy—
+
+lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the last
+words which Richard’s mother called after him as he was marching to
+Bosworth:—
+
+    Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,
+    Which in the day of battle tire thee more
+    Than all the complete armour that thou wear’st.
+
+As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it is to
+be remarked that, while he more than once complains of the smallness of
+the stage on which he has to produce big historical plays, and of the
+want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many effective open-air
+incidents, he always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a most
+elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors taking
+pains about their make-up.  Even now it is difficult to produce such a
+play as the _Comedy of Errors_; and to the picturesque accident of Miss
+Ellen Terry’s brother resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing
+_Twelfth Night_ adequately performed.  Indeed, to put any play of
+Shakespeare’s on the stage, absolutely as he himself wished it to be
+done, requires the services of a good property-man, a clever wig-maker, a
+costumier with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, a master of
+the methods of making-up, a fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an
+artist to direct personally the whole production.  For he is most careful
+to tell us the dress and appearance of each character.  ‘Racine abhorre
+la réalité,’ says Auguste Vacquerie somewhere; ‘il ne daigne pas
+s’occuper de son costume.  Si l’on s’en rapportait aux indications du
+poète, Agamemnon serait vêtu d’un sceptre et Achille d’une épée.’  But
+with Shakespeare it is very different.  He gives us directions about the
+costumes of Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in _Macbeth_, and
+the apothecary in _Romeo and Juliet_, several elaborate descriptions of
+his fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb in which
+Petruchio is to be married.  Rosalind, he tells us, is tall, and is to
+carry a spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller, and is to paint her
+face brown so as to look sunburnt.  The children who play at fairies in
+Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white and green—a compliment, by the
+way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite colours they were—and in white,
+with green garlands and gilded vizors, the angels are to come to
+Katherine in Kimbolton.  Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished
+from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his
+boots.  The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her
+husband in mourning beside her.  The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of
+the Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are
+all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue.  We know the
+patterns on the Dauphin’s armour and the Pucelle’s sword, the crest on
+Warwick’s helmet and the colour of Bardolph’s nose.  Portia has golden
+hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew
+Aguecheek’s hair hangs like flax on a distaff, and won’t curl at all.
+Some of the characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some
+hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to blacken their faces.
+Lear has a white beard, Hamlet’s father a grizzled, and Benedick is to
+shave his in the course of the play.  Indeed, on the subject of stage
+beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate; tells us of the many different
+colours in use, and gives a hint to actors always to see that their own
+are properly tied on.  There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats, and
+of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque of
+Russians, and a classical masque; several immortal scenes over a weaver
+in an ass’s head, a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes the
+Lord Mayor of London to quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband
+and his wife’s milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.
+
+As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms he
+makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at the
+ridiculous size of the ladies’ bonnets, and the many descriptions of the
+_mundus muliebris_, from the long of Autolycus in the _Winter’s Tale_
+down to the account of the Duchess of Milan’s gown in _Much Ado About
+Nothing_, they are far too numerous to quote; though it may be worth
+while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to
+be found in Lear’s scene with Edgar—a passage which has the advantage of
+brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing
+metaphysics of _Sartor Resartus_.  But I think that from what I have
+already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much interested
+in costume.  I do not mean in that shallow sense by which it has been
+concluded from his knowledge of deeds and daffodils that he was the
+Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan age; but that he saw that
+costume could be made at once impressive of a certain effect on the
+audience and expressive of certain types of character, and is one of the
+essential factors of the means which a true illusionist has at his
+disposal.  Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard was of as much
+value as Juliet’s loveliness; he sets the serge of the radical beside the
+silks of the lord, and sees the stage effects to be got from each: he has
+as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth
+of gold, and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.
+
+The difficulty Ducis felt about translating _Othello_ in consequence of
+the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his
+attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate ‘Le bandeau!
+le bandeau!’ may be taken as an example of the difference between _la
+tragédie philosophique_ and the drama of real life; and the introduction
+for the first time of the word _mouchoir_ at the Théâtre Français was an
+era in that romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and
+M. Zola the _enfant terrible_, just as the classicism of the earlier part
+of the century was emphasised by Talma’s refusal to play Greek heroes any
+longer in a powdered periwig—one of the many instances, by the way, of
+that desire for archæological accuracy in dress which has distinguished
+the great actors of our age.
+
+In criticising the importance given to money in _La Comédie Humaine_,
+Théophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero
+in fiction, _le héros métallique_.  Of Shakespeare it may be said he was
+the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may
+depend on a crinoline.
+
+The burning of the Globe Theatre—an event due, by the way, to the results
+of the passion for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare’s
+stage-management—has unfortunately robbed us of many important documents;
+but in the inventory, still in existence, of the costume-wardrobe of a
+London theatre in Shakespeare’s time, there are mentioned particular
+costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns, friars, and fools;
+green coats for Robin Hood’s men, and a green gown for Maid Marian; a
+white and gold doublet for Henry the Fifth, and a robe for Longshanks;
+besides surplices, copes, damask gowns, gowns of cloth of gold and of
+cloth of silver, taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet coats, satin coats,
+frieze coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather, red suits,
+grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe ‘for to goo invisibell,’ which
+seems inexpensive at £3, 10s., and four incomparable fardingales—all of
+which show a desire to give every character an appropriate dress.  There
+are also entries of Spanish, Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets,
+lances, painted shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of
+costumes for Turkish Janissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and
+goddesses of Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archæological
+research on the part of the manager of the theatre.  It is true that
+there is a mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the _donnée_ of the
+play was after the Fall.
+
+Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare will see that
+archæology was one of its special characteristics.  After that revival of
+the classical forms of architecture which was one of the notes of the
+Renaissance, and the printing at Venice and elsewhere of the masterpieces
+of Greek and Latin literature, had come naturally an interest in the
+ornamentation and costume of the antique world.  Nor was it for the
+learning that they could acquire, but rather for the loveliness that they
+might create, that the artists studied these things.  The curious objects
+that were being constantly brought to light by excavations were not left
+to moulder in a museum, for the contemplation of a callous curator, and
+the _ennui_ of a policeman bored by the absence of crime.  They were used
+as motives for the production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful
+merely, but also strange.
+
+Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way
+came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name ‘Julia,
+daughter of Claudius.’  On opening the coffer they found within its
+marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age,
+preserved by the embalmer’s skill from corruption and the decay of time.
+Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curling
+gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet
+departed.  Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the centre of a
+new cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at
+the wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the
+secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judæa’s rough
+and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by night,
+and in secret buried.  Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the
+less valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the
+antique world.  Archæology to them was not a mere science for the
+antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of
+antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new
+wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn.  From the
+pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna’s ‘Triumph of Cæsar,’ and the
+service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit
+can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts—the arts
+of arrested movement—but its influence was to be seen also in the great
+Græco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts
+of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the
+citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that
+chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so
+important that large prints were made of them and published—a fact which
+is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such kind.
+
+And this use of archæology in shows, so far from being a bit of priggish
+pedantry, is in every way legitimate and beautiful.  For the stage is not
+merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but is also the return of art
+to life.  Sometimes in an archæological novel the use of strange and
+obsolete terms seems to hide the reality beneath the learning, and I dare
+say that many of the readers of _Notre Dame de Paris_ have been much
+puzzled over the meaning of such expressions as _la casaque à mahoitres_,
+_les voulgiers_, _le gallimard taché d’encre_, _les craaquiniers_, and
+the like; but with the stage how different it is!  The ancient world
+wakes from its sleep, and history moves as a pageant before our eyes,
+without obliging us to have recourse to a dictionary or an encyclopædia
+for the perfection of our enjoyment.  Indeed, there is not the slightest
+necessity that the public should know the authorities for the mounting of
+any piece.  From such materials, for instance, as the disk of Theodosius,
+materials with which the majority of people are probably not very
+familiar, Mr. E. W. Godwin, one of the most artistic spirits of this
+century in England, created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of
+_Claudian_, and showed us the life of Byzantium in the fourth century,
+not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts, not by a novel which
+requires a glossary to explain it, but by the visible presentation before
+us of all the glory of that great town.  And while the costumes were true
+to the smallest points of colour and design, yet the details were not
+assigned that abnormal importance which they must necessarily be given in
+a piecemeal lecture, but were subordinated to the rules of lofty
+composition and the unity of artistic effect.  Mr. Symonds, speaking of
+that great picture of Mantegna’s, now in Hampton Court, says that the
+artist has converted an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of
+line.  The same could have been said with equal justice of Mr. Godwin’s
+scene.  Only the foolish called it pedantry, only those who would neither
+look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play being killed by its
+paint.  It was in reality a scene not merely perfect in its
+picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also, getting rid of any
+necessity for tedious descriptions, and showing us, by the colour and
+character of Claudian’s dress, and the dress of his attendants, the whole
+nature and life of the man, from what school of philosophy he affected,
+down to what horses he backed on the turf.
+
+And indeed archæology is only really delightful when transfused into some
+form of art.  I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious
+scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lemprière’s Dictionary is
+of far more value to us than Professor Max Müller’s treatment of the same
+mythology as a disease of language.  Better _Endymion_ than any theory,
+however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic
+among adjectives!  And who does not feel that the chief glory of
+Piranesi’s book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his
+‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?  Art, and art only, can make archæology
+beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most
+vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of
+actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.  But the sixteenth
+century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio
+also.  Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress
+of its neighbours.  Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the
+amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary.
+At the beginning of the century the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, with its two
+thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
+was over seventeen editions were published of Munster’s _Cosmography_.
+Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of
+Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well
+illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the
+hand of Titian.
+
+Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their
+knowledge.  The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased
+commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic
+missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various
+forms of contemporary dress.  After the departure from England, for
+instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of
+Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the
+strange attire of their visitors.  Later on London saw, perhaps too
+often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came
+envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an
+important influence on English costume.
+
+And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress, or the dress
+of foreign nations; there was also a good deal of research, amongst
+theatrical people especially, into the ancient costume of England itself:
+and when Shakespeare, in the prologue to one of his plays, expresses his
+regret at being unable to produce helmets of the period, he is speaking
+as an Elizabethan manager and not merely as an Elizabethan poet.  At
+Cambridge, for instance, during his day, a play of _Richard The Third_
+was performed, in which the actors were attired in real dresses of the
+time, procured from the great collection of historical costume in the
+Tower, which was always open to the inspection of managers, and sometimes
+placed at their disposal.  And I cannot help thinking that this
+performance must have been far more artistic, as regards costume, than
+Garrick’s mounting of Shakespeare’s own play on the subject, in which he
+himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress, and everybody else in the
+costume of the time of George the Third, Richmond especially being much
+admired in the uniform of a young guardsman.
+
+For what is the use to the stage of that archæology which has so
+strangely terrified the critics, but that it, and it alone, can give us
+the architecture and apparel suitable to the time in which the action of
+the play passes?  It enables us to see a Greek dressed like a Greek, and
+an Italian like an Italian; to enjoy the arcades of Venice and the
+balconies of Verona; and, if the play deals with any of the great eras in
+our country’s history, to contemplate the age in its proper attire, and
+the king in his habit as he lived.  And I wonder, by the way, what Lord
+Lytton would have said some time ago, at the Princess’s Theatre, had the
+curtain risen on his father’s Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair,
+attired in a flowing wig and a flowered dressing-gown, a costume which in
+the last century was considered peculiarly appropriate to an antique
+Roman!  For in those halcyon days of the drama no archæology troubled the
+stage, or distressed the critics, and our inartistic grandfathers sat
+peaceably in a stifling atmosphere of anachronisms, and beheld with the
+calm complacency of the age of prose an Iachimo in powder and patches, a
+Lear in lace ruffles, and a Lady Macbeth in a large crinoline.  I can
+understand archæology being attacked on the ground of its excessive
+realism, but to attack it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the
+mark.  However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as
+well speak disrespectfully of the equator.  For archæology, being a
+science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply.  Its value depends
+entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it.  We look to
+the archæologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.
+
+In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the
+first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama.
+This should be determined by the general spirit of the play, more than by
+any actual historical references which may occur in it.  Most _Hamlets_ I
+have seen were placed far too early.  _Hamlet_ is essentially a scholar
+of the Revival of Learning; and if the allusion to the recent invasion of
+England by the Danes puts it back to the ninth century, the use of foils
+brings it down much later.  Once, however, that the date has been fixed,
+then the archæologist is to supply us with the facts which the artist is
+to convert into effects.
+
+It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves show us
+that Shakespeare was indifferent to historical accuracy, and a great deal
+of capital has been made out of Hector’s indiscreet quotation from
+Aristotle.  Upon the other hand, the anachronisms are really few in
+number, and not very important, and, had Shakespeare’s attention been
+drawn to them by a brother artist, he would probably have corrected them.
+For, though they can hardly be called blemishes, they are certainly not
+the great beauties of his work; or, at least, if they are, their
+anachronistic charm cannot be emphasised unless the play is accurately
+mounted according to its proper date.  In looking at Shakespeare’s plays
+as a whole, however, what is really remarkable is their extraordinary
+fidelity as regards his personages and his plots.  Many of his _dramatis
+personæ_ are people who had actually existed, and some of them might have
+been seen in real life by a portion of his audience.  Indeed the most
+violent attack that was made on Shakespeare in his time was for his
+supposed caricature of Lord Cobham.  As for his plots, Shakespeare
+constantly draws them either from authentic history, or from the old
+ballads and traditions which served as history to the Elizabethan public,
+and which even now no scientific historian would dismiss as absolutely
+untrue.  And not merely did he select fact instead of fancy as the basis
+of much of his imaginative work, but he always gives to each play the
+general character, the social atmosphere in a word, of the age in
+question.  Stupidity he recognises as being one of the permanent
+characteristics of all European civilisations; so he sees no difference
+between a London mob of his own day and a Roman mob of pagan days,
+between a silly watchman in Messina and a silly Justice of the Peace in
+Windsor.  But when he deals with higher characters, with those exceptions
+of each age which are so fine that they become its types, he gives them
+absolutely the stamp and seal of their time.  Virgilia is one of those
+Roman wives on whose tomb was written ‘Domi mansit, lanam fecit,’ as
+surely as Juliet is the romantic girl of the Renaissance.  He is even
+true to the characteristics of race.  Hamlet has all the imagination and
+irresolution of the Northern nations, and the Princess Katharine is as
+entirely French as the heroine of _Divorçons_.  Harry the Fifth is a pure
+Englishman, and Othello a true Moor.
+
+Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from the
+fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it is wonderful how careful he is
+to have his facts perfectly right—indeed he follows Holinshed with
+curious fidelity.  The incessant wars between France and England are
+described with extraordinary accuracy down to the names of the besieged
+towns, the ports of landing and embarkation, the sites and dates of the
+battles, the titles of the commanders on each side, and the lists of the
+killed and wounded.  And as regards the Civil Wars of the Roses we have
+many elaborate genealogies of the seven sons of Edward the Third; the
+claims of the rival Houses of York and Lancaster to the throne are
+discussed at length; and if the English aristocracy will not read
+Shakespeare as a poet, they should certainly read him as a sort of early
+Peerage.  There is hardly a single title in the Upper House, with the
+exception of course of the uninteresting titles assumed by the law lords,
+which does not appear in Shakespeare along with many details of family
+history, creditable and discreditable.  Indeed if it be really necessary
+that the School Board children should know all about the Wars of the
+Roses, they could learn their lessons just as well out of Shakespeare as
+out of shilling primers, and learn them, I need not say, far more
+pleasurably.  Even in Shakespeare’s own day this use of his plays was
+recognised.  ‘The historical plays teach history to those who cannot read
+it in the chronicles,’ says Heywood in a tract about the stage, and yet I
+am sure that sixteenth-century chronicles were much more delightful
+reading than nineteenth-century primers are.
+
+Of course the æsthetic value of Shakespeare’s plays does not, in the
+slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth, and Truth is
+independent of facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure.
+But still Shakespeare’s use of facts is a most interesting part of his
+method of work, and shows us his attitude towards the stage, and his
+relations to the great art of illusion.  Indeed he would have been very
+much surprised at any one classing his plays with ‘fairy tales,’ as Lord
+Lytton does; for one of his aims was to create for England a national
+historical drama, which should deal with incidents with which the public
+was well acquainted, and with heroes that lived in the memory of a
+people.  Patriotism, I need hardly say, is not a necessary quality of
+art; but it means, for the artist, the substitution of a universal for an
+individual feeling, and for the public the presentation of a work of art
+in a most attractive and popular form.  It is worth noticing that
+Shakespeare’s first and last successes were both historical plays.
+
+It may be asked, what has this to do with Shakespeare’s attitude towards
+costume?  I answer that a dramatist who laid such stress on historical
+accuracy of fact would have welcomed historical accuracy of costume as a
+most important adjunct to his illusionist method.  And I have no
+hesitation in saying that he did so.  The reference to helmets of the
+period in the prologue to _Henry the Fifth_ may be considered fanciful,
+though Shakespeare must have often seen
+
+             The very casque
+    That did affright the air at Agincourt,
+
+where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey, along with
+the saddle of that ‘imp of fame,’ and the dinted shield with its torn
+blue velvet lining and its tarnished lilies of gold; but the use of
+military tabards in _Henry the Sixth_ is a bit of pure archæology, as
+they were not worn in the sixteenth century; and the King’s own tabard, I
+may mention, was still suspended over his tomb in St. George’s Chapel,
+Windsor, in Shakespeare’s day.  For, up to the time of the unfortunate
+triumph of the Philistines in 1645, the chapels and cathedrals of England
+were the great national museums of archæology, and in them were kept the
+armour and attire of the heroes of English history.  A good deal was of
+course preserved in the Tower, and even in Elizabeth’s day tourists were
+brought there to see such curious relics of the past as Charles Brandon’s
+huge lance, which is still, I believe, the admiration of our country
+visitors; but the cathedrals and churches were, as a rule, selected as
+the most suitable shrines for the reception of the historic antiquities.
+Canterbury can still show us the helm of the Black Prince, Westminster
+the robes of our kings, and in old St. Paul’s the very banner that had
+waved on Bosworth field was hung up by Richmond himself.
+
+In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London, he saw the apparel
+and appurtenances of past ages, and it is impossible to doubt that he
+made use of his opportunities.  The employment of lance and shield, for
+instance, in actual warfare, which is so frequent in his plays, is drawn
+from archæology, and not from the military accoutrements of his day; and
+his general use of armour in battle was not a characteristic of his age,
+a time when it was rapidly disappearing before firearms.  Again, the
+crest on Warwick’s helmet, of which such a point is made in _Henry the
+Sixth_, is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century play when crests
+were generally worn, but would not have been so in a play of
+Shakespeare’s own time, when feathers and plumes had taken their place—a
+fashion which, as he tells us in _Henry the Eighth_, was borrowed from
+France.  For the historical plays, then, we may be sure that archæology
+was employed, and as for the others I feel certain that it was the case
+also.  The appearance of Jupiter on his eagle, thunderbolt in hand, of
+Juno with her peacocks, and of Iris with her many-coloured bow; the
+Amazon masque and the masque of the Five Worthies, may all be regarded as
+archæological; and the vision which Posthumus sees in prison of Sicilius
+Leonatus—‘an old man, attired like a warrior, leading an ancient
+matron’—is clearly so.  Of the ‘Athenian dress’ by which Lysander is
+distinguished from Oberon I have already spoken; but one of the most
+marked instances is in the case of the dress of Coriolanus, for which
+Shakespeare goes directly to Plutarch.  That historian, in his Life of
+the great Roman, tells us of the oak-wreath with which Caius Marcius was
+crowned, and of the curious kind of dress in which, according to ancient
+fashion, he had to canvass his electors; and on both of these points he
+enters into long disquisitions, investigating the origin and meaning of
+the old customs.  Shakespeare, in the spirit of the true artist, accepts
+the facts of the antiquarian and converts them into dramatic and
+picturesque effects: indeed the gown of humility, the ‘woolvish gown,’ as
+Shakespeare calls it, is the central note of the play.  There are other
+cases I might quote, but this one is quite sufficient for my purpose; and
+it is evident from it at any rate that, in mounting a play in the
+accurate costume of the time, according to the best authorities, we are
+carrying out Shakespeare’s own wishes and method.
+
+Even if it were not so, there is no more reason that we should continue
+any imperfections which may be supposed to have characterised
+Shakespeare’s stage mounting than that we should have Juliet played by a
+young man, or give up the advantage of changeable scenery.  A great work
+of dramatic art should not merely be made expressive of modern passion by
+means of the actor, but should be presented to us in the form most
+suitable to the modern spirit.  Racine produced his Roman plays in Louis
+Quatorze dress on a stage crowded with spectators; but we require
+different conditions for the enjoyment of his art.  Perfect accuracy of
+detail, for the sake of perfect illusion, is necessary for us.  What we
+have to see is that the details are not allowed to usurp the principal
+place.  They must be subordinate always to the general motive of the
+play.  But subordination in art does not mean disregard of truth; it
+means conversion of fact into effect, and assigning to each detail its
+proper relative value
+
+    ‘Les petits détails d’histoire et de vie domestique (says Hugo)
+    doivent être scrupuleusement étudiés et reproduits par le poète, mais
+    uniquement comme des moyens d’accroître la réalité de l’ensemble, et
+    de faire pénétrer jusque dans les coins les plus obscurs de l’œuvre
+    cette vie générale et puissante au milieu de laquelle les personnages
+    sont plus vrais, et les catastrophes, par conséqueut, plus
+    poignantes.  Tout doit être subordonné à ce but.  L’Homme sur le
+    premier plan, le reste au fond.’
+
+This passage is interesting as coming from the first great French
+dramatist who employed archæology on the stage, and whose plays, though
+absolutely correct in detail, are known to all for their passion, not for
+their pedantry—for their life, not for their learning.  It is true that
+he has made certain concessions in the case of the employment of curious
+or strange expressions.  Ruy Blas talks of M, de Priego as ‘sujet du roi’
+instead of ‘noble du roi,’ and Angelo Malipieri speaks of ‘la croix
+rouge’ instead of ‘la croix de gueules.’  But they are concessions made
+to the public, or rather to a section of it.  ‘J’en offre ici toute mes
+excuses aux spectateurs intelligents,’ he says in a note to one of the
+plays; ‘espérons qu’un jour un seigneur vénitien pourra dire tout
+bonnement sans péril son blason sur le théâtre.  C’est un progrès qui
+viendra.’  And, though the description of the crest is not couched in
+accurate language, still the crest itself was accurately right.  It may,
+of course, be said that the public do not notice these things; upon the
+other hand, it should be remembered that Art has no other aim but her own
+perfection, and proceeds simply by her own laws, and that the play which
+Hamlet describes as being caviare to the general is a play he highly
+praises.  Besides, in England, at any rate, the public have undergone a
+transformation; there is far more appreciation of beauty now than there
+was a few years ago; and though they may not be familiar with the
+authorities and archæological data for what is shown to them, still they
+enjoy whatever loveliness they look at.  And this is the important thing.
+Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a
+microscope.  Archæological accuracy is merely a condition of illusionist
+stage effect; it is not its quality.  And Lord Lytton’s proposal that the
+dresses should merely be beautiful without being accurate is founded on a
+misapprehension of the nature of costume, and of its value on the stage.
+This value is twofold, picturesque and dramatic; the former depends on
+the colour of the dress, the latter on its design and character.  But so
+interwoven are the two that, whenever in our own day historical accuracy
+has been disregarded, and the various dresses in a play taken from
+different ages, the result has been that the stage has been turned into
+that chaos of costume, that caricature of the centuries, the Fancy Dress
+Ball, to the entire ruin of all dramatic and picturesque effect.  For the
+dresses of one age do not artistically harmonise with the dresses of
+another: and, as far as dramatic value goes, to confuse the costumes is
+to confuse the play.  Costume is a growth, an evolution, and a most
+important, perhaps the most important, sign of the manners, customs and
+mode of life of each century.  The Puritan dislike of colour, adornment
+and grace in apparel was part of the great revolt of the middle classes
+against Beauty in the seventeenth century.  A historian who disregarded
+it would give us a most inaccurate picture of the time, and a dramatist
+who did not avail himself of it would miss a most vital element in
+producing an illusionist effect.  The effeminacy of dress that
+characterised the reign of Richard the Second was a constant theme of
+contemporary authors.  Shakespeare, writing two hundred years after,
+makes the king’s fondness for gay apparel and foreign fashions a point in
+the play, from John of Gaunt’s reproaches down to Richard’s own speech in
+the third act on his deposition from the throne.  And that Shakespeare
+examined Richard’s tomb in Westminster Abbey seems to me certain from
+York’s speech:—
+
+    See, see, King Richard doth himself appear
+    As doth the blushing discontented sun
+    From out the fiery portal of the east,
+    When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
+    To dim his glory.
+
+For we can still discern on the King’s robe his favourite badge—the sun
+issuing from a cloud.  In fact, in every age the social conditions are so
+exemplified in costume, that to produce a sixteenth-century play in
+fourteenth-century attire, or _vice versa_, would make the performance
+seem unreal because untrue.  And, valuable as beauty of effect on the
+stage is, the highest beauty is not merely comparable with absolute
+accuracy of detail, but really dependent on it.  To invent, an entirely
+new costume is almost impossible except in burlesque or extravaganza, and
+as for combining the dress of different centuries into one, the
+experiment would be dangerous, and Shakespeare’s opinion of the artistic
+value of such a medley may be gathered from his incessant satire of the
+Elizabethan dandies for imagining that they were well dressed because
+they got their doublets in Italy, their hats in Germany, and their hose
+in France.  And it should be noted that the most lovely scenes that have
+been produced on our stage have been those that have been characterised
+by perfect accuracy, such as Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft’s eighteenth-century
+revivals at the Haymarket, Mr. Irying’s superb production of _Much Ado
+About Nothing_, and Mr. Barrett’s _Claudian_.  Besides, and this is
+perhaps the most complete answer to Lord Lytton’s theory, it must be
+remembered that neither in costume nor in dialogue is beauty the
+dramatist’s primary aim at all.  The true dramatist aims first at what is
+characteristic, and no more desires that all his personages should be
+beautifully attired than he desires that they should all have beautiful
+natures or speak beautiful English.  The true dramatist, in fact, shows
+us life under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life.  The
+Greek dress was the loveliest dress the world has ever seen, and the
+English dress of the last century one of the most monstrous; yet we
+cannot costume a play by Sheridan as we would costume a play by
+Sophokles.  For, as Polonius says in his excellent lecture, a lecture to
+which I am glad to have the opportunity of expressing my obligations, one
+of the first qualities of apparel is its expressiveness.  And the
+affected style of dress in the last century was the natural
+characteristic of a society of affected manners and affected
+conversation—a characteristic which the realistic dramatist will highly
+value down to the smallest detail of accuracy, and the materials for
+which he can get only from archæology.
+
+But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate; it must be also
+appropriate to the stature and appearance of the actor, and to his
+supposed condition, as well as to his necessary action in the play.  In
+Mr. Hare’s production of _As You Like It_ at the St. James’s Theatre, for
+instance, the whole point of Orlando’s complaint that he is brought up
+like a peasant, and not like a gentleman, was spoiled by the gorgeousness
+of his dress, and the splendid apparel worn by the banished Duke and his
+friends was quite out of place.  Mr. Lewis Wingfield’s explanation that
+the sumptuary laws of the period necessitated their doing so, is, I am
+afraid, hardly sufficient.  Outlaws, lurking in a forest and living by
+the chase, are not very likely to care much about ordinances of dress.
+They were probably attired like Robin Hood’s men, to whom, indeed, they
+are compared in the course of the play.  And that their dress was not
+that of wealthy noblemen may be seen by Orlando’s words when he breaks in
+upon them.  He mistakes them for robbers, and is amazed to find that they
+answer him in courteous and gentle terms.  Lady Archibald Campbell’s
+production, under Mr. E. W. Godwin’s direction, of the same play in
+Coombe Wood was, as regards mounting, far more artistic.  At least it
+seemed so to me.  The Duke and his companions were dressed in serge
+tunics, leathern jerkins, high boots and gauntlets, and wore bycocket
+hats and hoods.  And as they were playing in a real forest, they found, I
+am sure, their dresses extremely convenient.  To every character in the
+play was given a perfectly appropriate attire, and the brown and green of
+their costumes harmonised exquisitely with the ferns through which they
+wandered, the trees beneath which they lay, and the lovely English
+landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players.  The perfect naturalness
+of the scene was due to the absolute accuracy and appropriateness of
+everything that was worn.  Nor could archæology have been put to a
+severer test, or come out of it more triumphantly.  The whole production
+showed once for all that, unless a dress is archæologically correct, and
+artistically appropriate, it always looks unreal, unnatural, and
+theatrical in the sense of artificial.
+
+Nor, again, is it enough that there should be accurate and appropriate
+costumes of beautiful colours; there must be also beauty of colour on the
+stage as a whole, and as long as the background is painted by one artist,
+and the foreground figures independently designed by another, there is
+the danger of a want of harmony in the scene as a picture.  For each
+scene the colour-scheme should be settled as absolutely as for the
+decoration of a room, and the textures which it is proposed to use should
+be mixed and re-mixed in every possible combination, and what is
+discordant removed.  Then, as regards the particular kinds of colours,
+the stage is often too glaring, partly through the excessive use of hot,
+violent reds, and partly through the costumes looking too new.
+Shabbiness, which in modern life is merely the tendency of the lower
+orders towards tone, is not without its artistic value, and modern
+colours are often much improved by being a little faded.  Blue also is
+too frequently used: it is not merely a dangerous colour to wear by
+gaslight, but it is really difficult in England to get a thoroughly good
+blue.  The fine Chinese blue, which we all so much admire, takes two
+years to dye, and the English public will not wait so long for a colour.
+Peacock blue, of course, has been employed on the stage, notably at the
+Lyceum, with great advantage; but all attempts at a good light blue, or
+good dark blue, which I have seen have been failures.  The value of black
+is hardly appreciated; it was used effectively by Mr. Irving in _Hamlet_
+as the central note of a composition, but as a tone-giving neutral its
+importance is not recognised.  And this is curious, considering the
+general colour of the dress of a century in which, as Baudelaire says,
+‘Nous célébrons tous quelque enterrement.’  The archæologist of the
+future will probably point to this age as the time when the beauty of
+black was understood; but I hardly think that, as regards stage-mounting
+or house decoration, it really is.  Its decorative value is, of course,
+the same as that of white or gold; it can separate and harmonise colours.
+In modern plays the black frock-coat of the hero becomes important in
+itself, and should be given a suitable background.  But it rarely is.
+Indeed the only good background for a play in modern dress which I have
+ever seen was the dark grey and cream-white scene of the first act of the
+_Princesse Georges_ in Mrs. Langtry’s production.  As a rule, the hero is
+smothered in _bric-à-brac_ and palm-trees, lost in the gilded abyss of
+Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to a mere midge in the midst of
+marqueterie; whereas the background should always be kept as a
+background, and colour subordinated to effect.  This, of course, can only
+be done when there is one single mind directing the whole production.
+The facts of art are diverse, but the essence of artistic effect is
+unity.  Monarchy, Anarchy, and Republicanism may contend for the
+government of nations; but a theatre should be in the power of a cultured
+despot.  There may be division of labour, but there must be no division
+of mind.  Whoever understands the costume of an age understands of
+necessity its architecture and its surroundings also, and it is easy to
+see from the chairs of a century whether it was a century of crinolines
+or not.  In fact, in art there is no specialism, and a really artistic
+production should bear the impress of one master, and one master only,
+who not merely should design and arrange everything, but should have
+complete control over the way in which each dress is to be worn.
+
+Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of _Hernani_, absolutely
+refused to call her lover ‘_Mon Lion_!’ unless she was allowed to wear a
+little fashionable _toque_ then much in vogue on the Boulevards; and many
+young ladies on our own stage insist to the present day on wearing stiff
+starched petticoats under Greek dresses, to the entire ruin of all
+delicacy of line and fold; but these wicked things should not be allowed.
+And there should be far more dress rehearsals than there are now.  Actors
+such as Mr. Forbes-Robertson, Mr. Conway, Mr. George Alexander, and
+others, not to mention older artists, can move with ease and elegance in
+the attire of any century; but there are not a few who seem dreadfully
+embarrassed about their hands if they have no side pockets, and who
+always wear their dresses as if they were costumes.  Costumes, of course,
+they are to the designer; but dresses they should be to those that wear
+them.  And it is time that a stop should be put to the idea, very
+prevalent on the stage, that the Greeks and Romans always went about
+bareheaded in the open air—a mistake the Elizabethan managers did not
+fall into, for they gave hoods as well as gowns to their Roman senators.
+
+More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining to the actors
+that there is a form of gesture and movement that is not merely
+appropriate to each style of dress, but really conditioned by it.  The
+extravagant use of the arms in the eighteenth century, for instance, was
+the necessary result of the large hoop, and the solemn dignity of
+Burleigh owed as much to his ruff as to his reason.  Besides until an
+actor is at home in his dress, he is not at home in his part.
+
+Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistic temperament in
+the audience, and producing that joy in beauty for beauty’s sake without
+which the great masterpieces of art can never be understood, I will not
+here speak; though it is worth while to notice how Shakespeare
+appreciated that side of the question in the production of his tragedies,
+acting them always by artificial light, and in a theatre hung with black;
+but what I have tried to point out is that archæology is not a pedantic
+method, but a method of artistic illusion, and that costume is a means of
+displaying character without description, and of producing dramatic
+situations and dramatic effects.  And I think it is a pity that so many
+critics should have set themselves to attack one of the most important
+movements on the modern stage before that movement has at all reached its
+proper perfection.  That it will do so, however, I feel as certain as
+that we shall require from our dramatic critics in the future higher
+qualification than that they can remember Macready or have seen Benjamin
+Webster; we shall require of them, indeed, that they cultivate a sense of
+beauty.  _Pour être plus difficile_, _la tâche n’en est que plus
+glorieuse_.  And if they will not encourage, at least they must not
+oppose, a movement of which Shakespeare of all dramatists would have most
+approved, for it has the illusion of truth for its method, and the
+illusion of beauty for its result.  Not that I agree with everything that
+I have said in this essay.  There is much with which I entirely disagree.
+The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in æsthetic
+criticism attitude is everything.  For in art there is no such thing as a
+universal truth.  A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also
+true.  And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we
+can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in
+art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of
+contraries.  The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.
+
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Intentions, 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: Intentions
+
+
+Author: Oscar Wilde
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 26, 2014  [eBook #887]
+[This file was first posted on April 24, 1997]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTENTIONS***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen and Co edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<h1>INTENTIONS</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
+/>
+OSCAR WILDE</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">METHUEN &amp; CO. LTD.<br />
+36 ESSEX STREET W.C.<br />
+LONDON</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>First Published</i>, <i>at 1s.
+net</i>, <i>in 1913</i></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p><i>This Book was First Published</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>1891</i></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><i>Second Edition</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>1894</i></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><i>First Published</i> (<i>Third Edition</i>) <i>by
+Methuen and Co.</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>1908</i></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><i>Fourth Edition</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>1909</i></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><i>Fifth Edition</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>1911</i></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">DEDICATED</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">TO</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">MRS. CAREW</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE AUTHOR&rsquo;S LITERARY
+EXECUTOR</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Decay of Lying</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">Pen, Pencil, and Poison</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Critic as Artist</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page95">95</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Truth of Masks</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page221">221</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>THE
+DECAY OF LYING:<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">AN OBSERVATION</span></h2>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>A DIALOGUE</i>.&nbsp;
+<i>Persons</i>: <i>Cyril and</i><br />
+<i>Vivian</i>.&nbsp; <i>Scene</i>: <i>the Library of a
+country</i><br />
+<i>house in Nottinghamshire</i>.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span> (<i>coming in through the
+open window from the terrace</i>).&nbsp; My dear Vivian,
+don&rsquo;t coop yourself up all day in the library.&nbsp; It is
+a perfectly lovely afternoon.&nbsp; The air is exquisite.&nbsp;
+There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a
+plum.&nbsp; Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes
+and enjoy Nature.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Enjoy Nature!&nbsp; I
+am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; My own experience is that the
+more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.&nbsp; What Art
+really reveals to us is Nature&rsquo;s lack of design, her
+curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely
+unfinished condition.&nbsp; Nature has good intentions, of
+course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them
+out.&nbsp; When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all
+its defects.&nbsp; It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature
+is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art at all.&nbsp;
+Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature
+her proper place.&nbsp; As for the infinite variety of Nature,
+that is a pure myth.&nbsp; It is not to be found in Nature
+herself.&nbsp; It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or
+cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Well, you need not
+look at the landscape.&nbsp; You can lie on the grass and smoke
+and talk.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; But Nature is so
+uncomfortable.&nbsp; Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full
+of dreadful black insects.&nbsp; Why, even Morris&rsquo;s poorest
+workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of
+Nature can.&nbsp; Nature pales before the furniture of &lsquo;the
+street which from Oxford has borrowed its name,&rsquo; as the
+poet you love so much once vilely phrased it.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+complain.&nbsp; If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would
+never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open
+air.&nbsp; In a house we all feel of the proper
+proportions.&nbsp; Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned
+for our use and our pleasure.&nbsp; Egotism itself, which is so
+necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the
+result of indoor life.&nbsp; Out of doors one becomes abstract
+and impersonal.&nbsp; One&rsquo;s individuality absolutely leaves
+one.&nbsp; And then Nature is so indifferent, so
+unappreciative.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.&nbsp;
+Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die
+of it just as they die of any other disease.&nbsp; Fortunately,
+in England at any rate, thought is not catching.&nbsp; Our
+splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national
+stupidity.&nbsp; 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&mdash;that is really what our enthusiasm for education
+has come to.&nbsp; In the meantime, you had better go back to
+your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave me to correct my
+proofs.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Writing an
+article!&nbsp; That is not very consistent after what you have
+just said.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Who wants to be
+consistent?&nbsp; The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious
+people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of
+action, to the <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of practice.&nbsp; Not
+I.&nbsp; Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the
+word &lsquo;Whim.&rsquo;&nbsp; Besides, my article is really a
+most salutary and valuable warning.&nbsp; If it is attended to,
+there may be a new Renaissance of Art.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; What is the
+subject?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; I intend to call it
+&lsquo;The Decay of Lying: A Protest.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Lying!&nbsp; I should
+have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; I assure you that
+they do not.&nbsp; They never rise beyond the level of
+misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss,
+to argue.&nbsp; 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!&nbsp; After
+all, what is a fine lie?&nbsp; Simply that which is its own
+evidence.&nbsp; If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce
+evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the
+truth at once.&nbsp; No, the politicians won&rsquo;t do.&nbsp;
+Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar.&nbsp; The
+mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members.&nbsp; Their
+feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But they are briefed by the
+prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent.&nbsp; In
+spite of their endeavours, the truth will out.&nbsp; Newspapers,
+even, have degenerated.&nbsp; They may now be absolutely relied
+upon.&nbsp; One feels it as one wades through their
+columns.&nbsp; It is always the unreadable that occurs.&nbsp; I
+am afraid that there is not much to be said in favour of either
+the lawyer or the journalist.&nbsp; Besides, what I am pleading
+for is Lying in art.&nbsp; Shall I read you what I have
+written?&nbsp; It might do you a great deal of good.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Certainly, if you give
+me a cigarette.&nbsp; Thanks.&nbsp; By the way, what magazine do
+you intend it for?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; For the
+<i>Retrospective Review</i>.&nbsp; I think I told you that the
+elect had revived it.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Whom do you mean by
+&lsquo;the elect&rsquo;?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Oh, The Tired
+Hedonists, of course.&nbsp; It is a club to which I belong.&nbsp;
+We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we
+meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian.&nbsp; I am afraid
+you are not eligible.&nbsp; You are too fond of simple
+pleasures.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; I should be
+black-balled on the ground of animal spirits, I suppose?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Probably.&nbsp;
+Besides, you are a little too old.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t admit
+anybody who is of the usual age.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Well, I should fancy
+you are all a good deal bored with each other.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; We are.&nbsp; This is
+one of the objects of the club.&nbsp; Now, if you promise not to
+interrupt too often, I will read you my article.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; You will find me all
+attention.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span> (<i>reading in a very
+clear</i>, <i>musical voice</i>).&nbsp; <span class="smcap">The
+Decay Of Lying</span>: A <span
+class="smcap">Protest</span>.&mdash;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.&nbsp; The ancient
+historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the
+modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of
+fiction.&nbsp; The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both
+for method and manner.&nbsp; He has his tedious <i>document
+humain</i>, his miserable little <i>coin de la
+cr&eacute;ation</i>, into which he peers with his
+microscope.&nbsp; He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale,
+or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his
+subject.&nbsp; He has not even the courage of other
+people&rsquo;s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for
+everything, and ultimately, between encyclop&aelig;dias 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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The lose that results to literature in general from
+this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.&nbsp;
+People have a careless way of talking about a &ldquo;born
+liar,&rdquo; just as they talk about a &ldquo;born
+poet.&rdquo;&nbsp; But in both cases they are wrong.&nbsp; Lying
+and poetry are arts&mdash;arts, as Pinto saw, not unconnected
+with each other&mdash;and they require the most careful study,
+the most disinterested devotion.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Here, as
+elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But, as a rule, he comes to
+nothing.&nbsp; He either falls into careless habits of
+accuracy&mdash;&rsquo;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; My dear fellow!</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Please don&rsquo;t
+interrupt in the middle of a sentence.&nbsp; &lsquo;He either
+falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting
+the society of the aged and the well-informed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; This is no
+isolated instance that we are giving.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;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.&nbsp; There is such
+a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it
+too true, and <i>The Black Arrow</i> 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 <i>Lancet</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Nor are our other novelists much
+better.&nbsp; Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a
+painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible
+&ldquo;points of view&rdquo; his neat literary style, his
+felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.&nbsp; Mr. Hall
+Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at
+the top of his voice.&nbsp; He is so loud that one cannot bear
+what he says.&nbsp; Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of
+concealing what is not worth finding.&nbsp; He hunts down the
+obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective.&nbsp;
+As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes
+almost unbearable.&nbsp; The horses of Mr. William Black&rsquo;s
+phaeton do not soar towards the sun.&nbsp; They merely frighten
+the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.&nbsp;
+On seeing them approach, the peasants take refuge in
+dialect.&nbsp; Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates,
+lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome
+things.&nbsp; Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the
+altar of local colour.&nbsp; He is like the lady in the French
+comedy who keeps talking about &ldquo;le beau ciel
+d&rsquo;Italie.&rdquo;&nbsp; Besides, he has fallen into the bad
+habit of uttering moral platitudes.&nbsp; He is always telling us
+that to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be
+wicked.&nbsp; At times he is almost edifying.&nbsp; <i>Robert
+Elsmere</i> is of course a masterpiece&mdash;a masterpiece of the
+&ldquo;genre ennuyeux,&rdquo; the one form of literature that the
+English people seems thoroughly to enjoy.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be
+produced.&nbsp; England is the home of lost ideas.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as
+<i>Robert Elsmere</i> has been produced, things are not much
+better.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody
+is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very
+tears.&nbsp; M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays
+down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature,
+&ldquo;L&rsquo;homme de g&eacute;nie n&rsquo;a jamais
+d&rsquo;esprit,&rdquo; is determined to show that, if he has not
+got genius, he can at least be dull.&nbsp; And how well he
+succeeds!&nbsp; He is not without power.&nbsp; Indeed at times,
+as in <i>Germinal</i>, there is something almost epic in his
+work.&nbsp; But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end,
+and wrong not on the ground of morals, but on the ground of
+art.&nbsp; From any ethical standpoint it is just what it should
+be.&nbsp; The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things
+exactly as they happen.&nbsp; What more can any moralist
+desire?&nbsp; We have no sympathy at all with the moral
+indignation of our time against M. Zola.&nbsp; It is simply the
+indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed.&nbsp; But from the
+standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of the author of
+<i>L&rsquo;Assommoir</i>, <i>Nana</i> and
+<i>Pot-Bouille</i>?&nbsp; Nothing.&nbsp; Mr. Ruskin once
+described the characters in George Eliot&rsquo;s novels as being
+like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola&rsquo;s
+characters are much worse.&nbsp; They have their dreary vices,
+and their drearier virtues.&nbsp; The record of their lives is
+absolutely without interest.&nbsp; Who cares what happens to
+them?&nbsp; In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty
+and imaginative power.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t want to be harrowed
+and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower
+orders.&nbsp; M. Daudet is better.&nbsp; He has wit, a light
+touch and an amusing style.&nbsp; But he has lately committed
+literary suicide.&nbsp; Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle
+with his &ldquo;Il faut lutter pour l&rsquo;art,&rdquo; or for
+Valmajour with his eternal refrain about the nightingale, or for
+the poet in <i>Jack</i> with his &ldquo;mots cruels,&rdquo; now
+that we have learned from <i>Vingt Ans de ma Vie
+litt&eacute;raire</i> that these characters were taken directly
+from life.&nbsp; To us they seem to have suddenly lost all their
+vitality, all the few qualities they ever possessed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Otherwise the novel is not a work of
+art.&nbsp; As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the <i>roman
+psychologique</i>, 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.&nbsp; In point of fact
+what is interesting about people in good society&mdash;and M.
+Bourget rarely moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to
+come to London,&mdash;is the mask that each one of them wears,
+not the reality that lies behind the mask.&nbsp; It is a
+humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same
+stuff.&nbsp; In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet
+there is not a little of Falstaff.&nbsp; The fat knight has his
+moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse
+humour.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The more
+one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis
+disappear.&nbsp; Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful
+universal thing called human nature.&nbsp; Indeed, as any one who
+has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the
+brotherhood of man is no mere poet&rsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; However, my
+dear Cyril, I will not detain you any further just here.&nbsp; I
+quite admit that modern novels have many good points.&nbsp; All I
+insist on is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; That is certainly a
+very grave qualification, but I must say that I think you are
+rather unfair in some of your strictures.&nbsp; I like <i>The
+Deemster</i>, and <i>The Daughter of Heth</i>, and <i>Le
+Disciple</i>, and <i>Mr. Isaacs</i>, and as for <i>Robert
+Elsmere</i>, I am quite devoted to it.&nbsp; Not that I can look
+upon it as a serious work.&nbsp; As a statement of the problems
+that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and
+antiquated.&nbsp; It is simply Arnold&rsquo;s <i>Literature and
+Dogma</i> with the literature left out.&nbsp; It is as much
+behind the age as Paley&rsquo;s <i>Evidences</i>, or
+Colenso&rsquo;s method of Biblical exegesis.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; On the other hand, it
+contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful
+quotations, and Green&rsquo;s philosophy very pleasantly sugars
+the somewhat bitter pill of the author&rsquo;s fiction.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Surely they are realists, both
+of them?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Ah!&nbsp;
+Meredith!&nbsp; Who can define him?&nbsp; His style is chaos
+illumined by flashes of lightning.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Somebody in
+Shakespeare&mdash;Touchstone, I think&mdash;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&rsquo;s method.&nbsp; But whatever he is, he is not a
+realist.&nbsp; Or rather I would say that he is a child of
+realism who is not on speaking terms with his father.&nbsp; By
+deliberate choice he has made himself a romanticist.&nbsp; He has
+refused to bow the knee to Baal, and after all, even if the
+man&rsquo;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.&nbsp; By its means
+he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red
+with wonderful roses.&nbsp; As for Balzac, he was a most
+remarkable combination of the artistic temperament with the
+scientific spirit.&nbsp; The latter he bequeathed to his
+disciples.&nbsp; The former was entirely his own.&nbsp; The
+difference between such a book as M. Zola&rsquo;s
+<i>L&rsquo;Assommoir</i> and Balzac&rsquo;s <i>Illusions
+Perdues</i> is the difference between unimaginative realism and
+imaginative reality.&nbsp; &lsquo;All Balzac&rsquo;s
+characters;&rsquo; said Baudelaire, &lsquo;are gifted with the
+same ardour of life that animated himself.&nbsp; All his fictions
+are as deeply coloured as dreams.&nbsp; Each mind is a weapon
+loaded to the muzzle with will.&nbsp; The very scullions have
+genius.&rsquo;&nbsp; A steady course of Balzac reduces our living
+friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of
+shades.&nbsp; His characters have a kind of fervent
+fiery-coloured existence.&nbsp; They dominate us, and defy
+scepticism.&nbsp; One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the
+death of Lucien de Rubempr&eacute;.&nbsp; It is a grief from
+which I have never been able completely to rid myself.&nbsp; It
+haunts me in my moments of pleasure.&nbsp; I remember it when I
+laugh.&nbsp; But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein
+was.&nbsp; He created life, he did not copy it.&nbsp; 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 <i>Salammb&ocirc;</i> or
+<i>Esmond</i>, or <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, or the
+<i>Vicomte de Bragelonne</i>.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Do you object to
+modernity of form, then?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; It is a
+huge price to pay for a very poor result.&nbsp; Pure modernity of
+form is always somewhat vulgarising.&nbsp; It cannot help being
+so.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But the
+mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them
+unsuitable subjects for Art.&nbsp; The only beautiful things, as
+somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; To
+art&rsquo;s subject-matter we should be more or less
+indifferent.&nbsp; We should, at any rate, have no preferences,
+no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind.&nbsp; It is
+exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such
+an admirable motive for a tragedy.&nbsp; I do not know anything
+in the whole history of literature sadder than the artistic
+career of Charles Reade.&nbsp; He wrote one beautiful book,
+<i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, a book as much above
+<i>Romola</i> as <i>Romola</i> is above <i>Daniel Deronda</i>,
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+Believe me, my dear Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of
+subject-matter are entirely and absolutely wrong.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Certainly we are a degraded race, and have
+sold our birthright for a mess of facts.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And this is perhaps the
+best rough test of what is literature and what is not.&nbsp; If
+one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no
+use reading it at all.&nbsp; But what do you say about the return
+to Life and Nature?&nbsp; This is the panacea that is always
+being recommended to us.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; I will read you what
+I say on that subject.&nbsp; The passage comes later on in the
+article, but I may as well give it to you now:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The popular cry of our time is &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp; But, alas! we
+are mistaken in our amiable and well-meaning efforts.&nbsp;
+Nature is always behind the age.&nbsp; And as for Life, she is
+the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her
+house.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; What do you mean by
+saying that Nature is always behind the age?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Well, perhaps that is
+rather cryptic.&nbsp; What I mean is this.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One
+touch of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of
+Nature will destroy any work of Art.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She has
+no suggestions of her own.&nbsp; Wordsworth went to the lakes,
+but he was never a lake poet.&nbsp; He found in stones the
+sermons he had already hidden there.&nbsp; He went moralising
+about the district, but his good work was produced when he
+returned, not to Nature but to poetry.&nbsp; Poetry gave him
+&lsquo;Laodamia,&rsquo; and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode,
+such as it is.&nbsp; Nature gave him &lsquo;Martha Ray&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Peter Bell,&rsquo; and the address to Mr.
+Wilkinson&rsquo;s spade.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; I think that view
+might be questioned.&nbsp; I am rather inclined to believe in
+&lsquo;the impulse from a vernal wood,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; You would agree with that, I fancy.&nbsp;
+However, proceed with your article.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span> (<i>reading</i>).&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely
+imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and
+non-existent.&nbsp; This is the first stage.&nbsp; Then Life
+becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted
+into the charmed circle.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The
+third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out
+into the wilderness.&nbsp; That is the true decadence, and it is
+from this that we are now suffering.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Take the case of the English drama.&nbsp; At first in
+the hands of the monks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and
+mythological.&nbsp; Then she enlisted Life in her service, and
+using some of life&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She clothed her children in strange raiment
+and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose
+from its marble tomb.&nbsp; A new C&aelig;sar stalked through the
+streets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and flute-led oars
+another Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch.&nbsp; Old myth
+and legend and dream took shape and substance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In this they were perfectly
+right.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;But Life soon shattered the perfection of the
+form.&nbsp; Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the
+end.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The passages in Shakespeare&mdash;and
+they are many&mdash;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.&nbsp; Shakespeare is not by any
+means a flawless artist.&nbsp; He is too fond of going directly
+to life, and borrowing life&rsquo;s natural utterance.&nbsp; He
+forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative medium she
+surrenders everything.&nbsp; Goethe says, somewhere&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>In der Beschr&auml;nkung zeigt Fsich erst der
+Meister,</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>&ldquo;It is in working within limits that the master reveals
+himself,&rdquo; and the limitation, the very condition of any art
+is style.&nbsp; However, we need not linger any longer over
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s realism.&nbsp; <i>The Tempest</i> is the most
+perfect of palinodes.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And yet how wearisome the plays
+are!&nbsp; They do not succeed in producing even that impression
+of reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for
+existing.&nbsp; As a method, realism is a complete failure.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;What is true about the drama and the novel is no less
+true about those arts that we call the decorative arts.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature,
+our work has always become vulgar, common and
+uninteresting.&nbsp; Modern tapestry, with its a&euml;rial
+effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad expanses of waste
+sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty
+whatsoever.&nbsp; The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely
+detestable.&nbsp; We are beginning to weave possible carpets in
+England, but only because we have returned to the method and
+spirit of the East.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A
+cultured Mahomedan once remarked to us, &ldquo;You Christians are
+so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you
+have never thought of making an artistic application of the
+second.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle
+the question very completely.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;It was not always thus.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of the shallow and
+ungenerous attempts of modern sciolists to verify his history,
+may justly be called the &ldquo;Father of Lies&rdquo;; in the
+published speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in
+Tacitus at his best; in Pliny&rsquo;s <i>Natural History</i>; in
+Hanno&rsquo;s <i>Periplus</i>; 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 <i>Prodigiorum et
+Ostentorum Chronicon</i>; in the autobiography of Benvenuto
+Cellini; in the memoirs of Casanova; in Defoe&rsquo;s <i>History
+of the Plague</i>; in Boswell&rsquo;s <i>Life of Johnson</i>; in
+Napoleon&rsquo;s despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle,
+whose <i>French Revolution</i> 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.&nbsp; Now, everything is
+changed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Their chilling touch is
+over everything.&nbsp; They are vulgarising mankind.&nbsp; 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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; My dear boy!</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; However, you
+must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic future
+either of America or of our own country.&nbsp; Listen to
+this:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;That some change will take place before this century
+has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Whatever was his name or race,
+he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse.&nbsp;
+For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give
+pleasure.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s farcical
+comedies.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nor will he be welcomed by society alone.&nbsp; 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&mdash;poor, probable, uninteresting human
+life&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;No doubt there will always be critics who, like a
+certain writer in the <i>Saturday Review</i>, 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They will call upon
+Shakespeare&mdash;they always do&mdash;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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Ahem!&nbsp; Another
+cigarette, please.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; My dear fellow,
+whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic utterance, and no
+more represents Shakespeare&rsquo;s real views upon art than the
+speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals.&nbsp; But
+let me get to the end of the passage:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside
+of, herself.&nbsp; She is not to be judged by any external
+standard of resemblance.&nbsp; She is a veil, rather than a
+mirror.&nbsp; She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that
+no woodland possesses.&nbsp; She makes and unmakes many worlds,
+and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.&nbsp;
+Hers are the &ldquo;forms more real than living man,&rdquo; and
+hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are
+but unfinished copies.&nbsp; Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no
+uniformity.&nbsp; She can work miracles at her will, and when she
+calls monsters from the deep they come.&nbsp; She can bid the
+almond-tree blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe
+cornfield.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The dryads peer from the
+thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile strangely at
+her when she comes near them.&nbsp; She has hawk-faced gods that
+worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; I like that.&nbsp; I
+can see it.&nbsp; Is that the end?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; There is
+one more passage, but it is purely practical.&nbsp; It simply
+suggests some methods by which we could revive this lost art of
+Lying.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Well, before you read
+it to me, I should like to ask you a question.&nbsp; What do you
+mean by saying that life, &lsquo;poor, probable, uninteresting
+human life,&rsquo; will try to reproduce the marvels of
+art?&nbsp; I can quite understand your objection to art being
+treated as a mirror.&nbsp; You think it would reduce genius to
+the position of a cracked looking-glass.&nbsp; But you
+don&rsquo;t mean to say that you seriously believe that Life
+imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the
+reality?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Certainly I do.&nbsp;
+Paradox though it may seem&mdash;and paradoxes are always
+dangerous things&mdash;it is none the less true that Life
+imitates art far more than Art imitates life.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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 &lsquo;The Golden
+Stair,&rsquo; the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the
+&lsquo;Laus Amoris,&rsquo; the passion-pale face of Andromeda,
+the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in
+&lsquo;Merlin&rsquo;s Dream.&rsquo;&nbsp; And it has always been
+so.&nbsp; A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy
+it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising
+publisher.&nbsp; Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England
+what they have given us.&nbsp; They brought their types with
+them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty set herself to
+supply the master with models.&nbsp; The Greeks, with their quick
+artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Hence came their objection
+to realism.&nbsp; They disliked it on purely social
+grounds.&nbsp; They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly,
+and they were perfectly right.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But these things merely
+produce health, they do not produce beauty.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s best, Art&rsquo;s only
+pupil.</p>
+<p>As it is with the visible arts, so it is with
+literature.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But this is a
+mistake.&nbsp; The imagination is essentially creative, and
+always seeks for a new form.&nbsp; The boy-burglar is simply the
+inevitable result of life&rsquo;s imitative instinct.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Schopenhauer has analysed the
+pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented
+it.&nbsp; The world has become sad because a puppet was once
+melancholy.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+He was invented by Tourg&eacute;nieff, and completed by
+Dostoieffski.&nbsp; Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau
+as surely as the People&rsquo;s Palace rose out of the
+<i>d&eacute;bris</i> of a novel.&nbsp; Literature always
+anticipates life.&nbsp; It does not copy it, but moulds it to its
+purpose.&nbsp; The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely
+an invention of Balzac.&nbsp; Our Luciens de Rubempr&eacute;, our
+Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the
+stage of the <i>Com&eacute;die Humaine</i>.&nbsp; We are merely
+carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim
+or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.&nbsp; I once
+asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had had
+any model for Becky Sharp.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I inquired what became of the governess,
+and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after the
+appearance of <i>Vanity Fair</i>, 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&rsquo;s
+style, and entirely by Mrs. Rawdon Crawley&rsquo;s methods.&nbsp;
+Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to the Continent, and
+used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling
+places.&nbsp; The noble gentleman from whom the same great
+sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few months after
+<i>The Newcomer</i> had reached a fourth edition, with the word
+&lsquo;Adsum&rsquo; on his lips.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Feeling rather nervous he began to walk extremely fast, when
+suddenly out of an archway ran a child right between his
+legs.&nbsp; It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and
+trampled upon it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They surrounded him, and asked him his
+name.&nbsp; He was just about to give it when he suddenly
+remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson&rsquo;s
+story.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; As he
+passed out, the name on the brass door-plate of the surgery
+caught his eye.&nbsp; It was &lsquo;Jekyll.&rsquo;&nbsp; At least
+it should have been.</p>
+<p>Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course
+accidental.&nbsp; In the following case the imitation was
+self-conscious.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We became
+great friends, and were constantly together.&nbsp; And yet what
+interested me most in her was not her beauty, but her character,
+her entire vagueness of character.&nbsp; She seemed to have no
+personality at all, but simply the possibility of many
+types.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Then she would take
+to attending race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, and
+talk about nothing but betting.&nbsp; She abandoned religion for
+mesmerism, mesmerism for politics, and politics for the
+melodramatic excitements of philanthropy.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One day a serial began in one of the French
+magazines.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I wrote to my friend that evening about my
+views on John Bellini, and the admirable ices at Florian&rsquo;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.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know why I added that, but I remember
+I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same
+thing.&nbsp; Before my letter had reached her, she had run away
+with a man who deserted her in six months.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; When they appeared, it seemed to her that she
+was compelled to reproduce them in life, and she did so.&nbsp; It
+was a most clear example of this imitative instinct of which I
+was speaking, and an extremely tragic one.</p>
+<p>However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual
+instances.&nbsp; Personal experience is a most vicious and
+limited circle.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Scientifically speaking, the basis of
+life&mdash;the energy of life, as Aristotle would call
+it&mdash;is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always
+presenting various forms through which this expression can be
+attained.&nbsp; Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they
+be to her own hurt.&nbsp; Young men have committed suicide
+because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his
+own hand Werther died.&nbsp; Think of what we owe to the
+imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of
+C&aelig;sar.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Are you prepared to prove that?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; My dear fellow, I am
+prepared to prove anything.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Nature follows the
+landscape painter, then, and takes her effects from him?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Certainly.&nbsp;
+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?&nbsp;
+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?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; You smile.&nbsp; Consider the matter from a
+scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find
+that I am right.&nbsp; For what is Nature?&nbsp; Nature is no
+great mother who has borne us.&nbsp; She is our creation.&nbsp;
+It is in our brain that she quickens to life.&nbsp; Things are
+because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends
+on the Arts that have influenced us.&nbsp; To look at a thing is
+very different from seeing a thing.&nbsp; One does not see
+anything until one sees its beauty.&nbsp; Then, and then only,
+does it come into existence.&nbsp; At present, people see fogs,
+not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have
+taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.&nbsp;
+There may have been fogs for centuries in London.&nbsp; I dare
+say there were.&nbsp; But no one saw them, and so we do not know
+anything about them.&nbsp; They did not exist till Art had
+invented them.&nbsp; Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried
+to excess.&nbsp; They have become the mere mannerism of a clique,
+and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people
+bronchitis.&nbsp; Where the cultured catch an effect, the
+uncultured catch cold.&nbsp; And so, let us be humane, and invite
+Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.&nbsp; She has done so
+already, indeed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Where she used to
+give us Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets
+and entrancing Pissaros.&nbsp; Indeed there are moments, rare, it
+is true, but still to be observed from time to time, when Nature
+becomes absolutely modern.&nbsp; Of course she is not always to
+be relied upon.&nbsp; The fact is that she is in this unfortunate
+position.&nbsp; Art creates an incomparable and unique effect,
+and, having done so, passes on to other things.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Nobody of any real
+culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a
+sunset.&nbsp; Sunsets are quite old-fashioned.&nbsp; They belong
+to the time when Turner was the last note in art.&nbsp; To admire
+them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.&nbsp;
+Upon the other hand they go on.&nbsp; Yesterday evening Mrs.
+Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the
+glorious sky, as she called it.&nbsp; Of course I had to look at
+it.&nbsp; She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom
+one can deny nothing.&nbsp; And what was it?&nbsp; It was simply
+a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the
+painter&rsquo;s worst faults exaggerated and
+over-emphasised.&nbsp; Of course, I am quite ready to admit that
+Life very often commits the same error.&nbsp; She produces her
+false Ren&eacute;s and her sham Vautrins, just as Nature gives
+us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on another a more than
+questionable Rousseau.&nbsp; Still, Nature irritates one more
+when she does things of that kind.&nbsp; It seems so stupid, so
+obvious, so unnecessary.&nbsp; A false Vautrin might be
+delightful.&nbsp; A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable.&nbsp; However, I
+don&rsquo;t want to be too hard on Nature.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+That she imitates Art, I don&rsquo;t think even her worst enemy
+would deny now.&nbsp; It is the one thing that keeps her in touch
+with civilised man.&nbsp; But have I proved my theory to your
+satisfaction?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; You have proved it to
+my dissatisfaction, which is better.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Certainly not!&nbsp;
+Art never expresses anything but itself.&nbsp; This is the
+principle of my new &aelig;sthetics; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But it is not so.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She develops purely
+on her own lines.&nbsp; She is not symbolic of any age.&nbsp; It
+is the ages that are her symbols.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; But it was not so.&nbsp; The vices of Tiberius
+could not destroy that supreme civilisation, any more than the
+virtues of the Antonines could save it.&nbsp; It fell for other,
+for less interesting reasons.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; The more abstract, the
+more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its
+age.&nbsp; If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art,
+let us look at its architecture or its music.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; I quite agree with you
+there.&nbsp; The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the
+abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and
+ideal.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think
+so.&nbsp; After all, what the imitative arts really give us are
+merely the various styles of particular artists, or of certain
+schools of artists.&nbsp; Surely you don&rsquo;t imagine that the
+people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the
+figures on medi&aelig;val stained glass, or in medi&aelig;val
+stone and wood carving, or on medi&aelig;val metal-work, or
+tapestries, or illuminated MSS.&nbsp; They were probably very
+ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque, or remarkable,
+or fantastic in their appearance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; No great artist ever
+sees things as they really are.&nbsp; If he did, he would cease
+to be an artist.&nbsp; Take an example from our own day.&nbsp; I
+know that you are fond of Japanese things.&nbsp; Now, do you
+really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to
+us in art, have any existence?&nbsp; If you do, you have never
+understood Japanese art at all.&nbsp; The Japanese people are the
+deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual
+artists.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In fact the whole of Japan is a
+pure invention.&nbsp; There is no such country, there are no such
+people.&nbsp; One of our most charming painters went recently to
+the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the
+Japanese.&nbsp; All he saw, all he had the chance of painting,
+were a few lanterns and some fans.&nbsp; He was quite unable to
+discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs.
+Dowdeswell&rsquo;s Gallery showed only too well.&nbsp; He did not
+know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode
+of style, an exquisite fancy of art.&nbsp; And so, if you desire
+to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and
+go to Tokio.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Or, to return again to the past, take as another
+instance the ancient Greeks.&nbsp; Do you think that Greek art
+ever tells us what the Greek people were like?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; If you judge from the art, they certainly were
+so.&nbsp; But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for
+instance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; But modern portraits
+by English painters, what of them?&nbsp; Surely they are like the
+people they pretend to represent?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Quite so.&nbsp; They
+are so like them that a hundred years from now no one will
+believe in them.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Holbein&rsquo;s drawings of
+the men and women of his time impress us with a sense of their
+absolute reality.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is style that makes us believe
+in a thing&mdash;nothing but style.&nbsp; Most of our modern
+portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion.&nbsp; They
+never paint what they see.&nbsp; They paint what the public sees,
+and the public never sees anything.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Well, after that I
+think I should like to hear the end of your article.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; With pleasure.&nbsp;
+Whether it will do any good I really cannot say.&nbsp; Ours is
+certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible.&nbsp;
+Why, even Sleep has played us false, and has closed up the gates
+of ivory, and opened the gates of horn.&nbsp; The dreams of the
+great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr.
+Myers&rsquo;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.&nbsp; There is not even a fine
+nightmare among them.&nbsp; They are commonplace, sordid and
+tedious.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But in the
+English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for
+belief, but through his capacity for disbelief.&nbsp; Ours is the
+only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St.
+Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s ark, or Balaam&rsquo;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.&nbsp; The growth of
+common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be
+regretted.&nbsp; It is really a degrading concession to a low
+form of realism.&nbsp; It is silly, too.&nbsp; It springs from an
+entire ignorance of psychology.&nbsp; Man can believe the
+impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.&nbsp;
+However, I must read the end of my article:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to
+do, is to revive this old art of Lying.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But this is merely the light and graceful side of
+lying, such as was probably heard at Cretan dinner-parties.&nbsp;
+There are many other forms.&nbsp; Lying for the sake of gaining
+some immediate personal advantage, for instance&mdash;lying with
+a moral purpose, as it is usually called&mdash;though of late it
+has been rather looked down upon, was extremely popular with the
+antique world.&nbsp; Athena laughs when Odysseus tells her
+&ldquo;his words of sly devising,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s
+most exquisite odes.&nbsp; Later on, what at first had been
+merely a natural instinct was elevated into a self-conscious
+science.&nbsp; Elaborate rules were laid down for the guidance of
+mankind, and an important school of literature grew up round the
+subject.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A short primer, &ldquo;When to Lie and How,&rdquo;
+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.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s <i>Republic</i> that it is unnecessary to dwell
+upon them here.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But it is said
+to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it certainly does not lead
+to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The solid stolid
+British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in
+Flaubert&rsquo;s marvellous tale, and fantasy, <i>La
+Chim&egrave;re</i>, dances round it, and calls to it with her
+false, flute-toned voice.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous
+we shall all be!&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The very
+aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will
+soar from her nest of fire into the air.&nbsp; We shall lay our
+hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad&rsquo;s
+head.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But before this comes to pass we must cultivate
+the lost art of Lying.&rsquo;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Cyril</span>.&nbsp; Then we must entirely
+cultivate it at once.&nbsp; But in order to avoid making any
+error I want you to tell me briefly the doctrines of the new
+&aelig;sthetics.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Vivian</span>.&nbsp; Briefly, then, they
+are these.&nbsp; Art never expresses anything but itself.&nbsp;
+It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops
+purely on its own lines.&nbsp; It is not necessarily realistic in
+an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In no case does it reproduce its age.&nbsp; To pass
+from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake
+that all historians commit.</p>
+<p>The second doctrine is this.&nbsp; All bad art comes from
+returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into
+ideals.&nbsp; Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of
+Art&rsquo;s rough material, but before they are of any real
+service to art they must be translated into artistic
+conventions.&nbsp; The moment Art surrenders its imaginative
+medium it surrenders everything.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; To us, who live in the nineteenth century,
+any century is a suitable subject for art except our own.&nbsp;
+The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern
+us.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Besides, it is only the modern that
+ever becomes old-fashioned.&nbsp; M. Zola sits down to give us a
+picture of the Second Empire.&nbsp; Who cares for the Second
+Empire now?&nbsp; It is out of date.&nbsp; Life goes faster than
+Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.</p>
+<p>The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art
+imitates Life.&nbsp; This results not merely from Life&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature
+also imitates Art.&nbsp; The only effects that she can show us
+are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in
+paintings.&nbsp; This is the secret of Nature&rsquo;s charm, as
+well as the explanation of Nature&rsquo;s weakness.</p>
+<p>The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful
+untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.&nbsp; But of this I
+think I have spoken at sufficient length.&nbsp; And now let us go
+out on the terrace, where &lsquo;droops the milk-white peacock
+like a ghost,&rsquo; while the evening star &lsquo;washes the
+dusk with silver.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Come!&nbsp; We have talked long enough.</p>
+<h2><a name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 57</span>PEN,
+PENCIL AND POISON<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">A STUDY IN GREEN</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> has constantly been made a
+subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they
+are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.&nbsp; As a
+rule this must necessarily be so.&nbsp; That very concentration
+of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of
+the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation.&nbsp;
+To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else
+seems of much importance.&nbsp; Yet there are many exceptions to
+this rule.&nbsp; Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state
+councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>This remarkable man, so powerful with &lsquo;pen, pencil and
+poison,&rsquo; as a great poet of our own day has finely said of
+him, was born at Chiswick, in 1794.&nbsp; His father was the son
+of a distinguished solicitor of Gray&rsquo;s Inn and Hatton
+Garden.&nbsp; His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr.
+Griffiths, the editor and founder of the <i>Monthly Review</i>,
+the partner in another literary speculation of Thomas Davis, that
+famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that he was not a
+bookseller, but &lsquo;a gentleman who dealt in books,&rsquo; the
+friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the most well-known
+men of his day.&nbsp; Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him birth,
+at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the
+<i>Gentleman&rsquo;s Magazine</i> tells us of her &lsquo;amiable
+disposition and numerous accomplishments,&rsquo; and adds
+somewhat quaintly that &lsquo;she is supposed to have understood
+the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person of either
+sex now living.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+poetry.&nbsp; He went to school at Charles Burney&rsquo;s academy
+at Hammersmith.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 arch&aelig;ologist, and an admirable teacher who,
+while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not
+forget the importance of early moral training.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Indeed, painting was the first art that fascinated
+him.&nbsp; It was not till much later that he sought to find
+expression by pen or poison.</p>
+<p>Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by
+boyish dreams of the romance and chivalry of a soldier&rsquo;s
+life, and to have become a young guardsman.&nbsp; But the
+reckless dissipated life of his companions failed to satisfy the
+refined artistic temperament of one who was made for other
+things.&nbsp; In a short time he wearied of the service.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Art,&rsquo; he tells us, in words that still move many by
+their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; But Art was not the only cause of
+the change.&nbsp; &lsquo;The writings of Wordsworth,&rsquo; he
+goes on to say, &lsquo;did much towards calming the confusing
+whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations.&nbsp; I wept over
+them tears of happiness and gratitude.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; A severe illness, in
+which, to use his own words, he was &lsquo;broken like a vessel
+of clay,&rsquo; prostrated him for a time.&nbsp; His delicately
+strung organisation, however indifferent it might have been to
+inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to
+pain.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But he was
+young&mdash;only twenty-five years of age&mdash;and he soon
+passed out of the &lsquo;dead black waters,&rsquo; as he called
+them, into the larger air of humanistic culture.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &lsquo;I said with John Woodvil,&rsquo; he cries,
+&lsquo;it were a life of gods to dwell in such an element,&rsquo;
+to see and hear and write brave things:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;These high and gusty relishes of life<br />
+Have no allayings of mortality.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the
+utterance of a man who had a true passion for letters.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;To see and hear and write brave things,&rsquo; this was
+his aim.</p>
+<p>Scott, the editor of the <i>London Magazine</i>, struck by the
+young man&rsquo;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.&nbsp; <i>Janus Weathercock</i>, <i>Egomet
+Bonmot</i>, and <i>Van Vinkvooms</i>, were some of the grotesque
+masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to reveal
+his levity.&nbsp; A mask tells us more than a face.&nbsp; These
+disguises intensified his personality.&nbsp; In an incredibly
+short time he seems to have made his mark.&nbsp; Charles Lamb
+speaks of &lsquo;kind, light-hearted Wainewright,&rsquo; whose
+prose is &lsquo;capital.&rsquo;&nbsp; We hear of him entertaining
+Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke,
+the poet John Clare, and others, at <i>a
+petit-d&icirc;ner</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+There was something in him of Balzac&rsquo;s Lucien de
+Rubempr&eacute;.&nbsp; At times he reminds us of Julien
+Sorel.&nbsp; De Quincey saw him once.&nbsp; It was at a dinner at
+Charles Lamb&rsquo;s.&nbsp; &lsquo;Amongst the company, all
+literary men, sat a murderer,&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;what
+sudden growth of another interest&rsquo; 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a
+personality by the vulgar test of production.&nbsp; This young
+dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something.&nbsp;
+He recognised that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of
+style no less than the arts that seek to express it.&nbsp; Nor is
+his work without interest.&nbsp; We hear of William Blake
+stopping in the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and
+pronouncing it to be &lsquo;very fine.&rsquo;&nbsp; His essays
+are prefiguring of much that has since been realised.&nbsp; He
+seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
+culture that are regarded by many as true essentials.&nbsp; He
+writes about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian
+Renaissance.&nbsp; He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and
+Elizabethan translations of <i>Cupid and Psyche</i>, and the
+<i>Hypnerotomachia</i>, and book-binding and early editions, and
+wide-margined proofs.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Like
+Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier, he
+was fascinated by that &lsquo;sweet marble monster&rsquo; of both
+sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; But it is
+clear that he was one of the first to recognise what is, indeed,
+the very keynote of &aelig;sthetic eclecticism, I mean the true
+harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age or
+place, of school or manner.&nbsp; 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 arch&aelig;ological reconstruction of
+the past, nor burden ourselves with any fanciful necessity for
+historical accuracy.&nbsp; In this artistic perception he was
+perfectly right.&nbsp; All beautiful things belong to the same
+age.</p>
+<p>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 &Kappa;&Alpha;&Lambda;&Omicron;&Sigma;
+finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of
+the &lsquo;Delphic Sibyl&rsquo; of Michael Angelo, or of the
+&lsquo;Pastoral&rsquo; of Giorgione.&nbsp; 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, &lsquo;cased in a cover
+of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded
+with small brilliants and rubies,&rsquo; and close by it
+&lsquo;squats a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in
+the sunny fields of corn-bearing Sicily.&rsquo;&nbsp; Some dark
+antique bronzes contrast with the pale gleam of two noble
+<i>Christi Crucifixi</i>, one carved in ivory, the other moulded
+in wax.&rsquo;&nbsp; He has his trays of Tassie&rsquo;s gems, his
+tiny Louis-Quatorze <i>bonbonni&egrave;re</i> with a miniature by
+Petitot, his highly prized &lsquo;brown-biscuit teapots,
+filagree-worked,&rsquo; his citron morocco letter-case, and his
+&lsquo;pomona-green&rsquo; chair.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s &lsquo;Liber Studiorum,&rsquo; of which he was a
+warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique
+gems and cameos, &lsquo;the head of Alexander on an onyx of two
+strata,&rsquo; or &lsquo;that superb <i>altissimo relievo</i> on
+cornelian, Jupiter &AElig;giochus.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was always a
+great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful
+suggestions as to the best means of forming a collection.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the
+complex impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the
+first step in &aelig;sthetic criticism is to realise one&rsquo;s
+own impressions.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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 &lsquo;taste,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He certainly could not, and he frankly
+acknowledges how difficult it is to form any fair estimate of
+contemporary work.&nbsp; But, on the whole, his taste was good
+and sound.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;mere
+industry and accurate transcription.&rsquo;&nbsp; Of
+Crome&rsquo;s &lsquo;Heath Scene near Norwich&rsquo; he remarks
+that it shows &lsquo;how much a subtle observation of the
+elements, in their wild moods, does for a most uninteresting
+flat,&rsquo; and of the popular type of landscape of his day he
+says that it is &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s pictures as he did for Mr.
+Crabbe&rsquo;s poems.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The qualities that
+he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity
+of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power.&nbsp; Upon
+the other hand, he was not a doctrinaire.&nbsp; &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; This is one of his excellent
+aphorisms.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;to see the object as in
+itself it really is.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his
+ease in his criticisms of contemporary work.&nbsp; &lsquo;The
+present,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;is about as agreeable a confusion
+to me as Ariosto on the first perusal. . . . Modern things dazzle
+me.&nbsp; I must look at them through Time&rsquo;s
+telescope.&nbsp; Elia complains that to him the merit of a MS.
+poem is uncertain; &ldquo;print,&rdquo; as he excellently says,
+&ldquo;settles it.&rdquo;&nbsp; Fifty years&rsquo; toning does
+the same thing to a picture.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; What is Gothic
+touched him very little, but classical art and the art of the
+Renaissance were always dear to him.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In his judgments on the great Italian
+Masters, says De Quincey, &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; The highest
+praise that we can give to him is that he tried to revive style
+as a conscious tradition.&nbsp; But he saw that no amount of art
+lectures or art congresses, or &lsquo;plans for advancing the
+fine arts,&rsquo; will ever produce this result.&nbsp; The
+people, he says very wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee
+Hall, must always have &lsquo;the best models constantly before
+their eyes.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often
+extremely technical in his art criticisms.&nbsp; Of
+Tintoret&rsquo;s &lsquo;St. George delivering the Egyptian
+Princess from the Dragon,&rsquo; he remarks:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And elsewhere he talks learnedly of &lsquo;a delicate
+Schiavone, various as a tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,&rsquo;
+of &lsquo;a glowing portrait, remarkable for <i>morbidezza</i>,
+by the scarce Moroni,&rsquo; and of another picture being
+&lsquo;pulpy in the carnations.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; His
+description of Lancret&rsquo;s <i>Repas Italien</i>, in which
+&lsquo;a dark-haired girl, &ldquo;amorous of mischief,&rdquo;
+lies on the daisy-powdered grass,&rsquo; is in some respects very
+charming.&nbsp; Here is his account of &lsquo;The
+Crucifixion,&rsquo; by Rembrandt.&nbsp; It is extremely
+characteristic of his style&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Darkness&mdash;sooty, portentous
+darkness&mdash;shrouds the whole scene: only above the accursed
+wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy
+deluge&mdash;&lsquo;sleety-flaw, discoloured
+water&rsquo;&mdash;streams down amain, spreading a grisly
+spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable
+night.&nbsp; Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the darkened
+Cross trembles! the winds are dropt&mdash;the air is
+stagnant&mdash;a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet,
+and some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the
+hill.&nbsp; The horses snuff the coming terror, and become
+unmanageable through fear.&nbsp; 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, &lsquo;I
+thirst.&rsquo;&nbsp; The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.</p>
+<p>His head sinks, and the sacred corpse &lsquo;swings senseless
+of the cross.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Earth yawns, and the graves give up
+their dwellers.&nbsp; The dead and the living are mingled
+together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy
+city.&nbsp; New prodigies await them there.&nbsp; The veil of the
+temple&mdash;the unpierceable veil&mdash;is rent asunder from top
+to bottom, and that dreaded recess containing the Hebrew
+mysteries&mdash;the fatal ark with the tables and seven-branched
+candelabrum&mdash;is disclosed by the light of unearthly flames
+to the God-deserted multitude.</p>
+<p>Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite
+right.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; At
+present it is like a thing in another world.&nbsp; A dark gulf is
+betwixt us.&nbsp; It is not tangible by the body.&nbsp; We can
+only approach it in the spirit.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In this passage, written, the author tells us, &lsquo;in awe
+and reverence,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp; It is pleasanter, however, to pass to
+this description of Giulio Romano&rsquo;s &lsquo;Cephalus and
+Procris&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>We should read Moschus&rsquo;s lament for Bion,
+the sweet shepherd, before looking at this picture, or study the
+picture as a preparation for the lament.&nbsp; We have nearly the
+same images in both.&nbsp; 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; &lsquo;the satyrs, too, and fauns
+dark-veiled groan,&rsquo; and the fountain nymphs within the wood
+melt into tearful waters.&nbsp; The sheep and goats leave their
+pasture; and oreads, &lsquo;who love to scale the most
+inaccessible tops of all uprightest rocks,&rsquo; 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, &lsquo;with many-sobbing streams,&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">Filling the far-seen ocean with a
+voice.</p>
+<p>The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the
+knelling horn of Aurora&rsquo;s love no more shall scatter away
+the cold twilight on the top of Hymettus.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;now helpless,
+heavy, void of all motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick
+hair in mockery.</p>
+<p>From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs
+press forward with loud cries&mdash;</p>
+<p>And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists,
+advance;<br />
+And put strange pity in their horned countenance.</p>
+<p>Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace
+of death.&nbsp; On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love
+with &lsquo;vans dejected&rsquo; 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.&nbsp;
+Above and more remote than the Ephidryad, another female, rending
+her locks, appears among the vine-festooned pillars of an unshorn
+grove.&nbsp; The centre of the picture is filled by shady
+meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is &lsquo;the vast
+strength of the ocean stream,&rsquo; from whose floor the
+extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her
+brine-washed steeds to behold the death-pangs of her rival.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite
+admirable.&nbsp; The conception of making a prose poem out of
+paint is excellent.&nbsp; Much of the best modern literature
+springs from the same aim.&nbsp; In a very ugly and sensible age,
+the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.</p>
+<p>His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied.&nbsp; In
+everything connected with the stage, for instance, he was always
+extremely interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for
+arch&aelig;ological accuracy in costume and scene-painting.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;In art,&rsquo; he says in one of his essays,
+&lsquo;whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well&rsquo;;
+and he points out that once we allow the intrusion of
+anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be
+drawn.&nbsp; In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a
+famous occasion, he was &lsquo;on the side of the
+angels.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was one of the first to admire Keats and
+Shelley&mdash;&lsquo;the tremulously-sensitive and poetical
+Shelley,&rsquo; as he calls him.&nbsp; His admiration for
+Wordsworth was sincere and profound.&nbsp; He thoroughly
+appreciated William Blake.&nbsp; One of the best copies of the
+&lsquo;Songs of Innocence and Experience&rsquo; that is now in
+existence was wrought specially for him.&nbsp; He loved Alain
+Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and
+Chaucer and Chapman, and Petrarch.&nbsp; And to him all the arts
+were one.&nbsp; &lsquo;Our critics,&rsquo; he remarks with much
+wisdom, &lsquo;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&rsquo;; 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.&nbsp; To
+his fellow-contributors in the <i>London Magazine</i> he was
+always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan
+Cunningham, Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of
+the malice of a friend.&nbsp; 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:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>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.</p>
+<p>How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a
+conceit most seasonably out of season.&nbsp; His talk without
+affectation was compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even
+unto obscurity.&nbsp; Like grains of fine gold, his sentences
+would beat out into whole sheets.&nbsp; He had small mercy on
+spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the <i>fashion for
+men of genius</i> was a standing dish.&nbsp; Sir Thomas Browne
+was a &lsquo;bosom cronie&rsquo; of his; so was Burton, and old
+Fuller.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One night at C-&rsquo;s, the above dramatic
+partners were the temporary subject of chat.&nbsp; Mr. X.
+commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I
+don&rsquo;t know which of them), but was instantly taken up by
+Elia, who told him &lsquo;<i>That</i> was nothing; the lyrics
+were the high things&mdash;the lyrics!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>One side of his literary career deserves especial
+notice.&nbsp; Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much
+to him as to any man of the early part of this century.&nbsp; He
+was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and delighted in pictorial
+epithets and pompous exaggerations.&nbsp; 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 <i>Janus Weathercock</i>
+may be said to have invented.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; This being the least
+valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most
+obvious influence.&nbsp; A publicist, nowadays, is a man who
+bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his
+private life.</p>
+<p>Like most artificial people, he had a great love of
+nature.&nbsp; &lsquo;I hold three things in high
+estimation,&rsquo; he says somewhere: &lsquo;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.&nbsp; The country gives them
+all to me.&rsquo;&nbsp; He writes about his wandering over
+fragrant furze and heath repeating Collins&rsquo;s &lsquo;Ode to
+Evening,&rsquo; just to catch the fine quality of the moment;
+about smothering his face &lsquo;in a watery bed of cowslips, wet
+with May dews&rsquo;; and about the pleasure of seeing the
+sweet-breathed kine &lsquo;pass slowly homeward through the
+twilight,&rsquo; and hearing &lsquo;the distant clank of the
+sheep-bell.&rsquo;&nbsp; One phrase of his, &lsquo;the polyanthus
+glowed in its cold bed of earth, like a solitary picture of
+Giorgione on a dark oaken panel,&rsquo; is curiously
+characteristic of his temperament, and this passage is rather
+pretty in its way:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>The short tender grass was covered with
+marguerites&mdash;&lsquo;such that men called <i>daisies</i> in
+our town&rsquo;&mdash;thick as stars on a summer&rsquo;s
+night.&nbsp; The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly
+mellowed from a high dusky grove of elms at some distance off,
+and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring away the
+birds from the newly-sown seeds.&nbsp; The blue depths were the
+colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a cloud streaked the calm
+&aelig;ther; only round the horizon&rsquo;s edge streamed a
+light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village
+with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding
+whiteness.&nbsp; I thought of Wordsworth&rsquo;s &lsquo;Lines
+written in March.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who
+penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian
+influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir,
+one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any
+age.&nbsp; How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he
+does not tell us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the
+results of his terrible experiments and the methods that he
+adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.&nbsp; Even in later
+days, too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred to
+speak about &lsquo;The Excursion,&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Poems
+founded on the Affections.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is no doubt,
+however, that the poison that he used was strychnine.&nbsp; In
+one of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which
+served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory
+hands, he used to carry crystals of the Indian <i>nux vomica</i>,
+a poison, one of his biographers tells us, &lsquo;nearly
+tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of almost infinite
+dilution.&rsquo;&nbsp; His murders, says De Quincey, were more
+than were ever made known judicially.&nbsp; This is no doubt so,
+and some of them are worthy of mention.&nbsp; His first victim
+was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths.&nbsp; He poisoned him in
+1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had
+always been very much attached.&nbsp; In the August of the next
+year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife&rsquo;s mother, and
+in the following December he poisoned the lovely Helen
+Abercrombie, his sister-in-law.&nbsp; Why he murdered Mrs.
+Abercrombie is not ascertained.&nbsp; It may have been for a
+caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power that was in
+him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.&nbsp;
+But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself
+and his wife for the sake of a sum of about &pound;18,000, for
+which they had insured her life in various offices.&nbsp; The
+circumstances were as follows.&nbsp; On the 12th of December, he
+and his wife and child came up to London from Linden House, and
+took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street.&nbsp; With
+them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie.&nbsp;
+On the evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at
+supper that night Helen sickened.&nbsp; The next day she was
+extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in
+to attend her.&nbsp; She lived till Monday, the 20th, when, after
+the doctor&rsquo;s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright
+brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a
+walk.&nbsp; When they returned Helen Abercrombie was dead.&nbsp;
+She was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair
+hair.&nbsp; A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her
+brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much his
+style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a
+painter for whose work he had always entertained a great
+admiration.&nbsp; De Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not
+really privy to the murder.&nbsp; Let us hope that she was
+not.&nbsp; Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.</p>
+<p>The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the
+case, declined to pay the policy on the technical ground of
+misrepresentation and want of interest, and, with curious
+courage, the poisoner entered an action in the Court of Chancery
+against the Imperial, it being agreed that one decision should
+govern all the cases.&nbsp; The trial, however, did not come on
+for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was
+ultimately given in the companies&rsquo; favour.&nbsp; The judge
+on the occasion was Lord Abinger.&nbsp; <i>Egomet Bonmot</i> was
+represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet, and the
+Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for the other
+side.&nbsp; The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be
+present at either of the trials.&nbsp; The refusal of the
+companies to give him the &pound;18,000 had placed him in a
+position of most painful pecuniary embarrassment.&nbsp; Indeed, a
+few months after the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he had been
+actually arrested for debt in the streets of London while he was
+serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends.&nbsp; This
+difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he
+thought it better to go abroad till he could come to some
+practical arrangement with his creditors.&nbsp; He accordingly
+went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of the young lady in
+question, and while he was there induced him to insure his life
+with the Pelican Company for &pound;3000.&nbsp; As soon as the
+necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
+executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee
+as they sat together one evening after dinner.&nbsp; He himself
+did not gain any monetary advantage by doing this.&nbsp; His aim
+was simply to revenge himself on the first office that had
+refused to pay him the price of his sin.&nbsp; His friend died
+the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at once for a
+sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany,
+and was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who
+had a beautiful country house at St. Omer.&nbsp; From this he
+moved to Paris, where he remained for several years, living in
+luxury, some say, while others talk of his &lsquo;skulking with
+poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all who knew
+him.&rsquo;&nbsp; In 1837 he returned to England privately.&nbsp;
+Some strange mad fascination brought him back.&nbsp; He followed
+a woman whom he loved.</p>
+<p>It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the
+hotels in Covent Garden.&nbsp; His sitting-room was on the ground
+floor, and he prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being
+seen.&nbsp; Thirteen years before, when he was making his fine
+collection of majolica and Marc Antonios, he had forged the names
+of his trustees to a power of attorney, which enabled him to get
+possession of some of the money which he had inherited from his
+mother, and had brought into marriage settlement.&nbsp; He knew
+that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to
+England he was imperilling his life.&nbsp; Yet he returned.&nbsp;
+Should one wonder?&nbsp; It was said that the woman was very
+beautiful.&nbsp; Besides, she did not love him.</p>
+<p>It was by a mere accident that he was discovered.&nbsp; A
+noise in the street attracted his attention, and, in his artistic
+interest in modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a
+moment.&nbsp; Some one outside called out, &lsquo;That&rsquo;s
+Wainewright, the Bank-forger.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was Forrester, the
+Bow Street runner.</p>
+<p>On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey.&nbsp;
+The following report of the proceedings appeared in the
+<i>Times</i>:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson,
+Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of
+gentlemanly appearance, wearing mustachios, was indicted for
+forging and uttering a certain power of attorney for &pound;2259,
+with intent to defraud the Governor and Company of the Bank of
+England.</p>
+<p>There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of
+which he pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr.
+Serjeant Arabin in the course of the morning.&nbsp; On being
+brought before the judges, however, he begged to be allowed to
+withdraw the former plea, and then pleaded guilty to two of the
+indictments which were not of a capital nature.</p>
+<p>The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were
+three other indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed
+blood, the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded,
+and the prisoner at the close of the session sentenced by the
+Recorder to transportation for life.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to
+the colonies.&nbsp; In a fanciful passage in one of his early
+essays he had fancied himself &lsquo;lying in Horsemonger Gaol
+under sentence of death&rsquo; for having been unable to resist
+the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the British
+Museum in order to complete his collection.&nbsp; The sentence
+now passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of
+death.&nbsp; He complained bitterly of it to his friends, and
+pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some people may fancy,
+that the money was practically his own, having come to him from
+his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had been
+committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,
+was at least a <i>circonstance attenuante</i>.&nbsp; The
+permanence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem,
+and certainly the English law solves the question in an extremely
+rough-and-ready manner.&nbsp; There is, however, something
+dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was inflicted on
+him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the prose of
+modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his
+sins.</p>
+<p>While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne
+came across him by chance.&nbsp; They had been going over the
+prisons of London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate
+they suddenly caught sight of Wainewright.&nbsp; He met them with
+a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was
+&lsquo;horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in
+former years, and at whose table he had dined.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a
+kind of fashionable lounge.&nbsp; Many men of letters went down
+to visit their old literary comrade.&nbsp; But he was no longer
+the kind light-hearted Janus whom Charles Lamb admired.&nbsp; He
+seems to have grown quite cynical.</p>
+<p>To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one
+afternoon, and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing
+out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied:
+&lsquo;Sir, you City men enter on your speculations, and take the
+chances of them.&nbsp; Some of your speculations succeed, some
+fail.&nbsp; Mine happen to have failed, yours happen to have
+succeeded.&nbsp; That is the only difference, sir, between my
+visitor and me.&nbsp; But, sir, I will tell you one thing in
+which I have succeeded to the last.&nbsp; I have been determined
+through life to hold the position of a gentleman.&nbsp; I have
+always done so.&nbsp; I do so still.&nbsp; It is the custom of
+this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his
+morning&rsquo;s turn of sweeping it out.&nbsp; I occupy a cell
+with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer me the
+broom!&rsquo;&nbsp; When a friend reproached him with the murder
+of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said,
+&lsquo;Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick
+ankles.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and
+sent from there in the <i>Susan</i> to Van Diemen&rsquo;s Land
+along with three hundred other convicts.&nbsp; The voyage seems
+to have been most distasteful to him, and in a letter written to
+a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of &lsquo;the
+companion of poets and artists&rsquo; being compelled to
+associate with &lsquo;country bumpkins.&rsquo;&nbsp; The phrase
+that he applies to his companions need not surprise us.&nbsp;
+Crime in England is rarely the result of sin.&nbsp; It is nearly
+always the result of starvation.&nbsp; There was probably no one
+on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or
+even a psychologically interesting nature.</p>
+<p>His love of art, however, never deserted him.&nbsp; At Hobart
+Town he started a studio, and returned to sketching and
+portrait-painting, and his conversation and manners seem not to
+have lost their charm.&nbsp; Nor did he give up his habit of
+poisoning, and there are two cases on record in which he tried to
+make away with people who had offended him.&nbsp; But his hand
+seems to have lost its cunning.&nbsp; Both of his attempts were
+complete failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied
+with Tasmanian society, he presented a memorial to the governor
+of the settlement, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a
+ticket-of-leave.&nbsp; In it he speaks of himself as being
+&lsquo;tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and
+realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived
+of the exercise of profitable or even of decorous
+speech.&rsquo;&nbsp; His request, however, was refused, and the
+associate of Coleridge consoled himself by making those
+marvellous <i>Paradis Artificiels</i> whose secret is only known
+to the eaters of opium.&nbsp; In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his
+sole living companion being a cat, for which he had evinced at
+extraordinary affection.</p>
+<p>His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his
+art.&nbsp; They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality
+that his early work certainly lacked.&nbsp; In a note to the
+<i>Life of Dickens</i>, Forster mentions that in 1847 Lady
+Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who held a
+military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young
+lady from his clever brush; and it is said that &lsquo;he had
+contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into the
+portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl.&rsquo;&nbsp; M. Zola, in
+one of his novels, tells us of a young man who, having committed
+a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist
+portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a
+curious resemblance to his victim.&nbsp; The development of Mr.
+Wainewright&rsquo;s style seems to me far more subtle and
+suggestive.&nbsp; One can fancy an intense personality being
+created out of sin.</p>
+<p>This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years
+dazzled literary London, and made so brilliant a
+<i>d&eacute;but</i> in life and letters, is undoubtedly a most
+interesting study.&nbsp; Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest
+biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained
+in this memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite
+invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art and
+nature was a mere pretence and assumption, and others have denied
+to him all literary power.&nbsp; This seems to me a shallow, or
+at least a mistaken, view.&nbsp; The fact of a man being a
+poisoner is nothing against his prose.&nbsp; The domestic virtues
+are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an
+excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.&nbsp; It is
+possible that De Quincey exaggerated his critical powers, and I
+cannot help saying again that there is much in his published
+works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in the
+bad sense of that bad word.&nbsp; Here and there he is distinctly
+vulgar in expression, and he is always lacking in the
+self-restraint of the true artist.&nbsp; But for some of his
+faults we must blame the time in which he lived, and, after all,
+prose that Charles Lamb thought &lsquo;capital&rsquo; has no
+small historic interest.&nbsp; That he had a sincere love of art
+and nature seems to me quite certain.&nbsp; There is no essential
+incongruity between crime and culture.&nbsp; We cannot re-write
+the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral
+sense of what should be.</p>
+<p>Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be
+able to form any purely artistic judgment about him.&nbsp; It is
+impossible not to feel a strong prejudice against a man who might
+have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of
+Balliol.&nbsp; But had the man worn a costume and spoken a
+language different from our own, had he lived in imperial Rome,
+or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the
+seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this
+century and this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a
+perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position and value.&nbsp;
+I know that there are many historians, or at least writers on
+historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral
+judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame
+with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster.&nbsp;
+This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the
+moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that
+it will make its appearance wherever it is not required.&nbsp;
+Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming
+Nero, or scolding Tiberius, or censuring C&aelig;sar
+Borgia.&nbsp; These personages have become like the puppets of a
+play.&nbsp; They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder,
+but they do not harm us.&nbsp; They are not in immediate relation
+to us.&nbsp; We have nothing to fear from them.&nbsp; They have
+passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor
+science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.&nbsp;
+And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb&rsquo;s friend.&nbsp;
+At present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be
+treated in that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which
+we owe so many charming studies of the great criminals of the
+Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr. John Addington Symonds,
+Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee, and other
+distinguished writers.&nbsp; However, Art has not forgotten
+him.&nbsp; He is the hero of Dickens&rsquo;s <i>Hunted Down</i>,
+the Varney of Bulwer&rsquo;s <i>Lucretia</i>; and it is
+gratifying to note that fiction has paid some homage to one who
+was so powerful with &lsquo;pen, pencil and poison.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a
+fact.</p>
+<h2><a name="page95"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 95</span>THE
+CRITIC AS ARTIST<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING</span></h2>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>A DIALOGUE</i>.&nbsp; <i>Part
+I.</i>&nbsp; <i>Persons</i>: <i>Gilbert</i><br />
+<i>and Ernest</i>.&nbsp; <i>Scene</i>: <i>the library of a house
+in</i><br />
+<i>Piccadilly</i>, <i>overlooking the Green Park</i>.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span> (<i>at the
+Piano</i>).&nbsp; My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span> (<i>looking up</i>).&nbsp;
+At a capital story that I have just come across in this volume of
+Reminiscences that I have found on your table.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; What is the
+book?&nbsp; Ah! I see.&nbsp; I have not read it yet.&nbsp; Is it
+good?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Well, while you have
+been playing, I have been turning over the pages with some
+amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs.&nbsp;
+They are generally written by people who have either entirely
+lost their memories, or have never done anything worth
+remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation
+of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly
+at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes: the public is
+wonderfully tolerant.&nbsp; It forgives everything except
+genius.&nbsp; But I must confess that I like all memoirs.&nbsp; I
+like them for their form, just as much as for their matter.&nbsp;
+In literature mere egotism is delightful.&nbsp; It is what
+fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as
+Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de
+S&eacute;vign&eacute;.&nbsp; Whenever we come across it, and,
+strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it,
+and do not easily forget it.&nbsp; Humanity will always love
+Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to
+the world, and the couchant nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze
+for the castle of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even,
+that in the open Loggia at Florence shows the moon the dead
+terror that once turned life to stone, have not given it more
+pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
+scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour
+and his shame.&nbsp; The opinions, the character, the
+achievements of the man, matter very little.&nbsp; He may be a
+sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the
+bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can
+always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence.&nbsp;
+The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented&mdash;if
+that can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve
+intellectual problems by a denial of the supremacy of the
+intellect&mdash;may not, cannot, I think, survive.&nbsp; But the
+world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its
+progress from darkness to darkness.&nbsp; The lonely church at
+Littlemore, where &lsquo;the breath of the morning is damp, and
+worshippers are few,&rsquo; will always be dear to it, and
+whenever men see the yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of
+Trinity they will think of that gracious undergraduate who saw in
+the flower&rsquo;s sure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide
+for ever with the Benign Mother of his days&mdash;a prophecy that
+Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be
+fulfilled.&nbsp; Yes; autobiography is irresistible.&nbsp; Poor,
+silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into
+the circle of the Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is
+the better part of valour, bustles about among them in that
+&lsquo;shaggy purple gown with gold buttons and looped
+lace&rsquo; which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at
+his ease, and prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of
+the Indian blue petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the
+&lsquo;good hog&rsquo;s hars-let,&rsquo; and the &lsquo;pleasant
+French fricassee of veal&rsquo; that he loved to eat, of his game
+of bowls with Will Joyce, and his &lsquo;gadding after
+beauties,&rsquo; and his reciting of <i>Hamlet</i> on a Sunday,
+and his playing of the viol on week days, and other wicked or
+trivial things.&nbsp; Even in actual life egotism is not without
+its attractions.&nbsp; When people talk to us about others they
+are usually dull.&nbsp; When they talk to us about themselves
+they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them
+up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a
+book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect
+absolutely.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; There is much virtue
+in that If, as Touchstone would say.&nbsp; But do you seriously
+propose that every man should become his own Boswell?&nbsp; What
+would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and
+Recollections in that case?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; What has become of
+them?&nbsp; They are the pest of the age, nothing more and
+nothing less.&nbsp; Every great man nowadays has his disciples,
+and it is always Judas who writes the biography.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; My dear fellow!</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; I am afraid it is
+true.&nbsp; Formerly we used to canonise our heroes.&nbsp; The
+modern method is to vulgarise them.&nbsp; Cheap editions of great
+books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are
+absolutely detestable.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; May I ask, Gilbert,
+to whom you allude?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Oh! to all our
+second-rate <i>litt&eacute;rateurs</i>.&nbsp; We are overrun by a
+set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at
+the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one
+duty is to behave as mutes.&nbsp; But we won&rsquo;t talk about
+them.&nbsp; They are the mere body-snatchers of literature.&nbsp;
+The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul
+is out of their reach.&nbsp; And now, let me play Chopin to you,
+or Dvor&aacute;k?&nbsp; Shall I play you a fantasy by
+Dvor&aacute;k?&nbsp; He writes passionate, curiously-coloured
+things.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; No; I don&rsquo;t
+want music just at present.&nbsp; It is far too indefinite.&nbsp;
+Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner last night,
+and, though absolutely charming in every other respect, she
+insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in
+the German language.&nbsp; Now, whatever music sounds like I am
+glad to say that it does not sound in the smallest degree like
+German.&nbsp; There are forms of patriotism that are really quite
+degrading.&nbsp; No; Gilbert, don&rsquo;t play any more.&nbsp;
+Turn round and talk to me.&nbsp; Talk to me till the white-horned
+day comes into the room.&nbsp; There is something in your voice
+that is wonderful.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span> (<i>rising from the
+piano</i>).&nbsp; I am not in a mood for talking to-night.&nbsp;
+I really am not.&nbsp; How horrid of you to smile!&nbsp; Where
+are the cigarettes?&nbsp; Thanks.&nbsp; How exquisite these
+single daffodils are!&nbsp; They seem to be made of amber and
+cool ivory.&nbsp; They are like Greek things of the best
+period.&nbsp; What was the story in the confessions of the
+remorseful Academician that made you laugh?&nbsp; Tell it to
+me.&nbsp; After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping
+over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies
+that were not my own.&nbsp; Music always seems to me to produce
+that effect.&nbsp; It creates for one a past of which one has
+been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have
+been hidden from one&rsquo;s tears.&nbsp; I can fancy a man who
+had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some
+curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul,
+without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible
+experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or
+great renunciations.&nbsp; And so tell me this story,
+Ernest.&nbsp; I want to be amused.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Oh!&nbsp; I
+don&rsquo;t know that it is of any importance.&nbsp; But I
+thought it a really admirable illustration of the true value of
+ordinary art-criticism.&nbsp; It seems that a lady once gravely
+asked the remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his
+celebrated picture of &lsquo;A Spring-Day at
+Whiteley&rsquo;s,&rsquo; or, &lsquo;Waiting for the Last
+Omnibus,&rsquo; or some subject of that kind, was all painted by
+hand?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; And was it?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; You are quite
+incorrigible.&nbsp; But, seriously speaking, what is the use of
+art-criticism?&nbsp; Why cannot the artist be left alone, to
+create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth
+the world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would
+each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice
+and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify
+it for us, and give to it a momentary perfection.&nbsp; It seems
+to me that the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude
+around it, and works best in silence and in isolation.&nbsp; Why
+should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of
+criticism?&nbsp; Why should those who cannot create take upon
+themselves to estimate the value of creative work?&nbsp; What can
+they know about it?&nbsp; If a man&rsquo;s work is easy to
+understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; And if his work is
+incomprehensible, an explanation is wicked.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; I did not say
+that.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Ah! but you should
+have.&nbsp; Nowadays, we have so few mysteries left to us that we
+cannot afford to part with one of them.&nbsp; The members of the
+Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad Church Party,
+or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott&rsquo;s Great Writers Series,
+seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain their
+divinity away.&nbsp; Where one had hoped that Browning was a
+mystic they have sought to show that he was simply
+inarticulate.&nbsp; Where one had fancied that he had something
+to conceal, they have proved that he had but little to
+reveal.&nbsp; But I speak merely of his incoherent work.&nbsp;
+Taken as a whole the man was great.&nbsp; He did not belong to
+the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the Titan.&nbsp;
+He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could
+sing.&nbsp; His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort,
+and he passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to
+chaos.&nbsp; Still, he was great.&nbsp; He has been called a
+thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and
+always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated
+him, but rather the processes by which thought moves.&nbsp; It
+was the machine he loved, not what the machine makes.&nbsp; The
+method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him
+as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.&nbsp; So much, indeed, did
+the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised
+language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of
+expression.&nbsp; Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the
+Muse&rsquo;s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice;
+rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a
+material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of
+thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or
+stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and
+suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination
+itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man&rsquo;s
+utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have
+added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning&rsquo;s hands
+a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade
+in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his
+tongue in his cheek.&nbsp; There are moments when he wounds us by
+monstrous music.&nbsp; Nay, if he can only get his music by
+breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap
+in discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous
+wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, or
+the interval less harsh.&nbsp; Yet, he was great: and though he
+turned language into ignoble clay, he made from it men and women
+that live.&nbsp; He is the most Shakespearian creature since
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips,
+Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths.&nbsp; Even now,
+as I am speaking, and speaking not against him but for him, there
+glides through the room the pageant of his persons.&nbsp; There,
+creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some
+girl&rsquo;s hot kiss.&nbsp; There, stands dread Saul with the
+lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.&nbsp; Mildred
+Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and
+Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St.
+Praxed&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner,
+and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima&rsquo;s
+haggard face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself.&nbsp;
+Pale as the white satin of his doublet, the melancholy king
+watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal Strafford pass
+forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears the cousins
+whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go down.&nbsp;
+Yes, Browning was great.&nbsp; And as what will he be
+remembered?&nbsp; As a poet?&nbsp; Ah, not as a poet!&nbsp; He
+will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme
+writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.&nbsp; His
+sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not
+answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth,
+and what more should an artist do?&nbsp; Considered from the
+point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him who
+made Hamlet.&nbsp; Had he been articulate, he might have sat
+beside him.&nbsp; The only man who can touch the hem of his
+garment is George Meredith.&nbsp; Meredith is a prose Browning,
+and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in
+prose.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; There is something in
+what you say, but there is not everything in what you say.&nbsp;
+In many points you are unjust.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It is difficult not
+to be unjust to what one loves.&nbsp; But let us return to the
+particular point at issue.&nbsp; What was it that you said?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Simply this: that in
+the best days of art there were no art-critics.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; I seem to have heard
+that observation before, Ernest.&nbsp; It has all the vitality of
+error and all the tediousness of an old friend.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; It is true.&nbsp;
+Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that petulant
+manner.&nbsp; It is quite true.&nbsp; In the best days of art
+there were no art-critics.&nbsp; The sculptor hewed from the
+marble block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within
+it.&nbsp; The waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture
+to the statue, and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was
+dumb.&nbsp; He poured the glowing bronze into the mould of sand,
+and the river of red metal cooled into noble curves and took the
+impress of the body of a god.&nbsp; With enamel or polished
+jewels he gave sight to the sightless eyes.&nbsp; The
+hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his graver.&nbsp; And
+when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit portico, the
+child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who passed by,
+&delta;&iota;&alpha;
+&lambda;&alpha;&mu;&pi;&rho;&omicron;&tau;&#940;&tau;&omicron;&upsilon;
+&beta;&alpha;&#943;&nu;&omicron;&nu;&tau;&epsilon;&sigmaf;
+&alpha;&beta;&rho;&omega;&sigmaf;
+&alpha;&iota;&theta;&#941;&rho;&omicron;&sigmaf;, became
+conscious of a new influence that had come across their lives,
+and dreamily, or with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went
+to their homes or daily labour, or wandered, it may be, through
+the city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young
+Ph&aelig;drus bathed his feet, and, lying there on the soft
+grass, beneath the tall wind&mdash;whispering planes and
+flowering <i>agnus castus</i>, began to think of the wonder of
+beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe.&nbsp; In those
+days the artist was free.&nbsp; From the river valley he took the
+fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone,
+fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to
+the dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty
+tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and
+the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and
+raiment.&nbsp; On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright
+sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod
+with tired feet the purple white-starred fields of asphodel, one
+&lsquo;in whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan War,&rsquo;
+Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or figured Odysseus, the wise
+and cunning, bound by tight cords to the mast-step, that he might
+listen without hurt to the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by
+the clear river of Acheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted
+over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persian in trews and mitre
+flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the galleys clashing
+their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay.&nbsp; He drew
+with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared
+cedar.&nbsp; Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted
+with wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with
+heated irons making it firm.&nbsp; Panel and marble and linen
+canvas became wonderful as his brush swept across them; and life
+seeing her own image, was still, and dared not speak.&nbsp; All
+life, indeed, was his, from the merchants seated in the
+market-place to the cloaked shepherd lying on the hill; from the
+nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon, to
+the king whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon
+oil-bright shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans.&nbsp; Men and
+women, with pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passed before
+him.&nbsp; He watched them, and their secret became his.&nbsp;
+Through form and colour he re-created a world.</p>
+<p>All subtle arts belonged to him also.&nbsp; He held the gem
+against the revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple
+couch for Adonis, and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis
+with her hounds.&nbsp; He beat out the gold into roses, and
+strung them together for necklace or armlet.&nbsp; He beat out
+the gold into wreaths for the conqueror&rsquo;s helmet, or into
+palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the royal
+dead.&nbsp; On the back of the silver mirror he graved Thetis
+borne by her Nereids, or love-sick Ph&aelig;dra with her nurse,
+or Persephone, weary of memory, putting poppies in her
+hair.&nbsp; The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from the
+silent wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands.&nbsp; He
+decorated the base and stem and ears with pattern of dainty
+olive-leaf, or foliated acanthus, or curved and crested
+wave.&nbsp; Then in black or red he painted lads wrestling, or in
+the race: knights in full armour, with strange heraldic shields
+and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped chariot over
+rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or working their
+miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their pain.&nbsp;
+Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground of
+white the languid bridegroom and his bride, with Eros hovering
+round them&mdash;an Eros like one of Donatello&rsquo;s angels, a
+little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings.&nbsp; On
+the curved side he would write the name of his friend.&nbsp;
+&Kappa;&Alpha;&Lambda;&Omicron;&Sigma;
+&Alpha;&Lambda;&Kappa;&Iota;&Beta;&Iota;&Alpha;&Delta;&Eta;&Sigma;
+or &Kappa;&Alpha;&Lambda;&Omicron;&Sigma;
+&Chi;&Alpha;&Rho;&Mu;&Iota;&Delta;&Eta;&Sigma; tells us the story
+of his days.&nbsp; Again, on the rim of the wide flat cup he
+would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at rest, as his fancy
+willed it.&nbsp; From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed Aphrodite
+at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed M&aelig;nads in his train,
+Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained feet,
+while, satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated
+skins, or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted
+fir-cone, and wreathed with dark ivy.&nbsp; And no one came to
+trouble the artist at his work.&nbsp; No irresponsible chatter
+disturbed him.&nbsp; He was not worried by opinions.&nbsp; By the
+Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no Higginbotham.&nbsp;
+By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art
+congresses bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching
+the mediocrity how to mouth.&nbsp; By the Ilyssus there were no
+tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of
+what they do not understand.&nbsp; On the reed-grown banks of
+that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism monopolising
+the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in the
+dock.&nbsp; The Greeks had no art-critics.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Ernest, you are
+quite delightful, but your views are terribly unsound.&nbsp; I am
+afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of some
+one older than yourself.&nbsp; That is always a dangerous thing
+to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will
+find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.&nbsp;
+As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend
+it.&nbsp; It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian
+principle of the survival of the vulgarest.&nbsp; I have merely
+to do with literature.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But what is the
+difference between literature and journalism?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Oh! journalism is
+unreadable, and literature is not read.&nbsp; That is all.&nbsp;
+But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no
+art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd.&nbsp; It would be
+more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of
+art-critics.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Really?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes, a nation of
+art-critics.&nbsp; But I don&rsquo;t wish to destroy the
+delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the relation
+of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his
+age.&nbsp; To give an accurate description of what has never
+occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian,
+but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and
+culture.&nbsp; Still less do I desire to talk learnedly.&nbsp;
+Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or
+the profession of the mentally unemployed.&nbsp; And, as for what
+is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish
+method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly
+tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes.&nbsp;
+No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by
+Dvor&aacute;k.&nbsp; The pallid figures on the tapestry are
+smiling at us, and the heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are
+folded in sleep.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t let us discuss anything
+solemnly.&nbsp; I am but too conscious of the fact that we are
+born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I
+live in terror of not being misunderstood.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+degrade me into the position of giving you useful
+information.&nbsp; Education is an admirable thing, but it is
+well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth
+knowing can be taught.&nbsp; Through the parted curtains of the
+window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver.&nbsp; Like
+gilded bees the stars cluster round her.&nbsp; The sky is a hard
+hollow sapphire.&nbsp; Let us go out into the night.&nbsp;
+Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
+still.&nbsp; Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of
+Bohemia, and hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she
+seems?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; You are horribly
+wilful.&nbsp; I insist on your discussing this matter with
+me.&nbsp; You have said that the Greeks were a nation of
+art-critics.&nbsp; What art-criticism have they left us?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; My dear Ernest, even
+if not a single fragment of art-criticism had come down to us
+from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none the less true
+that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they
+invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism
+of everything else.&nbsp; For, after all, what is our primary
+debt to the Greeks?&nbsp; Simply the critical spirit.&nbsp; And,
+this spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion and
+science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education,
+they exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two
+supreme and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless
+system of criticism that the world has ever seen.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But what are the two
+supreme and highest arts?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Life and Literature,
+life and the perfect expression of life.&nbsp; The principles of
+the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise in an
+age so marred by false ideals as our own.&nbsp; The principles of
+the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle
+that we can hardly understand them.&nbsp; Recognising that the
+most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his
+infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism of language,
+considered in the light of the mere material of that art, to a
+point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or
+emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for
+instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as
+a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need
+hardly say, with much keener &aelig;sthetic instinct.&nbsp; In
+this they were right, as they were right in all things.&nbsp;
+Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of
+the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this
+country, there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more
+and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is really
+the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek
+to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide
+always.&nbsp; Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole,
+the most perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us,
+is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music,
+and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life of
+words and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such
+rhythmical life produces.&nbsp; We, in fact, have made writing a
+definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of
+elaborate design.&nbsp; The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded
+writing simply as a method of chronicling.&nbsp; Their test was
+always the spoken word in its musical and metrical
+relations.&nbsp; The voice was the medium, and the ear the
+critic.&nbsp; I have sometimes thought that the story of
+Homer&rsquo;s blindness might be really an artistic myth, created
+in critical days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the
+great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the
+body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but that he is a
+true singer also, building his song out of music, repeating each
+line over and over again to himself till he has caught the secret
+of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that are winged
+with light.&nbsp; Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to
+his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that
+England&rsquo;s great poet owed much of the majestic movement and
+sonorous splendour of his later verse.&nbsp; When Milton could no
+longer write he began to sing.&nbsp; Who would match the measures
+of <i>Comus</i> with the measures of <i>Samson Agonistes</i>, or
+of <i>Paradise Lost</i> or <i>Regained</i>?&nbsp; When Milton
+became blind he composed, as every one should compose, with the
+voice purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days became that
+mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all
+the stateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have its
+swiftness, and is the one imperishable inheritance of English
+literature sweeping through all the ages, because above them, and
+abiding with us ever, being immortal in its form.&nbsp; Yes:
+writing has done much harm to writers.&nbsp; We must return to
+the voice.&nbsp; That must be our test, and perhaps then we shall
+be able to appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek
+art-criticism.</p>
+<p>As it now is, we cannot do so.&nbsp; Sometimes, when I have
+written a piece of prose that I have been modest enough to
+consider absolutely free from fault, a dreadful thought comes
+over me that I may have been guilty of the immoral effeminacy of
+using trochaic and tribrachic movements, a crime for which a
+learned critic of the Augustan age censures with most just
+severity the brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias.&nbsp; I
+grow cold when I think of it, and wonder to myself if the
+admirable ethical effect of the prose of that charming writer,
+who once in a spirit of reckless generosity towards the
+uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed the monstrous
+doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life, will not some day
+be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the p&aelig;ons
+have been wrongly placed.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Ah! now you are
+flippant.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Who would not be
+flippant when he is gravely told that the Greeks had no
+art-critics?&nbsp; I can understand it being said that the
+constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but
+not that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not
+criticise.&nbsp; You will not ask me to give you a survey of
+Greek art criticism from Plato to Plotinus.&nbsp; The night is
+too lovely for that, and the moon, if she heard us, would put
+more ashes on her face than are there already.&nbsp; But think
+merely of one perfect little work of &aelig;sthetic criticism,
+Aristotle&rsquo;s <i>Treatise on Poetry</i>.&nbsp; It is not
+perfect in form, for it is badly written, consisting perhaps of
+notes dotted down for an art lecture, or of isolated fragments
+destined for some larger book, but in temper and treatment it is
+perfect, absolutely.&nbsp; The ethical effect of art, its
+importance to culture, and its place in the formation of
+character, had been done once for all by Plato; but here we have
+art treated, not from the moral, but from the purely
+&aelig;sthetic point of view.&nbsp; Plato had, of course, dealt
+with many definitely artistic subjects, such as the importance of
+unity in a work of art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the
+&aelig;sthetic value of appearances, the relation of the visible
+arts to the external world, and the relation of fiction to
+fact.&nbsp; He first perhaps stirred in the soul of man that
+desire that we have not yet satisfied, the desire to know the
+connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in
+the moral and intellectual order of the Kosmos.&nbsp; The
+problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may seem
+to many to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysical
+sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer
+them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they are still
+vital and full of meaning.&nbsp; It may be that it is as a critic
+of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering
+the name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a new
+philosophy.&nbsp; But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art
+primarily in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for
+instance, and investigating the material it uses, which is
+language, its subject-matter, which is life, the method by which
+it works, which is action, the conditions under which it reveals
+itself, which are those of theatric presentation, its logical
+structure, which is plot, and its final &aelig;sthetic appeal,
+which is to the sense of beauty realised through the passions of
+pity and awe.&nbsp; That purification and spiritualising of the
+nature which he calls
+&kappa;&#940;&theta;&alpha;&rho;&sigma;&iota;&sigmaf; is, as
+Goethe saw, essentially &aelig;sthetic, and is not moral, as
+Lessing fancied.&nbsp; Concerning himself primarily with the
+impression that the work of art produces, Aristotle sets himself
+to analyse that impression, to investigate its source, to see how
+it is engendered.&nbsp; As a physiologist and psychologist, he
+knows that the health of a function resides in energy.&nbsp; To
+have a capacity for a passion and not to realise it, is to make
+oneself incomplete and limited.&nbsp; The mimic spectacle of life
+that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom of much &lsquo;perilous
+stuff,&rsquo; and by presenting high and worthy objects for the
+exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the man; nay,
+not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him also
+into noble feelings of which he might else have known nothing,
+the word &kappa;&#940;&theta;&alpha;&rho;&sigma;&iota;&sigmaf;
+having, it has sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the
+rite of initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally
+tempted to fancy, its true and only meaning here.&nbsp; This is
+of course a mere outline of the book.&nbsp; But you see what a
+perfect piece of &aelig;sthetic criticism it is.&nbsp; Who indeed
+but a Greek could have analysed art so well?&nbsp; After reading
+it, one does not wonder any longer that Alexandria devoted itself
+so largely to art-criticism, and that we find the artistic
+temperaments of the day investigating every question of style and
+manner, discussing the great Academic schools of painting, for
+instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve
+the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or the realistic
+and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual life,
+or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value
+of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper
+subject-matter for the artist.&nbsp; Indeed, I fear that the
+inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in
+matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism
+were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin
+colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of
+those who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can
+gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been
+robbed.&nbsp; And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks
+chattered about painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and
+had their private views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and
+Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements
+towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art,
+and produced their art-historians, and their arch&aelig;ologists,
+and all the rest of it.&nbsp; Why, even the theatrical managers
+of travelling companies brought their dramatic critics with them
+when they went on tour, and paid them very handsome salaries for
+writing laudatory notices.&nbsp; Whatever, in fact, is modern in
+our life we owe to the Greeks.&nbsp; Whatever is an anachronism
+is due to medi&aelig;valism.&nbsp; It is the Greeks who have
+given us the whole system of art-criticism, and how fine their
+critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that the
+material they criticised with most care was, as I have already
+said, language.&nbsp; For the material that painter or sculptor
+uses is meagre in comparison with that of words.&nbsp; Words have
+not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as
+rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the
+Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and
+certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze,
+but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are
+theirs indeed alone.&nbsp; If the Greeks had criticised nothing
+but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of
+the world.&nbsp; To know the principles of the highest art is to
+know the principles of all the arts.</p>
+<p>But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured
+cloud.&nbsp; Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a
+lion&rsquo;s eye.&nbsp; She is afraid that I will talk to you of
+Lucian and Longinus, of Quinctilian and Dionysius, of Pliny and
+Fronto and Pausanias, of all those who in the antique world wrote
+or lectured upon art matters.&nbsp; She need not be afraid.&nbsp;
+I am tired of my expedition into the dim, dull abyss of
+facts.&nbsp; There is nothing left for me now but the divine
+&mu;&omicron;&nu;&#972;&chi;&rho;&omicron;&nu;&omicron;&sigmaf;
+&eta;&delta;&omicron;&nu;&#942; of another cigarette.&nbsp;
+Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one
+unsatisfied.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Try one of
+mine.&nbsp; They are rather good.&nbsp; I get them direct from
+Cairo.&nbsp; The only use of our <i>attach&eacute;s</i> is that
+they supply their friends with excellent tobacco.&nbsp; And as
+the moon has hidden herself, let us talk a little longer.&nbsp; I
+am quite ready to admit that I was wrong in what I said about the
+Greeks.&nbsp; They were, as you have pointed out, a nation of
+art-critics.&nbsp; I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry
+for them.&nbsp; For the creative faculty is higher than the
+critical.&nbsp; There is really no comparison between them.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; The antithesis
+between them is entirely arbitrary.&nbsp; Without the critical
+faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the
+name.&nbsp; You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of
+choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist
+realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary
+perfection.&nbsp; Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact
+of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most
+characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this
+critical faculty can create anything at all in art.&nbsp;
+Arnold&rsquo;s definition of literature as a criticism of life
+was not very felicitous in form, but it showed how keenly he
+recognised the importance of the critical element in all creative
+work.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; I should have said
+that great artists work unconsciously, that they were
+&lsquo;wiser than they knew,&rsquo; as, I think, Emerson remarks
+somewhere.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It is really not so,
+Ernest.&nbsp; All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and
+deliberate.&nbsp; No poet sings because he must sing.&nbsp; At
+least, no great poet does.&nbsp; A great poet sings because he
+chooses to sing.&nbsp; It is so now, and it has always been
+so.&nbsp; We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that
+sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more
+natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets
+looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical
+quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into
+song.&nbsp; The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep
+scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white
+feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the
+morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in
+the vale.&nbsp; But in this we are merely lending to other ages
+what we desire, or think we desire, for our own.&nbsp; Our
+historical sense is at fault.&nbsp; Every century that produces
+poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems
+to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is
+always the result of the most self-conscious effort.&nbsp;
+Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without
+self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical
+spirit are one.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; I see what you mean,
+and there is much in it.&nbsp; But surely you would admit that
+the great poems of the early world, the primitive, anonymous
+collective poems, were the result of the imagination of races,
+rather than of the imagination of individuals?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Not when they became
+poetry.&nbsp; Not when they received a beautiful form.&nbsp; For
+there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there
+is no unity, and unity is of the individual.&nbsp; No doubt Homer
+had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had
+chronicles and plays and novels from which to work, but they were
+merely his rough material.&nbsp; He took them, and shaped them
+into song.&nbsp; They become his, because he made them
+lovely.&nbsp; They were built out of music,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And so not built at all,<br />
+And therefore built for ever.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly
+one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the
+individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but
+the man who creates the age.&nbsp; Indeed, I am inclined to think
+that each myth and legend that seems to us to spring out of the
+wonder, or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was in its
+origin the invention of one single mind.&nbsp; The curiously
+limited number of the myths seems to me to point to this
+conclusion.&nbsp; But we must not go off into questions of
+comparative mythology.&nbsp; We must keep to criticism.&nbsp; And
+what I want to point out is this.&nbsp; An age that has no
+criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic,
+and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that
+possesses no art at all.&nbsp; There have been critical ages that
+have not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word, ages
+in which the spirit of man has sought to set in order the
+treasures of his treasure-house, to separate the gold from the
+silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over the jewels,
+and to give names to the pearls.&nbsp; But there has never been a
+creative age that has not been critical also.&nbsp; For it is the
+critical faculty that invents fresh forms.&nbsp; The tendency of
+creation is to repeat itself.&nbsp; It is to the critical
+instinct that we owe each new school that springs up, each new
+mould that art finds ready to its hand.&nbsp; There is really not
+a single form that art now uses that does not come to us from the
+critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were either
+stereotyped or invented or made perfect.&nbsp; I say Alexandria,
+not merely because it was there that the Greek spirit became most
+self-conscious, and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and
+theology, but because it was to that city, and not to Athens,
+that Rome turned for her models, and it was through the survival,
+such as it was, of the Latin language that culture lived at
+all.&nbsp; When, at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned upon
+Europe, the soil had been in some measure prepared for it.&nbsp;
+But, to get rid of the details of history, which are always
+wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the
+forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit.&nbsp; To
+it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of
+its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic
+novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the
+oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive
+them, and the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that
+word.&nbsp; In fact, we owe it everything, except the sonnet, to
+which, however, some curious parallels of thought-movement may be
+traced in the Anthology, American journalism, to which no
+parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham Scotch
+dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has recently
+proposed should be made the basis for a final and unanimous
+effort on the part of our second-rate poets to make themselves
+really romantic.&nbsp; Each new school, as it appears, cries out
+against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man that
+it owes its origin.&nbsp; The mere creative instinct does not
+innovate, but reproduces.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; You have been talking
+of criticism as an essential part of the creative spirit, and I
+now fully accept your theory.&nbsp; But what of criticism outside
+creation?&nbsp; I have a foolish habit of reading periodicals,
+and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly
+valueless.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; So is most modern
+creative work also.&nbsp; Mediocrity weighing mediocrity in the
+balance, and incompetence applauding its brother&mdash;that is
+the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us
+from time to time.&nbsp; And yet, I feel I am a little unfair in
+this matter.&nbsp; As a rule, the critics&mdash;I speak, of
+course, of the higher class, of those in fact who write for the
+sixpenny papers&mdash;are far more cultured than the people whose
+work they are called upon to review.&nbsp; This is, indeed, only
+what one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more
+cultivation than creation does.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Really?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Certainly.&nbsp;
+Anybody can write a three-volumed novel.&nbsp; It merely requires
+a complete ignorance of both life and literature.&nbsp; The
+difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the
+difficulty of sustaining any standard.&nbsp; Where there is no
+style a standard must be impossible.&nbsp; The poor reviewers are
+apparently reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of
+literature, the chroniclers of the doings of the habitual
+criminals of art.&nbsp; It is sometimes said of them that they do
+not read all through the works they are called upon to
+criticise.&nbsp; They do not.&nbsp; Or at least they should
+not.&nbsp; If they did so, they would become confirmed
+misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase from one of the pretty
+Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the rest of their
+lives.&nbsp; Nor is it necessary.&nbsp; To know the vintage and
+quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.&nbsp; It
+must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is
+worth anything or worth nothing.&nbsp; Ten minutes are really
+sufficient, if one has the instinct for form.&nbsp; Who wants to
+wade through a dull volume?&nbsp; One tastes it, and that is
+quite enough&mdash;more than enough, I should imagine.&nbsp; I am
+aware that there are many honest workers in painting as well as
+in literature who object to criticism entirely.&nbsp; They are
+quite right.&nbsp; Their work stands in no intellectual relation
+to their age.&nbsp; It brings us no new element of
+pleasure.&nbsp; It suggests no fresh departure of thought, or
+passion, or beauty.&nbsp; It should not be spoken of.&nbsp; It
+should be left to the oblivion that it deserves.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But, my dear
+fellow&mdash;excuse me for interrupting you&mdash;you seem to me
+to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great
+deal too far.&nbsp; For, after all, even you must admit that it
+is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; More difficult to do
+a thing than to talk about it?&nbsp; Not at all.&nbsp; That is a
+gross popular error.&nbsp; It is very much more difficult to talk
+about a thing than to do it.&nbsp; In the sphere of actual life
+that is of course obvious.&nbsp; Anybody can make history.&nbsp;
+Only a great man can write it.&nbsp; There is no mode of action,
+no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower
+animals.&nbsp; It is only by language that we rise above them, or
+above each other&mdash;by language, which is the parent, and not
+the child, of thought.&nbsp; Action, indeed, is always easy, and
+when presented to us in its most aggravated, because most
+continuous form, which I take to be that of real industry,
+becomes simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever
+to do.&nbsp; No, Ernest, don&rsquo;t talk about action.&nbsp; It
+is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by
+an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious.&nbsp; It is a thing
+incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and
+ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its
+aim.&nbsp; Its basis is the lack of imagination.&nbsp; It is the
+last resource of those who know not how to dream.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Gilbert, you treat
+the world as if it were a crystal ball.&nbsp; You hold it in your
+hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy.&nbsp; You do
+nothing but re-write history.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; The one duty we owe
+to history is to re-write it.&nbsp; That is not the least of the
+tasks in store for the critical spirit.&nbsp; When we have fully
+discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise
+that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is
+the man of action.&nbsp; He, indeed, knows neither the origin of
+his deeds nor their results.&nbsp; From the field in which he
+thought that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our vintage,
+and the fig-tree that he planted for our pleasure is as barren as
+the thistle, and more bitter.&nbsp; It is because Humanity has
+never known where it was going that it has been able to find its
+way.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; You think, then, that
+in the sphere of action a conscious aim is a delusion?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It is worse than a
+delusion.&nbsp; If we lived long enough to see the results of our
+actions it may be that those who call themselves good would be
+sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls evil
+stirred by a noble joy.&nbsp; Each little thing that we do passes
+into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to
+powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into
+elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and more splendid
+than any that has gone before.&nbsp; But men are the slaves of
+words.&nbsp; They rage against Materialism, as they call it,
+forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has
+not spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if
+any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world&rsquo;s
+faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty
+or trammelling creeds.&nbsp; What is termed Sin is an essential
+element of progress.&nbsp; Without it the world would stagnate,
+or grow old, or become colourless.&nbsp; By its curiosity Sin
+increases the experience of the race.&nbsp; Through its
+intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony
+of type.&nbsp; In its rejection of the current notions about
+morality, it is one with the higher ethics.&nbsp; And as for the
+virtues!&nbsp; What are the virtues?&nbsp; Nature, M. Renan tells
+us, cares little about chastity, and it may be that it is to the
+shame of the Magdalen, and not to their own purity, that the
+Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom from stain.&nbsp;
+Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part
+have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of
+evils.&nbsp; The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of
+which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud,
+is a sign of our imperfect development.&nbsp; It must be merged
+in instinct before we become fine.&nbsp; Self-denial is simply a
+method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a
+survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old
+worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of
+the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and
+has its altars in the land.&nbsp; Virtues!&nbsp; Who knows what
+the virtues are?&nbsp; Not you.&nbsp; Not I.&nbsp; Not any
+one.&nbsp; It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal,
+for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had
+gained by his crime.&nbsp; It is well for his peace that the
+saint goes to his martyrdom.&nbsp; He is spared the sight of the
+horror of his harvest.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Gilbert, you sound
+too harsh a note.&nbsp; Let us go back to the more gracious
+fields of literature.&nbsp; What was it you said?&nbsp; That it
+was more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span> (<i>after a
+pause</i>).&nbsp; Yes: I believe I ventured upon that simple
+truth.&nbsp; Surely you see now that I am right?&nbsp; When man
+acts he is a puppet.&nbsp; When he describes he is a poet.&nbsp;
+The whole secret lies in that.&nbsp; It was easy enough on the
+sandy plains by windy Ilion to send the notched arrow from the
+painted bow, or to hurl against the shield of hide and flamelike
+brass the long ash-handled spear.&nbsp; It was easy for the
+adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian carpets for her lord, and
+then, as he lay couched in the marble bath, to throw over his
+head the purple net, and call to her smooth-faced lover to stab
+through the meshes at the heart that should have broken at
+Aulis.&nbsp; For Antigone even, with Death waiting for her as her
+bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the tainted air at noon,
+and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the wretched
+naked corse that had no tomb.&nbsp; But what of those who wrote
+about these things?&nbsp; What of those who gave them reality,
+and made them live for ever?&nbsp; Are they not greater than the
+men and women they sing of?&nbsp; &lsquo;Hector that sweet knight
+is dead,&rsquo; and Lucian tells us how in the dim under-world
+Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen, and marvelled that it
+was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships were
+launched, those beautiful mailed men laid low, those towered
+cities brought to dust.&nbsp; Yet, every day the swanlike
+daughter of Leda comes out on the battlements, and looks down at
+the tide of war.&nbsp; The greybeards wonder at her loveliness,
+and she stands by the side of the king.&nbsp; In his chamber of
+stained ivory lies her leman.&nbsp; He is polishing his dainty
+armour, and combing the scarlet plume.&nbsp; With squire and
+page, her husband passes from tent to tent.&nbsp; She can see his
+bright hair, and hears, or fancies that she hears, that clear
+cold voice.&nbsp; In the courtyard below, the son of Priam is
+buckling on his brazen cuirass.&nbsp; The white arms of
+Andromache are around his neck.&nbsp; He sets his helmet on the
+ground, lest their babe should be frightened.&nbsp; Behind the
+embroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles, in perfumed
+raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his
+soul arrays himself to go forth to the fight.&nbsp; From a
+curiously carven chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his
+ship-side, the Lord of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic
+chalice that the lip of man had never touched, and cleanses it
+with brimstone, and with fresh water cools it, and, having washed
+his hands, fills with black wine its burnished hollow, and spills
+the thick grape-blood upon the ground in honour of Him whom at
+Dodona barefooted prophets worshipped, and prays to Him, and
+knows not that he prays in vain, and that by the hands of two
+knights from Troy, Panthous&rsquo; son, Euphorbus, whose
+love-locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid, the
+lion-hearted, Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his
+doom.&nbsp; Phantoms, are they?&nbsp; Heroes of mist and
+mountain?&nbsp; Shadows in a song?&nbsp; No: they are real.&nbsp;
+Action!&nbsp; What is action?&nbsp; It dies at the moment of its
+energy.&nbsp; It is a base concession to fact.&nbsp; The world is
+made by the singer for the dreamer.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; While you talk it
+seems to me to be so.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It is so in
+truth.&nbsp; On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard
+like a thing of green bronze.&nbsp; The owl has built her nest in
+the palace of Priam.&nbsp; Over the empty plain wander shepherd
+and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced,
+oily sea, &omicron;&iota;&nu;&omicron;&psi;
+&pi;&#972;&nu;&tau;&omicron;&sigmaf;, as Homer calls it,
+copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great galleys of
+the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely
+tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing
+corks of his net.&nbsp; Yet, every morning the doors of the city
+are thrown open, and on foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the
+warriors go forth to battle, and mock their enemies from behind
+their iron masks.&nbsp; All day long the fight rages, and when
+night comes the torches gleam by the tents, and the cresset burns
+in the hall.&nbsp; Those who live in marble or on painted panel,
+know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in
+its beauty, but limited to one note of passion or one mood of
+calm.&nbsp; Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad
+emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, of pleasure
+and of suffering.&nbsp; The seasons come and go in glad or
+saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass
+by before them.&nbsp; They have their youth and their manhood,
+they are children, and they grow old.&nbsp; It is always dawn for
+St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the window.&nbsp; Through the
+still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God&rsquo;s
+pain.&nbsp; The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads
+from her brow.&nbsp; On that little hill by the city of Florence,
+where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the
+solstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer suns that
+hardly can the slim naked girl dip into the marble tank the round
+bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player
+rest idly upon the chords.&nbsp; It is twilight always for the
+dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of
+France.&nbsp; In eternal twilight they move, those frail
+diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch
+the dew-drenched grass they tread on.&nbsp; But those who walk in
+epos, drama, or romance, see through the labouring months the
+young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening unto
+morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the
+shifting day with all its gold and shadow.&nbsp; For them, as for
+us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that
+Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment
+for their pleasure.&nbsp; The statue is concentrated to one
+moment of perfection.&nbsp; The image stained upon the canvas
+possesses no spiritual element of growth or change.&nbsp; If they
+know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life,
+for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those
+only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not
+merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a
+past of glory or of shame.&nbsp; Movement, that problem of the
+visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone.&nbsp; It
+is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the
+soul in its unrest.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Yes; I see now what
+you mean.&nbsp; But, surely, the higher you place the creative
+artist, the lower must the critic rank.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Why so?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Because the best that
+he can give us will be but an echo of rich music, a dim shadow of
+clear-outlined form.&nbsp; It may, indeed, be that life is chaos,
+as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms are mean and its
+heroisms ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature to
+create, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world
+that will be more marvellous, more enduring, and more true than
+the world that common eyes look upon, and through which common
+natures seek to realise their perfection.&nbsp; But surely, if
+this new world has been made by the spirit and touch of a great
+artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect that there
+will be nothing left for the critic to do.&nbsp; I quite
+understand now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far
+more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.&nbsp; But it
+seems to me that this sound and sensible maxim, which is really
+extremely soothing to one&rsquo;s feelings, and should be adopted
+as its motto by every Academy of Literature all over the world,
+applies only to the relations that exist between Art and Life,
+and not to any relations that there may be between Art and
+Criticism.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; But, surely,
+Criticism is itself an art.&nbsp; And just as artistic creation
+implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without
+it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really
+creative in the highest sense of the word.&nbsp; Criticism is, in
+fact, both creative and independent.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Independent?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes;
+independent.&nbsp; Criticism is no more to be judged by any low
+standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or
+sculptor.&nbsp; The critic occupies the same relation to the work
+of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world
+of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of
+thought.&nbsp; He does not even require for the perfection of his
+art the finest materials.&nbsp; Anything will serve his
+purpose.&nbsp; And just as out of the sordid and sentimental
+amours of the silly wife of a small country doctor in the squalid
+village of Yonville-l&rsquo;Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert
+was able to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style,
+so, from subjects of little or of no importance, such as the
+pictures in this year&rsquo;s Royal Academy, or in any
+year&rsquo;s Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis
+Morris&rsquo;s poems, M. Ohnet&rsquo;s novels, or the plays of
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be his
+pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of contemplation,
+produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct with
+intellectual subtlety.&nbsp; Why not?&nbsp; Dulness is always an
+irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the
+permanent <i>Bestia Trionfans</i> that calls wisdom from its
+cave.&nbsp; To an artist so creative as the critic, what does
+subject-matter signify?&nbsp; No more and no less than it does to
+the novelist and the painter.&nbsp; Like them, he can find his
+motives everywhere.&nbsp; Treatment is the test.&nbsp; There is
+nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But is Criticism
+really a creative art?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Why should it not
+be?&nbsp; It works with materials, and puts them into a form that
+is at once new and delightful.&nbsp; What more can one say of
+poetry?&nbsp; Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a
+creation.&nbsp; For just as the great artists, from Homer and
+&AElig;schylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go
+directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in
+myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with
+materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to
+which imaginative form and colour have been already added.&nbsp;
+Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the
+purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative
+than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external
+to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as
+the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.&nbsp;
+Certainly, it is never trammelled by any shackles of
+verisimilitude.&nbsp; No ignoble considerations of probability,
+that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic
+or public life, affect it ever.&nbsp; One may appeal from fiction
+unto fact.&nbsp; But from the soul there is no appeal.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; From the soul?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes, from the
+soul.&nbsp; That is what the highest criticism really is, the
+record of one&rsquo;s own soul.&nbsp; It is more fascinating than
+history, as it is concerned simply with oneself.&nbsp; It is more
+delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not
+abstract, real and not vague.&nbsp; It is the only civilised form
+of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the
+thoughts of one&rsquo;s life; not with life&rsquo;s physical
+accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods
+and imaginative passions of the mind.&nbsp; I am always amused by
+the silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem
+to imagine that the primary function of the critic is to chatter
+about their second-rate work.&nbsp; The best that one can say of
+most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar
+than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of
+distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer
+to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and
+will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual
+existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be
+torn.&nbsp; His sole aim is to chronicle his own
+impressions.&nbsp; It is for him that pictures are painted, books
+written, and marble hewn into form.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; I seem to have heard
+another theory of Criticism.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes: it has been
+said by one whose gracious memory we all revere, and the music of
+whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her Sicilian fields, and
+made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the Cumnor cowslips,
+that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in
+itself it really is.&nbsp; But this is a very serious error, and
+takes no cognisance of Criticism&rsquo;s most perfect form, which
+is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own
+secret and not the secret of another.&nbsp; For the highest
+Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impressive
+purely.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But is that really
+so?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Of course it
+is.&nbsp; Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin&rsquo;s views on Turner
+are sound or not?&nbsp; What does it matter?&nbsp; That mighty
+and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its
+noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so
+sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and
+epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those
+wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases
+in England&rsquo;s Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think
+at times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring,
+but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking
+to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not through form and colour
+alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss,
+but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion
+and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with
+poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the
+greater art.&nbsp; Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put
+into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never
+dreamed of?&nbsp; The painter may have been merely the slave of
+an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into
+the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before
+that strange figure &lsquo;set in its marble chair in that cirque
+of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,&rsquo; I
+murmur to myself, &lsquo;She is older than the rocks among which
+she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and
+learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep
+seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for
+strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother
+of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all
+this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and
+lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing
+lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And I say to my friend, &lsquo;The presence that thus so
+strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the
+ways of a thousand years man had come to desire&rsquo;; and he
+answers me, &lsquo;Hers is the head upon which all &ldquo;the
+ends of the world are come,&rdquo; and the eyelids are a little
+weary.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really
+is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows
+nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our
+ears as was that flute-player&rsquo;s music that lent to the lips
+of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves.&nbsp; Do you
+ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this
+picture that &lsquo;all the thoughts and experience of the world
+had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to
+refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of
+Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its
+spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan
+world, the sins of the Borgias?&rsquo;&nbsp; He would probably
+have answered that he had contemplated none of these things, but
+had concerned himself simply with certain arrangements of lines
+and masses, and with new and curious colour-harmonies of blue and
+green.&nbsp; And it is for this very reason that the criticism
+which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.&nbsp; It
+treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new
+creation.&nbsp; It does not confine itself&mdash;let us at least
+suppose so for the moment&mdash;to discovering the real intention
+of the artist and accepting that as final.&nbsp; And in this it
+is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at
+least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in
+his soul who wrought it.&nbsp; Nay, it is rather the beholder who
+lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it
+marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age,
+so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives, and a symbol of
+what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear
+that we may receive.&nbsp; The longer I study, Ernest, the more
+clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts is, as the
+beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may be marred,
+and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention
+on the part of the artist.&nbsp; For when the work is finished it
+has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver
+a message far other than that which was put into its lips to
+say.&nbsp; Sometimes, when I listen to the overture to
+<i>Tannh&auml;user</i>, I seem indeed to see that comely knight
+treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass, and to hear the
+voice of Venus calling to him from the caverned hill.&nbsp; But
+at other times it speaks to me of a thousand different things, of
+myself, it may be, and my own life, or of the lives of others
+whom one has loved and grown weary of loving, or of the passions
+that man has known, or of the passions that man has not known,
+and so has sought for.&nbsp; To-night it may fill one with that
+&Epsilon;&Rho;&Omega;&Sigma; &Tau;&Omega;&Nu;
+&Alpha;&Delta;&Upsilon;&Nu;&Alpha;&Tau;&Omega;&Nu;, that <i>Amour
+de l&rsquo;Impossible</i>, which falls like a madness on many who
+think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so that they
+sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in the
+infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain, grow faint and
+swoon or stumble.&nbsp; To-morrow, like the music of which
+Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music of the Greek,
+it may perform the office of a physician, and give us an anodyne
+against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and
+&lsquo;bring the soul into harmony with all right
+things.&rsquo;&nbsp; And what is true about music is true about
+all the arts.&nbsp; Beauty has as many meanings as man has
+moods.&nbsp; Beauty is the symbol of symbols.&nbsp; Beauty
+reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.&nbsp; When it
+shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But is such work as
+you have talked about really criticism?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It is the highest
+Criticism, for it criticises not merely the individual work of
+art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form which the
+artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood
+incompletely.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; The highest
+Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary
+aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is
+not; that is your theory, I believe?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes, that is my
+theory.&nbsp; To the critic the work of art is simply a
+suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily
+bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.&nbsp;
+The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put
+into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses
+to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and
+&aelig;sthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn,
+and whispers of a thousand different things which were not
+present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the
+panel or graved the gem.</p>
+<p>It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the
+nature of the highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art,
+that the pictures that the critic loves most to write about are
+those that belong to the anecdotage of painting, and that deal
+with scenes taken out of literature or history.&nbsp; But this is
+not so.&nbsp; Indeed, pictures of this kind are far too
+intelligible.&nbsp; As a class, they rank with illustrations,
+and, even considered from this point of view are failures, as
+they do not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to
+it.&nbsp; For the domain of the painter is, as I suggested
+before, widely different from that of the poet.&nbsp; To the
+latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not merely
+the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to
+also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient
+gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect
+cycle of thought.&nbsp; The painter is so far limited that it is
+only through the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery
+of the soul; only through conventional images that he can handle
+ideas; only through its physical equivalents that he can deal
+with psychology.&nbsp; And how inadequately does he do it then,
+asking us to accept the torn turban of the Moor for the noble
+rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of
+Lear!&nbsp; Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him.&nbsp; Most
+of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and wasted
+lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets, marring their
+motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by visible
+form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of
+what is not seen.&nbsp; Their pictures are, as a natural
+consequence, insufferably tedious.&nbsp; They have degraded the
+invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth
+looking at is the obvious.&nbsp; I do not say that poet and
+painter may not treat of the same subject.&nbsp; They have always
+done so and will always do so.&nbsp; But while the poet can be
+pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must be pictorial
+always.&nbsp; For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in
+nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen.</p>
+<p>And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really
+fascinate the critic.&nbsp; He will turn from them to such works
+as make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the
+subtle quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from
+them there is an escape into a wider world.&nbsp; It is sometimes
+said that the tragedy of an artist&rsquo;s life is that he cannot
+realise his ideal.&nbsp; But the true tragedy that dogs the steps
+of most artists is that they realise their ideal too
+absolutely.&nbsp; For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed
+of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new
+starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.&nbsp; This
+is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.&nbsp; Music
+can never reveal its ultimate secret.&nbsp; This, also, is the
+explanation of the value of limitations in art.&nbsp; The
+sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the
+actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are
+able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which
+would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the
+Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual.&nbsp; It is
+through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in
+beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of
+recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the
+&aelig;sthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason
+and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both
+to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole,
+and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may
+possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer
+unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself.&nbsp; You
+see, then, how it is that the &aelig;sthetic critic rejects these
+obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and
+having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for
+such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative
+beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation
+final.&nbsp; Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the
+critic will have to the work that has stirred him to creation,
+but it will be such resemblance as exists, not between Nature and
+the mirror that the painter of landscape or figure may be
+supposed to hold up to her, but between Nature and the work of
+the decorative artist.&nbsp; Just as on the flowerless carpets of
+Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to look on,
+though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as
+the pearl and purple of the sea-shell is echoed in the church of
+St. Mark at Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous
+chapel at Ravenna is made gorgeous by the gold and green and
+sapphire of the peacock&rsquo;s tail, though the birds of Juno
+fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the work that he
+criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of whose
+charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and
+shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery
+of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature, solves
+once for all the problem of Art&rsquo;s unity.</p>
+<p>But I see it is time for supper.&nbsp; After we have discussed
+some Chambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the
+question of the critic considered in the light of the
+interpreter.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Ah! you admit, then,
+that the critic may occasionally be allowed to see the object as
+in itself it really is.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; I am not quite
+sure.&nbsp; Perhaps I may admit it after supper.&nbsp; There is a
+subtle influence in supper.</p>
+<h2><a name="page151"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 151</span>THE
+CRITIC AS ARTIST<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE
+IMPORTANCE</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING</span></h2>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>A DIALOGUE</i>: <i>Part
+II.</i>&nbsp; <i>Persons</i>: <i>the same</i>.<br />
+<i>Scene</i>: <i>the same</i>.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; The ortolans were
+delightful, and the Chambertin perfect, and now let us return to
+the point at issue.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Ah! don&rsquo;t let
+us do that.&nbsp; Conversation should touch everything, but
+should concentrate itself on nothing.&nbsp; Let us talk about
+<i>Moral Indignation</i>, <i>its Cause and Cure</i>, a subject on
+which I think of writing: or about <i>The Survival of
+Thersites</i>, as shown by the English comic papers; or about any
+topic that may turn up.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; No; I want to discuss
+the critic and criticism.&nbsp; You have told me that the highest
+criticism deals with art, not as expressive, but as impressive
+purely, and is consequently both creative and independent, is in
+fact an art by itself, occupying the same relation to creative
+work that creative work does to the visible world of form and
+colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought.&nbsp;
+Well, now, tell me, will not the critic be sometimes a real
+interpreter?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes; the critic will
+be an interpreter, if he chooses.&nbsp; He can pass from his
+synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, to an
+analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower
+sphere, as I hold it to be, there are many delightful things to
+be said and done.&nbsp; Yet his object will not always be to
+explain the work of art.&nbsp; He may seek rather to deepen its
+mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of
+wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike.&nbsp;
+Ordinary people are &lsquo;terribly at ease in Zion.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+They propose to walk arm in arm with the poets, and have a glib
+ignorant way of saying, &lsquo;Why should we read what is written
+about Shakespeare and Milton?&nbsp; We can read the plays and the
+poems.&nbsp; That is enough.&rsquo;&nbsp; But an appreciation of
+Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the
+reward of consummate scholarship.&nbsp; And he who desires to
+understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in
+which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation,
+to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar
+with the history of the struggle for supremacy between the old
+classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school
+of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and
+Marlowe&rsquo;s greater son; he must know the materials that were
+at Shakespeare&rsquo;s disposal, and the method in which he used
+them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the
+sixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations and their
+opportunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s day, its aims and modes and canons; he must
+study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed
+verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama,
+and the connection between the art of the creator of the
+Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he
+must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of
+Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare&rsquo;s true position in the
+history of European drama and the drama of the world.&nbsp; The
+critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat
+Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and
+revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his
+name.&nbsp; Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose
+mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his
+privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men.</p>
+<p>And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens.&nbsp; The critic
+will indeed be an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter
+in the sense of one who simply repeats in another form a message
+that has been put into his lips to say.&nbsp; For, just as it is
+only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a
+country gains that individual and separate life that we call
+nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying
+his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality
+and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters
+into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes,
+the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; I would have said
+that personality would have been a disturbing element.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; No; it is an element
+of revelation.&nbsp; If you wish to understand others you must
+intensify your own individualism.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; What, then, is the
+result?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; I will tell you, and
+perhaps I can tell you best by definite example.&nbsp; It seems
+to me that, while the literary critic stands of course first, as
+having the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material,
+each of the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned to it.&nbsp;
+The actor is a critic of the drama.&nbsp; He shows the
+poet&rsquo;s work under new conditions, and by a method special
+to himself.&nbsp; He takes the written word, and action, gesture
+and voice become the media of revelation.&nbsp; The singer or the
+player on lute and viol is the critic of music.&nbsp; The etcher
+of a picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us
+by the use of a new material its true colour-quality, its tones
+and values, and the relations of its masses, and so is, in his
+way, a critic of it, for the critic is he who exhibits to us a
+work of art in a form different from that of the work itself, and
+the employment of a new material is a critical as well as a
+creative element.&nbsp; Sculpture, too, has its critic, who may
+be either the carver of a gem, as he was in Greek days, or some
+painter like Mantegna, who sought to reproduce on canvas the
+beauty of plastic line and the symphonic dignity of processional
+bas-relief.&nbsp; And in the case of all these creative critics
+of art it is evident that personality is an absolute essential
+for any real interpretation.&nbsp; When Rubinstein plays to us
+the <i>Sonata Appassionata</i> of Beethoven, he gives us not
+merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven
+absolutely&mdash;Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic
+nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense
+personality.&nbsp; When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have
+the same experience.&nbsp; His own individuality becomes a vital
+part of the interpretation.&nbsp; People sometimes say that
+actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare&rsquo;s;
+and this fallacy&mdash;for it is a fallacy&mdash;is, I regret to
+say, repeated by that charming and graceful writer who has lately
+deserted the turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of
+Commons, I mean the author of <i>Obiter Dicta</i>.&nbsp; In point
+of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+Hamlet.&nbsp; If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a
+work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to
+life.&nbsp; There are as many Hamlets as there are
+melancholies.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; As many Hamlets as
+there are melancholies?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes: and as art
+springs from personality, so it is only to personality that it
+can be revealed, and from the meeting of the two comes right
+interpretative criticism.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; The critic, then,
+considered as the interpreter, will give no less than he
+receives, and lend as much as he borrows?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; He will be always
+showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age.&nbsp;
+He will always be reminding us that great works of art are living
+things&mdash;are, in fact, the only things that live.&nbsp; So
+much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that, as
+civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the
+elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits,
+will grow less and less interested in actual life, and <i>will
+seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has
+touched</i>.&nbsp; For life is terribly deficient in form.&nbsp;
+Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong
+people.&nbsp; There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and
+its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.&nbsp; One is always
+wounded when one approaches it.&nbsp; Things last either too
+long, or not long enough.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Poor life!&nbsp; Poor
+human life!&nbsp; Are you not even touched by the tears that the
+Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Too quickly touched
+by them, I fear.&nbsp; For when one looks back upon the life that
+was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such
+fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a dream
+and an illusion.&nbsp; What are the unreal things, but the
+passions that once burned one like fire?&nbsp; What are the
+incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully
+believed?&nbsp; What are the improbable things?&nbsp; The things
+that one has done oneself.&nbsp; No, Ernest; life cheats us with
+shadows, like a puppet-master.&nbsp; We ask it for
+pleasure.&nbsp; It gives it to us, with bitterness and
+disappointment in its train.&nbsp; We come across some noble
+grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to
+our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take
+its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence
+and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or
+dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we
+had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Life then is a
+failure?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; From the artistic
+point of view, certainly.&nbsp; And the chief thing that makes
+life a failure from this artistic point of view is the thing that
+lends to life its sordid security, the fact that one can never
+repeat exactly the same emotion.&nbsp; How different it is in the
+world of Art!&nbsp; On a shelf of the bookcase behind you stands
+the <i>Divine Comedy</i>, and I know that, if I open it at a
+certain place, I shall be filled with a fierce hatred of some one
+who has never wronged me, or stirred by a great love for some one
+whom I shall never see.&nbsp; There is no mood or passion that
+Art cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her
+secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are going to
+be.&nbsp; We can choose our day and select our hour.&nbsp; We can
+say to ourselves, &lsquo;To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with
+grave Virgil through the valley of the shadow of death,&rsquo;
+and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood, and the Mantuan
+stands by our side.&nbsp; We pass through the gate of the legend
+fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the horror of
+another world.&nbsp; The hypocrites go by, with their painted
+faces and their cowls of gilded lead.&nbsp; Out of the ceaseless
+winds that drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the
+heretic rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the
+rain.&nbsp; We break the withered branches from the tree in the
+grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds
+with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter
+cries.&nbsp; Out of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and
+when from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the
+pride that triumphs over the torture of that bed becomes ours for
+a moment.&nbsp; Through the dim purple air fly those who have
+stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit of
+loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the
+semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner
+of false coin.&nbsp; He bids us listen to his misery; we stop,
+and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and
+night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channels
+gush down the green Casentine hills.&nbsp; Sinon, the false Greek
+of Troy, mocks at him.&nbsp; He smites him in the face, and they
+wrangle.&nbsp; We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till
+Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by
+giants where great Nimrod blows his horn.&nbsp; Terrible things
+are in store for us, and we go to meet them in Dante&rsquo;s
+raiment and with Dante&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; We traverse the
+marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat through the
+slimy waves.&nbsp; He calls to us, and we reject him.&nbsp; When
+we hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us
+for the bitterness of our scorn.&nbsp; We tread upon the cold
+crystal of Cocytus, in which traitors stick like straws in
+glass.&nbsp; Our foot strikes against the head of Bocca.&nbsp; He
+will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in handfuls from
+the screaming skull.&nbsp; Alberigo prays us to break the ice
+upon his face that he may weep a little.&nbsp; We pledge our word
+to him, and when he has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the
+word that we have spoken, and pass from him; such cruelty being
+courtesy indeed, for who more base than he who has mercy for the
+condemned of God?&nbsp; In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man who
+sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew
+C&aelig;sar.&nbsp; We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the
+stars.</p>
+<p>In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holy
+mountain rises into the pure light of day.&nbsp; There is peace
+for us, and for those who for a season abide in it there is some
+peace also, though, pale from the poison of the Maremma, Madonna
+Pia passes before us, and Ismene, with the sorrow of earth still
+lingering about her, is there.&nbsp; Soul after soul makes us
+share in some repentance or some joy.&nbsp; He whom the mourning
+of his widow taught to drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us
+of Nella praying in her lonely bed, and we learn from the mouth
+of Buonconte how a single tear may save a dying sinner from the
+fiend.&nbsp; Sordello, that noble and disdainful Lombard, eyes us
+from afar like a couchant lion.&nbsp; When he learns that Virgil
+is one of Mantua&rsquo;s citizens, he falls upon his neck, and
+when he learns that he is the singer of Rome he falls before his
+feet.&nbsp; In that valley whose grass and flowers are fairer
+than cleft emerald and Indian wood, and brighter than scarlet and
+silver, they are singing who in the world were kings; but the
+lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg do not move to the music of the
+others, and Philip of France beats his breast and Henry of
+England sits alone.&nbsp; On and on we go, climbing the
+marvellous stair, and the stars become larger than their wont,
+and the song of the kings grows faint, and at length we reach the
+seven trees of gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise.&nbsp;
+In a griffin-drawn chariot appears one whose brows are bound with
+olive, who is veiled in white, and mantled in green, and robed in
+a vesture that is coloured like live fire.&nbsp; The ancient
+flame wakes within us.&nbsp; Our blood quickens through terrible
+pulses.&nbsp; We recognise her.&nbsp; It is Beatrice, the woman
+we have worshipped.&nbsp; The ice congealed about our heart
+melts.&nbsp; Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bow our
+forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned.&nbsp;
+When we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of
+the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the
+mistress of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven.&nbsp;
+Out of that eternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati
+leans to us.&nbsp; Her beauty troubles us for a moment, and when,
+like a thing that falls through water, she passes away, we gaze
+after her with wistful eyes.&nbsp; The sweet planet of Venus is
+full of lovers.&nbsp; Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the lady of
+Sordello&rsquo;s heart, is there, and Folco, the passionate
+singer of Provence, who in sorrow for Azalais forsook the world,
+and the Canaanitish harlot whose soul was the first that Christ
+redeemed.&nbsp; Joachim of Flora stands in the sun, and, in the
+sun, Aquinas recounts the story of St. Francis and Bonaventure
+the story of St. Dominic.&nbsp; Through the burning rubies of
+Mars, Cacciaguida approaches.&nbsp; He tells us of the arrow that
+is shot from the bow of exile, and how salt tastes the bread of
+another, and how steep are the stairs in the house of a
+stranger.&nbsp; In Saturn the soul sings not, and even she who
+guides us dare not smile.&nbsp; On a ladder of gold the flames
+rise and fall.&nbsp; At last, we see the pageant of the Mystical
+Rose.&nbsp; Beatrice fixes her eyes upon the face of God to turn
+them not again.&nbsp; The beatific vision is granted to us; we
+know the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.</p>
+<p>Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make
+ourselves one with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altar
+with him, and share his rapture and his scorn.&nbsp; And if we
+grow tired of an antique time, and desire to realise our own age
+in all its weariness and sin, are there not books that can make
+us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a
+score of shameful years?&nbsp; Close to your hand lies a little
+volume, bound in some Nile-green skin that has been powdered with
+gilded nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory.&nbsp; It is the
+book that Gautier loved, it is Baudelaire&rsquo;s
+masterpiece.&nbsp; Open it at that sad madrigal that begins</p>
+<blockquote><p>Que m&rsquo;importe que tu sois sage?<br />
+Sois belle! et sois triste!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have
+never worshipped joy.&nbsp; Pass on to the poem on the man who
+tortures himself, let its subtle music steal into your brain and
+colour your thoughts, and you will become for a moment what he
+was who wrote it; nay, not for a moment only, but for many barren
+moonlit nights and sunless sterile days will a despair that is
+not your own make its dwelling within you, and the misery of
+another gnaw your heart away.&nbsp; Read the whole book, suffer
+it to tell even one of its secrets to your soul, and your soul
+will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey,
+and seek to repent of strange crimes of which it is guiltless,
+and to make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never
+known.&nbsp; And then, when you are tired of these flowers of
+evil, turn to the flowers that grow in the garden of Perdita, and
+in their dew-drenched chalices cool your fevered brow, and let
+their loveliness heal and restore your soul; or wake from his
+forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and bid the lover of
+Heliodore make you music, for he too has flowers in his song, red
+pomegranate blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh, ringed
+daffodils and dark blue hyacinths, and marjoram and crinkled
+ox-eyes.&nbsp; Dear to him was the perfume of the bean-field at
+evening, and dear to him the odorous eared-spikenard that grew on
+the Syrian hills, and the fresh green thyme, the wine-cup&rsquo;s
+charm.&nbsp; The feet of his love as she walked in the garden
+were like lilies set upon lilies.&nbsp; Softer than sleep-laden
+poppy petals were her lips, softer than violets and as
+scented.&nbsp; The flame-like crocus sprang from the grass to
+look at her.&nbsp; For her the slim narcissus stored the cool
+rain; and for her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that
+wooed them.&nbsp; And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus
+was as fair as she was.</p>
+<p>It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion.&nbsp; We
+sicken with the same maladies as the poets, and the singer lends
+us his pain.&nbsp; Dead lips have their message for us, and
+hearts that have fallen to dust can communicate their joy.&nbsp;
+We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine, and we follow Manon
+Lescaut over the whole world.&nbsp; Ours is the love-madness of
+the Tyrian, and the terror of Orestes is ours also.&nbsp; There
+is no passion that we cannot feel, no pleasure that we may not
+gratify, and we can choose the time of our initiation and the
+time of our freedom also.&nbsp; Life!&nbsp; Life!&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our
+experience.&nbsp; It is a thing narrowed by circumstances,
+incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence
+of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the
+artistic and critical temperament.&nbsp; It makes us pay too high
+a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets
+at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Must we go, then, to
+Art for everything?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; For
+everything.&nbsp; Because Art does not hurt us.&nbsp; The tears
+that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile
+emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken.&nbsp; We weep,
+but we are not wounded.&nbsp; We grieve, but our grief is not
+bitter.&nbsp; In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says
+somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection.&nbsp; But the
+sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I
+may quote once more from the great art critic of the
+Greeks.&nbsp; It is through Art, and through Art only, that we
+can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only,
+that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual
+existence.&nbsp; This results not merely from the fact that
+nothing that one can imagine is worth doing, and that one can
+imagine everything, but from the subtle law that emotional
+forces, like the forces of the physical sphere, are limited in
+extent and energy.&nbsp; One can feel so much, and no more.&nbsp;
+And how can it matter with what pleasure life tries to tempt one,
+or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one&rsquo;s soul, if
+in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed one
+has found the true secret of joy, and wept away one&rsquo;s tears
+over their deaths who, like Cordelia and the daughter of
+Brabantio, can never die?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Stop a moment.&nbsp;
+It seems to me that in everything that you have said there is
+something radically immoral.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; All art is
+immoral.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; All art?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; For
+emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion
+for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical
+organisation of life that we call society.&nbsp; Society, which
+is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the
+concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own
+continuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt
+rightly demands, of each of its citizens that he should
+contribute some form of productive labour to the common weal, and
+toil and travail that the day&rsquo;s work may be done.&nbsp;
+Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the
+dreamer.&nbsp; The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in
+us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people
+dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they
+are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and
+other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a
+loud stentorian voice, &lsquo;What are you doing?&rsquo; whereas
+&lsquo;What are you thinking?&rsquo; is the only question that
+any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to
+another.&nbsp; They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming
+folk.&nbsp; Perhaps that is the reason why they are so
+excessively tedious.&nbsp; But some one should teach them that
+while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest
+sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the
+highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Contemplation?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Contemplation.&nbsp;
+I said to you some time ago that it was far more difficult to
+talk about a thing than to do it.&nbsp; Let me say to you now
+that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the
+world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.&nbsp; To
+Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of
+energy.&nbsp; To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this
+was the noblest form of energy also.&nbsp; It was to this that
+the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of
+medi&aelig;val days.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; We exist, then, to do
+nothing?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It is to do nothing
+that the elect exist.&nbsp; Action is limited and relative.&nbsp;
+Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and
+watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.&nbsp; But we who are
+born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured
+and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of
+exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in
+exchange for life itself.&nbsp; To us the <i>citt&agrave;
+divina</i> is colourless, and the <i>fruitio Dei</i> without
+meaning.&nbsp; Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and
+religious ecstasy is out of date.&nbsp; The world through which
+the Academic philosopher becomes &lsquo;the spectator of all time
+and of all existence&rsquo; is not really an ideal world, but
+simply a world of abstract ideas.&nbsp; When we enter it, we
+starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought.&nbsp; The courts
+of the city of God are not open to us now.&nbsp; Its gates are
+guarded by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all
+that in our nature is most divine.&nbsp; It is enough that our
+fathers believed.&nbsp; They have exhausted the faith-faculty of
+the species.&nbsp; Their legacy to us is the scepticism of which
+they were afraid.&nbsp; Had they put it into words, it might not
+live within us as thought.&nbsp; No, Ernest, no.&nbsp; We cannot
+go back to the saint.&nbsp; There is far more to be learned from
+the sinner.&nbsp; We cannot go back to the philosopher, and the
+mystic leads us astray.&nbsp; Who, as Mr. Pater suggests
+somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for
+that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high?&nbsp;
+What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart,
+the Vision of B&ouml;hme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was
+revealed to Swedenborg&rsquo;s blinded eyes?&nbsp; Such things
+are less than the yellow trumpet of one daffodil of the field,
+far less than the meanest of the visible arts, for, just as
+Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind expressing
+itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the
+lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul
+alike.&nbsp; To the &aelig;sthetic temperament the vague is
+always repellent.&nbsp; The Greeks were a nation of artists,
+because they were spared the sense of the infinite.&nbsp; Like
+Aristotle, like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the
+concrete, and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; What then do you
+propose?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It seems to me that
+with the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to
+realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the
+race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true
+meaning of the word modernity.&nbsp; For he to whom the present
+is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in
+which he lives.&nbsp; To realise the nineteenth century, one must
+realise every century that has preceded it and that has
+contributed to its making.&nbsp; To know anything about oneself
+one must know all about others.&nbsp; There must be no mood with
+which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot
+make alive.&nbsp; Is this impossible?&nbsp; I think not.&nbsp; By
+revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all action, and so
+freeing us from the self-imposed and trammelling burden of moral
+responsibility, the scientific principle of Heredity has become,
+as it were, the warrant for the contemplative life.&nbsp; It has
+shown us that we are never less free than when we try to
+act.&nbsp; It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter,
+and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom.&nbsp; We may
+not watch it, for it is within us.&nbsp; We may not see it, save
+in a mirror that mirrors the soul.&nbsp; It is Nemesis without
+her mask.&nbsp; It is the last of the Fates, and the most
+terrible.&nbsp; It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we
+know.</p>
+<p>And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it
+has robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in
+the subjective sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us,
+this terrible shadow, with many gifts in its hands, gifts of
+strange temperaments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild
+ardours and chill moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts
+of thoughts that are at variance with each other, and passions
+that war against themselves.&nbsp; And so, it is not our own life
+that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells
+within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and
+individual, created for our service, and entering into us for our
+joy.&nbsp; It is something that has dwelt in fearful places, and
+in ancient sepulchres has made its abode.&nbsp; It is sick with
+many maladies, and has memories of curious sins.&nbsp; It is
+wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter.&nbsp; It fills us
+with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we
+cannot gain.&nbsp; One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for
+us.&nbsp; It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is
+dimmed to us by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble
+ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our
+development.&nbsp; It can help us to leave the age in which we
+were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not
+exiled from their air.&nbsp; It can teach us how to escape from
+our experience, and to realise the experiences of those who are
+greater than we are.&nbsp; The pain of Leopardi crying out
+against life becomes our pain.&nbsp; Theocritus blows on his
+pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd.&nbsp; In
+the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in
+the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen.&nbsp;
+We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of
+Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame
+into song.&nbsp; We can see the dawn through Shelley&rsquo;s
+eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows amorous of
+our youth.&nbsp; Ours is the anguish of Atys, and ours the weak
+rage and noble sorrows of the Dane.&nbsp; Do you think that it is
+the imagination that enables us to live these countless
+lives?&nbsp; Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is
+the result of heredity.&nbsp; It is simply concentrated
+race-experience.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But where in this is
+the function of the critical spirit?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; The culture that
+this transmission of racial experiences makes possible can be
+made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may be said
+to be one with it.&nbsp; For who is the true critic but he who
+bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of
+myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no
+emotional impulse obscure?&nbsp; And who the true man of culture,
+if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious rejection has
+made instinct self-conscious and intelligent, and can separate
+the work that has distinction from the work that has it not, and
+so by contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets
+of style and school, and understands their meanings, and listens
+to their voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested
+curiosity which is the real root, as it is the real flower, of
+the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity,
+and, having learned &lsquo;the best that is known and thought in
+the world,&rsquo; lives&mdash;it is not fanciful to say
+so&mdash;with those who are the Immortals.</p>
+<p>Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its
+aim not <i>doing</i> but <i>being</i>, and not <i>being</i>
+merely, but <i>becoming</i>&mdash;that is what the critical
+spirit can give us.&nbsp; The gods live thus: either brooding
+over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus
+fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the
+tragicomedy of the world that they have made.&nbsp; We, too,
+might live like them, and set ourselves to witness with
+appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature
+afford.&nbsp; We might make ourselves spiritual by detaching
+ourselves from action, and become perfect by the rejection of
+energy.&nbsp; It has often seemed to me that Browning felt
+something of this.&nbsp; Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into active
+life, and makes him realise his mission by effort.&nbsp; Browning
+might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission
+by thought.&nbsp; Incident and event were to him unreal or
+unmeaning.&nbsp; He made the soul the protagonist of life&rsquo;s
+tragedy, and looked on action as the one undramatic element of a
+play.&nbsp; To us, at any rate, the &Beta;&Iota;&Omicron;&Sigma;
+&Theta;&Epsilon;&Omega;&Rho;&Eta;&Tau;&Iota;&Kappa;&Omicron;&Sigma;
+is the true ideal.&nbsp; From the high tower of Thought we can
+look out at the world.&nbsp; Calm, and self-centred, and
+complete, the &aelig;sthetic critic contemplates life, and no
+arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his
+harness.&nbsp; He at least is safe.&nbsp; He has discovered how
+to live.</p>
+<p>Is such a mode of life immoral?&nbsp; Yes: all the arts are
+immoral, except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that
+seek to excite to action of evil or of good.&nbsp; For action of
+every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics.&nbsp; The aim of art
+is simply to create a mood.&nbsp; Is such a mode of life
+unpractical?&nbsp; Ah! it is not so easy to be unpractical as the
+ignorant Philistine imagines.&nbsp; It were well for England if
+it were so.&nbsp; There is no country in the world so much in
+need of unpractical people as this country of ours.&nbsp; With
+us, Thought is degraded by its constant association with
+practice.&nbsp; Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of
+actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer,
+or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that
+unimportant section of the community among whom he has cast his
+lot, can seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested
+intellectual judgment about any one thing?&nbsp; Each of the
+professions means a prejudice.&nbsp; The necessity for a career
+forces every one to take sides.&nbsp; We live in the age of the
+overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are
+so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.&nbsp; And,
+harsh though it may sound, I cannot help saying that such people
+deserve their doom.&nbsp; The sure way of knowing nothing about
+life is to try to make oneself useful.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; A charming doctrine,
+Gilbert.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; I am not sure about
+that, but it has at least the minor merit of being true.&nbsp;
+That the desire to do good to others produces a plentiful crop of
+prigs is the least of the evils of which it is the cause.&nbsp;
+The prig is a very interesting psychological study, and though of
+all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a
+pose at all is something.&nbsp; It is a formal recognition of the
+importance of treating life from a definite and reasoned
+standpoint.&nbsp; That Humanitarian Sympathy wars against Nature,
+by securing the survival of the failure, may make the man of
+science loathe its facile virtues.&nbsp; The political economist
+may cry out against it for putting the improvident on the same
+level as the provident, and so robbing life of the strongest,
+because most sordid, incentive to industry.&nbsp; But, in the
+eyes of the thinker, the real harm that emotional sympathy does
+is that it limits knowledge, and so prevents us from solving any
+single social problem.&nbsp; We are trying at present to stave
+off the coming crisis, the coming revolution as my friends the
+Fabianists call it, by means of doles and alms.&nbsp; Well, when
+the revolution or crisis arrives, we shall be powerless, because
+we shall know nothing.&nbsp; And so, Ernest, let us not be
+deceived.&nbsp; England will never be civilised till she has
+added Utopia to her dominions.&nbsp; There is more than one of
+her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair
+a land.&nbsp; What we want are unpractical people who see beyond
+the moment, and think beyond the day.&nbsp; Those who try to lead
+the people can only do so by following the mob.&nbsp; It is
+through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways
+of the gods must be prepared.</p>
+<p>But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of
+beholding, and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, there
+is something that is egotistic.&nbsp; If you think so, do not say
+so.&nbsp; It takes a thoroughly selfish age, like our own, to
+deify self-sacrifice.&nbsp; It takes a thoroughly grasping age,
+such as that in which we live, to set above the fine intellectual
+virtues, those shallow and emotional virtues that are an
+immediate practical benefit to itself.&nbsp; They miss their aim,
+too, these philanthropists and sentimentalists of our day, who
+are always chattering to one about one&rsquo;s duty to
+one&rsquo;s neighbour.&nbsp; For the development of the race
+depends on the development of the individual, and where
+self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual
+standard is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost.&nbsp;
+If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating
+himself&mdash;a rare type in our time, I admit, but still one
+occasionally to be met with&mdash;you rise from table richer, and
+conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and
+sanctified your days.&nbsp; But oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next
+to a man who has spent his life in trying to educate
+others!&nbsp; What a dreadful experience that is!&nbsp; How
+appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the
+fatal habit of imparting opinions!&nbsp; How limited in range the
+creature&rsquo;s mind proves to be!&nbsp; How it wearies us, and
+must weary himself, with its endless repetitions and sickly
+reiteration!&nbsp; How lacking it is in any element of
+intellectual growth!&nbsp; In what a vicious circle it always
+moves!</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; You speak with
+strange feeling, Gilbert.&nbsp; Have you had this dreadful
+experience, as you call it, lately?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Few of us escape it.
+People say that the schoolmaster is abroad.&nbsp; I wish to
+goodness he were.&nbsp; But the type of which, after all, he is
+only one, and certainly the least important, of the
+representatives, seems to me to be really dominating our lives;
+and just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical
+sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who
+is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had
+any time to educate himself.&nbsp; No, Ernest, self-culture is
+the true ideal of man.&nbsp; Goethe saw it, and the immediate
+debt that we owe to Goethe is greater than the debt we owe to any
+man since Greek days.&nbsp; The Greeks saw it, and have left us,
+as their legacy to modern thought, the conception of the
+contemplative life as well as the critical method by which alone
+can that life be truly realised.&nbsp; It was the one thing that
+made the Renaissance great, and gave us Humanism.&nbsp; It is the
+one thing that could make our own age great also; for the real
+weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or
+unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through
+sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome
+courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and
+not intellectual.</p>
+<p>I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of
+attainment, still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years
+to come, unpopular with the crowd.&nbsp; It is so easy for people
+to have sympathy with suffering.&nbsp; It is so difficult for
+them to have sympathy with thought.&nbsp; Indeed, so little do
+ordinary people understand what thought really is, that they seem
+to imagine that, when they have said that a theory is dangerous,
+they have pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such
+theories that have any true intellectual value.&nbsp; An idea
+that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at
+all.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Gilbert, you bewilder
+me.&nbsp; You have told me that all art is, in its essence,
+immoral.&nbsp; Are you going to tell me now that all thought is,
+in its essence, dangerous?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes, in the
+practical sphere it is so.&nbsp; The security of society lies in
+custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability
+of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any
+intelligence amongst its members.&nbsp; The great majority of
+people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on
+the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the
+dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusion of
+the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life,
+that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always
+loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with
+the dictates of reason.&nbsp; But let us turn from the practical
+sphere, and say no more about the wicked philanthropists, who,
+indeed, may well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of
+the Yellow River Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such
+well-meaning and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple
+and spontaneous virtue that there is in man.&nbsp; They are a
+wearisome topic, and I am anxious to get back to the sphere in
+which criticism is free.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; The sphere of the
+intellect?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; You
+remember that I spoke of the critic as being in his own way as
+creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be merely of
+value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some
+new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal,
+or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of
+a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and more
+perfect.&nbsp; Well, you seemed to be a little sceptical about
+the theory.&nbsp; But perhaps I wronged you?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; I am not really
+sceptical about it, but I must admit that I feel very strongly
+that such work as you describe the critic producing&mdash;and
+creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to be&mdash;is,
+of necessity, purely subjective, whereas the greatest work is
+objective always, objective and impersonal.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; The difference
+between objective and subjective work is one of external form
+merely.&nbsp; It is accidental, not essential.&nbsp; All artistic
+creation is absolutely subjective.&nbsp; The very landscape that
+Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own
+mind; and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem
+to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the
+poets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate
+analysis, simply the poets themselves, not as they thought they
+were, but as they thought they were not; and by such thinking
+came in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to
+be.&nbsp; For out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there
+be in creation what in the creator was not.&nbsp; Nay, I would
+say that the more objective a creation appears to be, the more
+subjective it really is.&nbsp; Shakespeare might have met
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or
+seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each
+other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and
+Romeo out of his passion.&nbsp; They were elements of his nature
+to which he gave visible form, impulses that stirred so strongly
+within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer them to
+realise their energy, not on the lower plane of actual life,
+where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so made
+imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art where Love can
+indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can stab the
+eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave,
+and make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one&rsquo;s
+father&rsquo;s spirit, beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking
+in complete steel from misty wall to wall.&nbsp; Action being
+limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed;
+and, just as it is because he did nothing that he has been able
+to achieve everything, so it is because he never speaks to us of
+himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us absolutely,
+and show us his true nature and temperament far more completely
+than do those strange and exquisite sonnets, even, in which he
+bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart.&nbsp; Yes,
+the objective form is the most subjective in matter.&nbsp; Man is
+least himself when he talks in his own person.&nbsp; Give him a
+mask, and he will tell you the truth.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; The critic, then,
+being limited to the subjective form, will necessarily be less
+able fully to express himself than the artist, who has always at
+his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Not necessarily, and
+certainly not at all if he recognises that each mode of criticism
+is, in its highest development, simply a mood, and that we are
+never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.&nbsp;
+The &aelig;sthetic critic, constant only to the principle of
+beauty in all things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions,
+winning from the various schools the secret of their charm,
+bowing, it may be, before foreign altars, or smiling, if it be
+his fancy, at strange new gods.&nbsp; What other people call
+one&rsquo;s past has, no doubt, everything to do with them, but
+has absolutely nothing to do with oneself.&nbsp; The man who
+regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look
+forward to.&nbsp; When one has found expression for a mood, one
+has done with it.&nbsp; You laugh; but believe me it is so.&nbsp;
+Yesterday it was Realism that charmed one.&nbsp; One gained from
+it that <i>nouveau frisson</i> which it was its aim to
+produce.&nbsp; One analysed it, explained it, and wearied of
+it.&nbsp; At sunset came the <i>Luministe</i> in painting, and
+the <i>Symboliste</i> in poetry, and the spirit of
+medi&aelig;valism, that spirit which belongs not to time but to
+temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia, and stirred us for
+a moment by the terrible fascination of pain.&nbsp; To-day the
+cry is for Romance, and already the leaves are tremulous in the
+valley, and on the purple hill-tops walks Beauty with slim gilded
+feet.&nbsp; The old modes of creation linger, of course.&nbsp;
+The artists reproduce either themselves or each other, with
+wearisome iteration.&nbsp; But Criticism is always moving on, and
+the critic is always developing.</p>
+<p>Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective
+form of expression.&nbsp; The method of the drama is his, as well
+as the method of the epos.&nbsp; He may use dialogue, as he did
+who set Milton talking to Marvel on the nature of comedy and
+tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord Brooke discourse on letters
+beneath the Penshurst oaks; or adopt narration, as Mr. Pater is
+fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary Portraits&mdash;is not
+that the title of the book?&mdash;presents to us, under the
+fanciful guise of fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of
+criticism, one on the painter Watteau, another on the philosophy
+of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan elements of the early
+Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the most
+suggestive, on the source of that Aufkl&auml;rung, that
+enlightening which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to
+which our own culture owes so great a debt.&nbsp; Dialogue,
+certainly, that wonderful literary form which, from Plato to
+Lucian, and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that
+grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, the creative
+critics of the world have always employed, can never lose for the
+thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.&nbsp; By its
+means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to
+every fancy, and reality to every mood.&nbsp; By its means he can
+exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it to us in
+the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner
+all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side
+issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its
+progress, and really illumine the idea more completely, or from
+those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness
+to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the delicate
+charm of chance.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; By its means, too, he
+can invent an imaginary antagonist, and convert him when he
+chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Ah! it is so easy to
+convert others.&nbsp; It is so difficult to convert
+oneself.&nbsp; To arrive at what one really believes, one must
+speak through lips different from one&rsquo;s own.&nbsp; To know
+the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods.&nbsp; For what
+is Truth?&nbsp; In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion
+that has survived.&nbsp; In matters of science, it is the
+ultimate sensation.&nbsp; In matters of art, it is one&rsquo;s
+last mood.&nbsp; And you see now, Ernest, that the critic has at
+his disposal as many objective forms of expression as the artist
+has.&nbsp; Ruskin put his criticism into imaginative prose, and
+is superb in his changes and contradictions; and Browning put his
+into blank verse and made painter and poet yield us their secret;
+and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater fiction, and Rossetti
+translated into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione and the
+design of Ingres, and his own design and colour also, feeling,
+with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that
+the ultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium
+that of words.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Well, now that you
+have settled that the critic has at his disposal all objective
+forms, I wish you would tell me what are the qualities that
+should characterise the true critic.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; What would you say
+they were?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Well, I should say
+that a critic should above all things be fair.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Ah! not fair.&nbsp;
+A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word.&nbsp;
+It is only about things that do not interest one that one can
+give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt the reason why
+an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.&nbsp; The
+man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who sees
+absolutely nothing at all.&nbsp; Art is a passion, and, in
+matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so
+is fluid rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine moods and
+exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a
+scientific formula or a theological dogma.&nbsp; It is to the
+soul that Art speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner of
+the mind as well as of the body.&nbsp; One should, of course,
+have no prejudices; but, as a great Frenchman remarked a hundred
+years ago, it is one&rsquo;s business in such matters to have
+preferences, and when one has preferences one ceases to be
+fair.&nbsp; It is only an auctioneer who can equally and
+impartially admire all schools of Art.&nbsp; No; fairness is not
+one of the qualities of the true critic.&nbsp; It is not even a
+condition of criticism.&nbsp; Each form of Art with which we come
+in contact dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of every
+other form.&nbsp; We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the
+work in question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its
+secret.&nbsp; For the time, we must think of nothing else, can
+think of nothing else, indeed.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; The true critic will
+be rational, at any rate, will he not?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Rational?&nbsp;
+There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest.&nbsp; One is to
+dislike it.&nbsp; The other, to like it rationally.&nbsp; For
+Art, as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener
+and spectator a form of divine madness.&nbsp; It does not spring
+from inspiration, but it makes others inspired.&nbsp; Reason is
+not the faculty to which it appeals.&nbsp; If one loves Art at
+all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and
+against such love, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry
+out.&nbsp; There is nothing sane about the worship of
+beauty.&nbsp; It is too splendid to be sane.&nbsp; Those of whose
+lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to
+be pure visionaries.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Well, at least, the
+critic will be sincere.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; A little sincerity
+is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely
+fatal.&nbsp; The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in
+his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for
+beauty in every age and in each school, and will never suffer
+himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or
+stereotyped mode of looking at things.&nbsp; He will realise
+himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will
+ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view.&nbsp;
+Through constant change, and through constant change alone, he
+will find his true unity.&nbsp; He will not consent to be the
+slave of his own opinions.&nbsp; For what is mind but motion in
+the intellectual sphere?&nbsp; The essence of thought, as the
+essence of life, is growth.&nbsp; You must not be frightened by
+word, Ernest.&nbsp; What people call insincerity is simply a
+method by which we can multiply our personalities.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; I am afraid I have
+not been fortunate in my suggestions.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Of the three
+qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity and fairness, were,
+if not actually moral, at least on the borderland of morals, and
+the first condition of criticism is that the critic should be
+able to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics
+are absolutely distinct and separate.&nbsp; When they are
+confused, Chaos has come again.&nbsp; They are too often confused
+in England now, and though our modern Puritans cannot destroy a
+beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurience,
+they can almost taint beauty for a moment.&nbsp; It is chiefly, I
+regret to say, through journalism that such people find
+expression.&nbsp; I regret it because there is much to be said in
+favour of modern journalism.&nbsp; By giving us the opinions of
+the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the
+community.&nbsp; By carefully chronicling the current events of
+contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance
+such events really are.&nbsp; By invariably discussing the
+unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for
+culture, and what are not.&nbsp; But it should not allow poor
+Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art.&nbsp; When it does
+this it stultifies itself.&nbsp; And yet Tartuffe&rsquo;s
+articles and Chadband&rsquo;s notes do this good, at least.&nbsp;
+They serve to show how extremely limited is the area over which
+ethics, and ethical considerations, can claim to exercise
+influence.&nbsp; Science is out of the reach of morals, for her
+eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.&nbsp; Art is out of the reach
+of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and
+immortal and ever-changing.&nbsp; To morals belong the lower and
+less intellectual spheres.&nbsp; However, let these mouthing
+Puritans pass; they have their comic side.&nbsp; Who can help
+laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit
+the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?&nbsp; Some
+limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some
+of our newspapers and newspaper writers.&nbsp; For they give us
+the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life.&nbsp; They chronicle,
+with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the
+conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic
+details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest
+whatsoever.&nbsp; But the artist, who accepts the facts of life,
+and yet transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them
+vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows their colour-element, and
+their wonder, and their true ethical import also, and builds out
+of them a world more real than reality itself, and of loftier and
+more noble import&mdash;who shall set limits to him?&nbsp; Not
+the apostles of that new Journalism which is but the old
+vulgarity &lsquo;writ large.&rsquo;&nbsp; Not the apostles of
+that new Puritanism, which is but the whine of the hypocrite, and
+is both writ and spoken badly.&nbsp; The mere suggestion is
+ridiculous.&nbsp; Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed
+to the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for
+the true critic.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; And what are
+they?&nbsp; Tell me yourself.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Temperament is the
+primary requisite for the critic&mdash;a temperament exquisitely
+susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty
+gives us.&nbsp; Under what conditions, and by what means, this
+temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not
+discuss at present.&nbsp; It is sufficient to note that it
+exists, and that there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the
+other senses and above them, separate from the reason and of
+nobler import, separate from the soul and of equal value&mdash;a
+sense that leads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as
+I think, to contemplate merely.&nbsp; But to be purified and made
+perfect, this sense requires some form of exquisite
+environment.&nbsp; Without this it starves, or is dulled.&nbsp;
+You remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a
+young Greek should be educated, and with what insistence he
+dwells upon the importance of surroundings, telling us how the
+lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds,
+so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for
+the reception of the beauty that is spiritual.&nbsp; Insensibly,
+and without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real
+love of beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is
+the true aim of education.&nbsp; By slow degrees there is to be
+engendered in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally
+and simply to choose the good in preference to the bad, and,
+rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine
+instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and
+loveliness.&nbsp; Ultimately, in its due course, this taste is to
+become critical and self-conscious, but at first it is to exist
+purely as a cultivated instinct, and &lsquo;he who has received
+this true culture of the inner man will with clear and certain
+vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature, and
+with a taste that cannot err, while he praises, and finds his
+pleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and so
+becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad,
+now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the
+reason why&rsquo;: and so, when, later on, the critical and
+self-conscious spirit develops in him, he &lsquo;will recognise
+and salute it as a friend with whom his education has made him
+long familiar.&rsquo;&nbsp; I need hardly say, Ernest, how far we
+in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the
+smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if
+one ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was
+the love of beauty, and that the methods by which education
+should work were the development of temperament, the cultivation
+of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.</p>
+<p>Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of
+environment, and the dulness of tutors and professors matters
+very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at
+Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in
+Waynfleete&rsquo;s chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the
+strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon
+smite to a finer gold the tower&rsquo;s gilded vanes, or wander
+up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted
+ceiling&rsquo;s shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured
+gateway of Laud&rsquo;s building in the College of St.
+John.&nbsp; Nor is it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge, that the
+sense of beauty can be formed and trained and perfected.&nbsp;
+All over England there is a Renaissance of the decorative
+Arts.&nbsp; Ugliness has had its day.&nbsp; Even in the houses of
+the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are not rich
+have been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in.&nbsp;
+Caliban, poor noisy Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to
+make mows at a thing, the thing ceases to exist.&nbsp; But if he
+mocks no longer, it is because he has been met with mockery,
+swifter and keener than his own, and for a moment has been
+bitterly schooled into that silence which should seal for ever
+his uncouth distorted lips.&nbsp; What has been done up to now,
+has been chiefly in the clearing of the way.&nbsp; It is always
+more difficult to destroy than it is to create, and when what one
+has to destroy is vulgarity and stupidity, the task of
+destruction needs not merely courage but also contempt.&nbsp; Yet
+it seems to me to have been, in a measure, done.&nbsp; We have
+got rid of what was bad.&nbsp; We have now to make what is
+beautiful.&nbsp; And though the mission of the &aelig;sthetic
+movement is to lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to
+create, yet, as the creative instinct is strong in the Celt, and
+it is the Celt who leads in art, there is no reason why in future
+years this strange Renaissance should not become almost as mighty
+in its way as was that new birth of Art that woke many centuries
+ago in the cities of Italy.</p>
+<p>Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to
+the decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts
+that teach us.&nbsp; Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to
+look at.&nbsp; At least, some of them are.&nbsp; But they are
+quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too
+assertive, too intellectual.&nbsp; Their meaning is too obvious,
+and their method too clearly defined.&nbsp; One exhausts what
+they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as
+tedious as one&rsquo;s relations.&nbsp; I am very fond of the
+work of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and
+London.&nbsp; Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the
+school.&nbsp; Some of their arrangements and harmonies serve to
+remind one of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier&rsquo;s
+immortal <i>Symphonie en Blanc Majeur</i>, that flawless
+masterpiece of colour and music which may have suggested the type
+as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.&nbsp; For a
+class that welcomes the incompetent with sympathetic eagerness,
+and that confuses the bizarre with the beautiful, and vulgarity
+with truth, they are extremely accomplished.&nbsp; They can do
+etchings that have the brilliancy of epigrams, pastels that are
+as fascinating as paradoxes, and as for their portraits, whatever
+the commonplace may say against them, no one can deny that they
+possess that unique and wonderful charm which belongs to works of
+pure fiction.&nbsp; But even the Impressionists, earnest and
+industrious as they are, will not do.&nbsp; I like them.&nbsp;
+Their white keynote, with its variations in lilac, was an era in
+colour.&nbsp; Though the moment does not make the man, the moment
+certainly makes the Impressionist, and for the moment in art, and
+the &lsquo;moment&rsquo;s monument,&rsquo; as Rossetti phrased
+it, what may not be said?&nbsp; They are suggestive also.&nbsp;
+If they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least
+given great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their
+leaders may have all the inexperience of old age, their young men
+are far too wise to be ever sensible.&nbsp; Yet they will insist
+on treating painting as if it were a mode of autobiography
+invented for the use of the illiterate, and are always prating to
+us on their coarse gritty canvases of their unnecessary selves
+and their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by a vulgar
+over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and
+only modest thing about them.&nbsp; One tires, at the end, of the
+work of individuals whose individuality is always noisy, and
+generally uninteresting.&nbsp; There is far more to be said in
+favour of that newer school at Paris, the <i>Archaicistes</i>, as
+they call themselves, who, refusing to leave the artist entirely
+at the mercy of the weather, do not find the ideal of art in mere
+atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the imaginative beauty of
+design and the loveliness of fair colour, and rejecting the
+tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see, try to
+see something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual
+and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul
+which is as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more
+splendid in artistic purpose.&nbsp; They, at any rate, work under
+those decorative conditions that each art requires for its
+perfection, and have sufficient &aelig;sthetic instinct to regret
+those sordid and stupid limitations of absolute modernity of form
+which have proved the ruin of so many of the
+Impressionists.&nbsp; Still, the art that is frankly decorative
+is the art to live with.&nbsp; It is, of all our visible arts,
+the one art that creates in us both mood and temperament.&nbsp;
+Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite
+form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.&nbsp;
+The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and
+masses becomes mirrored in the mind.&nbsp; The repetitions of
+pattern give us rest.&nbsp; The marvels of design stir the
+imagination.&nbsp; In the mere loveliness of the materials
+employed there are latent elements of culture.&nbsp; Nor is this
+all.&nbsp; By its deliberate rejection of Nature as the ideal of
+beauty, as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary
+painter, decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the
+reception of true imaginative work, but develops in it that sense
+of form which is the basis of creative no less than of critical
+achievement.&nbsp; For the real artist is he who proceeds, not
+from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion.&nbsp;
+He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself,
+&lsquo;I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen
+lines,&rsquo; but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he
+conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the
+mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually
+and emotionally complete.&nbsp; From time to time the world cries
+out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its
+hackneyed and silly phrase, he has &lsquo;nothing to
+say.&rsquo;&nbsp; But if he had something to say, he would
+probably say it, and the result would be tedious.&nbsp; It is
+just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful
+work.&nbsp; He gains his inspiration from form, and from form
+purely, as an artist should.&nbsp; A real passion would ruin
+him.&nbsp; Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art.&nbsp; All
+bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.&nbsp; To be natural is
+to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; I wonder do you
+really believe what you say?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Why should you
+wonder?&nbsp; It is not merely in art that the body is the
+soul.&nbsp; In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of
+things.&nbsp; The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey,
+Plato tells us, both rhythm and harmony into the mind.&nbsp;
+Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great
+moments of sincerity that make us admire and know the man.&nbsp;
+He was right, though he may not have known how terribly right he
+was.&nbsp; The Creeds are believed, not because they are
+rational, but because they are repeated.&nbsp; Yes: Form is
+everything.&nbsp; It is the secret of life.&nbsp; Find expression
+for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you.&nbsp; Find
+expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy.&nbsp; Do you
+wish to love?&nbsp; Use Love&rsquo;s Litany, and the words will
+create the yearning from which the world fancies that they
+spring.&nbsp; Have you a grief that corrodes your heart?&nbsp;
+Steep yourself in the Language of grief, learn its utterance from
+Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that mere
+expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, which is the
+birth of passion, is also the death of pain.&nbsp; And so, to
+return to the sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not merely
+the critical temperament, but also the &aelig;sthetic instinct,
+that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their
+conditions of beauty.&nbsp; Start with the worship of form, and
+there is no secret in art that will not be revealed to you, and
+remember that in criticism, as in creation, temperament is
+everything, and that it is, not by the time of their production,
+but by the temperaments to which they appeal, that the schools of
+art should be historically grouped.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Your theory of
+education is delightful.&nbsp; But what influence will your
+critic, brought up in these exquisite surroundings,
+possess?&nbsp; Do you really think that any artist is ever
+affected by criticism?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; The influence of the
+critic will be the mere fact of his own existence.&nbsp; He will
+represent the flawless type.&nbsp; In him the culture of the
+century will see itself realised.&nbsp; You must not ask of him
+to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself.&nbsp; The
+demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel
+itself alive.&nbsp; The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise
+influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with the
+individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into
+consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it new desires
+and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler
+moods.&nbsp; The actual art of to-day will occupy him less than
+the art of to-morrow, far less than the art of yesterday, and as
+for this or that person at present toiling away, what do the
+industrious matter?&nbsp; They do their best, no doubt, and
+consequently we get the worst from them.&nbsp; It is always with
+the best intentions that the worst work is done.&nbsp; And
+besides, my dear Ernest, when a man reaches the age of forty, or
+becomes a Royal Academician, or is elected a member of the
+Athen&aelig;um Club, or is recognised as a popular novelist,
+whose books are in great demand at suburban railway stations, one
+may have the amusement of exposing him, but one cannot have the
+pleasure of reforming him.&nbsp; And this is, I dare say, very
+fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation is a much
+more painful process than punishment, is indeed punishment in its
+most aggravated and moral form&mdash;a fact which accounts for
+our entire failure as a community to reclaim that interesting
+phenomenon who is called the confirmed criminal.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But may it not be
+that the poet is the best judge of poetry, and the painter of
+painting?&nbsp; Each art must appeal primarily to the artist who
+works in it.&nbsp; His judgment will surely be the most
+valuable?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; The appeal of all
+art is simply to the artistic temperament.&nbsp; Art does not
+address herself to the specialist.&nbsp; Her claim is that she is
+universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one.&nbsp;
+Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is the best
+judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of other
+people&rsquo;s work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his
+own.&nbsp; That very concentration of vision that makes a man an
+artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine
+appreciation.&nbsp; The energy of creation hurries him blindly on
+to his own goal.&nbsp; The wheels of his chariot raise the dust
+as a cloud around him.&nbsp; The gods are hidden from each
+other.&nbsp; They can recognise their worshippers.&nbsp; That is
+all.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; You say that a great
+artist cannot recognise the beauty of work different from his
+own.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It is impossible for
+him to do so.&nbsp; Wordsworth saw in <i>Endymion</i> merely a
+pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of
+actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth&rsquo;s message, being repelled
+by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete
+creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the
+poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from
+him.&nbsp; The realism of Euripides was hateful to
+Sophokles.&nbsp; Those droppings of warm tears had no music for
+him.&nbsp; Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not
+understand the method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir
+Joshua the method of Gainsborough.&nbsp; Bad artists always
+admire each other&rsquo;s work.&nbsp; They call it being
+large-minded and free from prejudice.&nbsp; But a truly great
+artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned,
+under any conditions other than those that he has selected.&nbsp;
+Creation employs all its critical faculty within its own
+sphere.&nbsp; It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to
+others.&nbsp; It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that
+he is the proper judge of it.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Do you really mean
+that?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes, for creation
+limits, while contemplation widens, the vision.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; But what about
+technique?&nbsp; Surely each art has its separate technique?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Certainly: each art
+has its grammar and its materials.&nbsp; There is no mystery
+about either, and the incompetent can always be correct.&nbsp;
+But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and
+certain, to find their true realisation they must be touched by
+the imagination into such beauty that they will seem an
+exception, each one of them.&nbsp; Technique is really
+personality.&nbsp; That is the reason why the artist cannot teach
+it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the &aelig;sthetic
+critic can understand it.&nbsp; To the great poet, there is only
+one method of music&mdash;his own.&nbsp; To the great painter,
+there is only one manner of painting&mdash;that which he himself
+employs.&nbsp; The &aelig;sthetic critic, and the &aelig;sthetic
+critic alone, can appreciate all forms and modes.&nbsp; It is to
+him that Art makes her appeal.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Well, I think I have
+put all my questions to you.&nbsp; And now I must
+admit&mdash;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Ah! don&rsquo;t say
+that you agree with me.&nbsp; When people agree with me I always
+feel that I must be wrong.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; In that case I
+certainly won&rsquo;t tell you whether I agree with you or
+not.&nbsp; But I will put another question.&nbsp; You have
+explained to me that criticism is a creative art.&nbsp; What
+future has it?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; It is to criticism
+that the future belongs.&nbsp; The subject-matter at the disposal
+of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and
+variety.&nbsp; Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted
+the obvious.&nbsp; If creation is to last at all, it can only do
+so on the condition of becoming far more critical than it is at
+present.&nbsp; The old roads and dusty highways have been
+traversed too often.&nbsp; Their charm has been worn away by
+plodding feet, and they have lost that element of novelty or
+surprise which is so essential for romance.&nbsp; He who would
+stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new
+background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost
+workings.&nbsp; The first is for the moment being done for us by
+Mr. Rudyard Kipling.&nbsp; As one turns over the pages of his
+<i>Plain Tales from the Hills</i>, one feels as if one were
+seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of
+vulgarity.&nbsp; The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle
+one&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are
+in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings.&nbsp; The mere
+lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic
+realism to what he tells us.&nbsp; From the point of view of
+literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.&nbsp;
+From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows
+vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.&nbsp; Dickens
+knew its clothes and its comedy.&nbsp; Mr. Kipling knows its
+essence and its seriousness.&nbsp; He is our first authority on
+the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes,
+and his backgrounds are real works of art.&nbsp; As for the
+second condition, we have had Browning, and Meredith is with
+us.&nbsp; But there is still much to be done in the sphere of
+introspection.&nbsp; People sometimes say that fiction is getting
+too morbid.&nbsp; As far as psychology is concerned, it has never
+been morbid enough.&nbsp; We have merely touched the surface of
+the soul, that is all.&nbsp; In one single ivory cell of the
+brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more
+terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of
+<i>Le Rouge et le Noir</i>, have sought to track the soul into
+its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest
+sins.&nbsp; Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried
+backgrounds, and it is possible that a further development of the
+habit of introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty
+to which it seeks to supply fresh material.&nbsp; I myself am
+inclined to think that creation is doomed.&nbsp; It springs from
+too primitive, too natural an impulse.&nbsp; However this may be,
+it is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation
+is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism
+increases daily.&nbsp; There are always new attitudes for the
+mind, and new points of view.&nbsp; The duty of imposing form
+upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances.&nbsp; There
+was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is
+now.&nbsp; It is only by its means that Humanity can become
+conscious of the point at which it has arrived.</p>
+<p>Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism.&nbsp;
+You might just as well have asked me the use of thought.&nbsp; It
+is Criticism, as Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual
+atmosphere of the age.&nbsp; It is Criticism, as I hope to point
+out myself some day, that makes the mind a fine instrument.&nbsp;
+We, in our educational system, have burdened the memory with a
+load of unconnected facts, and laboriously striven to impart our
+laboriously-acquired knowledge.&nbsp; We teach people how to
+remember, we never teach them how to grow.&nbsp; It has never
+occurred to us to try and develop in the mind a more subtle
+quality of apprehension and discernment.&nbsp; The Greeks did
+this, and when we come in contact with the Greek critical
+intellect, we cannot but be conscious that, while our
+subject-matter is in every respect larger and more varied than
+theirs, theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter
+can be interpreted.&nbsp; England has done one thing; it has
+invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to
+organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the
+dignity of physical force.&nbsp; But Wisdom has always been
+hidden from it.&nbsp; Considered as an instrument of thought, the
+English mind is coarse and undeveloped.&nbsp; The only thing that
+can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.</p>
+<p>It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture
+possible.&nbsp; It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work,
+and distils it into a finer essence.&nbsp; Who that desires to
+retain any sense of form could struggle through the monstrous
+multitudinous books that the world has produced, books in which
+thought stammers or ignorance brawls?&nbsp; The thread that is to
+guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of
+Criticism.&nbsp; Nay more, where there is no record, and history
+is either lost, or was never written, Criticism can re-create the
+past for us from the very smallest fragment of language or art,
+just as surely as the man of science can from some tiny bone, or
+the mere impress of a foot upon a rock, re-create for us the
+winged dragon or Titan lizard that once made the earth shake
+beneath its tread, can call Behemoth out of his cave, and make
+Leviathan swim once more across the startled sea.&nbsp;
+Prehistoric history belongs to the philological and
+arch&aelig;ological critic.&nbsp; It is to him that the origins
+of things are revealed.&nbsp; The self-conscious deposits of an
+age are nearly always misleading.&nbsp; Through philological
+criticism alone we know more of the centuries of which no actual
+record has been preserved, than we do of the centuries that have
+left us their scrolls.&nbsp; It can do for us what can be done
+neither by physics nor metaphysics.&nbsp; It can give us the
+exact science of mind in the process of becoming.&nbsp; It can do
+for us what History cannot do.&nbsp; It can tell us what man
+thought before he learned how to write.&nbsp; You have asked me
+about the influence of Criticism.&nbsp; I think I have answered
+that question already; but there is this also to be said.&nbsp;
+It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan.&nbsp; The Manchester
+school tried to make men realise the brotherhood of humanity, by
+pointing out the commercial advantages of peace.&nbsp; It sought
+to degrade the wonderful world into a common market-place for the
+buyer and the seller.&nbsp; It addressed itself to the lowest
+instincts, and it failed.&nbsp; War followed upon war, and the
+tradesman&rsquo;s creed did not prevent France and Germany from
+clashing together in blood-stained battle.&nbsp; There are others
+of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies,
+or to the shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract
+ethics.&nbsp; They have their Peace Societies, so dear to the
+sentimentalists, and their proposals for unarmed International
+Arbitration, so popular among those who have never read
+history.&nbsp; But mere emotional sympathy will not do.&nbsp; It
+is too variable, and too closely connected with the passions; and
+a board of arbitrators who, for the general welfare of the race,
+are to be deprived of the power of putting their decisions into
+execution, will not be of much avail.&nbsp; There is only one
+thing worse than Injustice, and that is Justice without her sword
+in her hand.&nbsp; When Right is not Might, it is Evil.</p>
+<p>No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than
+the greed for gain could do so.&nbsp; It is only by the
+cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall
+be able to rise superior to race-prejudices.&nbsp;
+Goethe&mdash;you will not misunderstand what I say&mdash;was a
+German of the Germans.&nbsp; He loved his country&mdash;no man
+more so.&nbsp; Its people were dear to him; and he led
+them.&nbsp; Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon
+vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent.&nbsp; &lsquo;How
+can one write songs of hatred without hating?&rsquo; he said to
+Eckermann, &lsquo;and how could I, to whom culture and barbarism
+are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most
+cultivated of the earth and to which I owe so great a part of my
+own cultivation?&rsquo;&nbsp; This note, sounded in the modern
+world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point
+for the cosmopolitanism of the future.&nbsp; Criticism will
+annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the
+human mind in the variety of its forms.&nbsp; If we are tempted
+to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are
+seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly
+its most important element.&nbsp; As long as war is regarded as
+wicked, it will always have its fascination.&nbsp; When it is
+looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.&nbsp; The
+change will of course be slow, and people will not be conscious
+of it.&nbsp; They will not say &lsquo;We will not war against
+France because her prose is perfect,&rsquo; but because the prose
+of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.&nbsp;
+Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far
+closer than those that can be forged by shopman or
+sentimentalist.&nbsp; It will give us the peace that springs from
+understanding.</p>
+<p>Nor is this all.&nbsp; It is Criticism that, recognising no
+position as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow
+shibboleths of any sect or school, creates that serene
+philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake, and loves
+it not the less because it knows it to be unattainable.&nbsp; How
+little we have of this temper in England, and how much we need
+it!&nbsp; The English mind is always in a rage.&nbsp; The
+intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels
+of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.&nbsp; It
+was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example
+of that &lsquo;sweet reasonableness&rsquo; of which Arnold spoke
+so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect.&nbsp; The author of
+the <i>Origin of Species</i> had, at any rate, the philosophic
+temper.&nbsp; If one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and
+platforms of England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian, or
+the indifference of Montaigne.&nbsp; We are dominated by the
+fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.&nbsp; Anything
+approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown
+amongst us.&nbsp; People cry out against the sinner, yet it is
+not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame.&nbsp; There is
+no sin except stupidity.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; Ah! what an
+antinomian you are!</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; The artistic critic,
+like the mystic, is an antinomian always.&nbsp; To be good,
+according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite
+easy.&nbsp; It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror,
+a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion
+for middle-class respectability.&nbsp; &AElig;sthetics are higher
+than ethics.&nbsp; They belong to a more spiritual sphere.&nbsp;
+To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we
+can arrive.&nbsp; Even a colour-sense is more important, in the
+development of the individual, than a sense of right and
+wrong.&nbsp; &AElig;sthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the
+sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the
+external world, sexual is to natural selection.&nbsp; Ethics,
+like natural selection, make existence possible.&nbsp;
+&AElig;sthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and
+wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and
+variety and change.&nbsp; And when we reach the true culture that
+is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have
+dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not
+because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because
+they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and
+can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an
+entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a
+richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of
+thought, acts or passions that with the common would be
+commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful
+vile.&nbsp; Is this dangerous?&nbsp; Yes; it is
+dangerous&mdash;all ideas, as I told you, are so.&nbsp; But the
+night wearies, and the light flickers in the lamp.&nbsp; One more
+thing I cannot help saying to you.&nbsp; You have spoken against
+Criticism as being a sterile thing.&nbsp; The nineteenth century
+is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of
+two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of
+Nature, the other the critic of the books of God.&nbsp; Not to
+recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most
+important eras in the progress of the world.&nbsp; Creation is
+always behind the age.&nbsp; It is Criticism that leads us.&nbsp;
+The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; And he who is in
+possession of this spirit, or whom this spirit possesses, will, I
+suppose, do nothing?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Like the Persephone
+of whom Landor tells us, the sweet pensive Persephone around
+whose white feet the asphodel and amaranth are blooming, he will
+sit contented &lsquo;in that deep, motionless quiet which mortals
+pity, and which the gods enjoy.&rsquo;&nbsp; He will look out
+upon the world and know its secret.&nbsp; By contact with divine
+things he will become divine.&nbsp; His will be the perfect life,
+and his only.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; You have told me many
+strange things to-night, Gilbert.&nbsp; You have told me that it
+is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it, and that
+to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world;
+you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought
+dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and
+that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of
+Art what the artist had not put there; that it is exactly because
+a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and
+that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not
+rational.&nbsp; My friend, you are a dreamer.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; Yes: I am a
+dreamer.&nbsp; For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by
+moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the
+rest of the world.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernest</span>.&nbsp; His punishment?</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Gilbert</span>.&nbsp; And his
+reward.&nbsp; But, see, it is dawn already.&nbsp; Draw back the
+curtains and open the windows wide.&nbsp; How cool the morning
+air is!&nbsp; Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of
+silver.&nbsp; A faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the
+shadows of the white houses are purple.&nbsp; It is too late to
+sleep.&nbsp; Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the
+roses.&nbsp; Come!&nbsp; I am tired of thought.</p>
+<h2><a name="page221"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 221</span>THE
+TRUTH OF MASKS<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">A NOTE ON ILLUSION</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> many of the somewhat violent
+attacks that have recently been made on that splendour of
+mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian revivals in
+England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics
+that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the
+costumes of his actors, and that, could he see Mrs.
+Langtry&rsquo;s production of <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, he
+would probably say that the play, and the play only, is the
+thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella.&nbsp;
+While, as regards any historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton,
+in an article in the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, has laid it down
+as a dogma of art that arch&aelig;ology is entirely out of place
+in the presentation of any of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays, and the
+attempt to introduce it one of the stupidest pedantries of an age
+of prigs.</p>
+<p>Lord Lytton&rsquo;s position I shall examine later on; but, as
+regards the theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much
+about the costume-wardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to
+study Shakespeare&rsquo;s method will see that there is
+absolutely no dramatist of the French, English, or Athenian stage
+who relies so much for his illusionist effects on the dress of
+his actors as Shakespeare does himself.</p>
+<p>Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by
+beauty of costume, he constantly introduces into his plays
+masques and dances, purely for the sake of the pleasure which
+they give the eye; and we have still his stage-directions for the
+three great processions in <i>Henry the Eighth</i>, directions
+which are characterised by the most extraordinary elaborateness
+of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in Anne
+Boleyn&rsquo;s hair.&nbsp; Indeed it would be quite easy for a
+modern manager to reproduce these pageants absolutely as
+Shakespeare had them designed; and so accurate were they that one
+of the court officials of the time, writing an account of the
+last performance of the play at the Globe Theatre to a friend,
+actually complains of their realistic character, notably of the
+production on the stage of the Knights of the Garter in the robes
+and insignia of the order as being calculated to bring ridicule
+on the real ceremonies; much in the same spirit in which the
+French Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful
+actor, M. Christian, from appearing in uniform, on the plea that
+it was prejudicial to the glory of the army that a colonel should
+be caricatured.&nbsp; And elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel
+which distinguished the English stage under Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+influence was attacked by the contemporary critics, not as a
+rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic tendencies of
+realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are always the
+last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.</p>
+<p>The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that
+Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding
+picturesqueness to poetry, but that he saw how important costume
+is as a means of producing certain dramatic effects.&nbsp; Many
+of his plays, such as <i>Measure for Measure</i>, <i>Twelfth
+Night</i>, <i>The Two Gentleman of Verona</i>, <i>All&rsquo;s
+Well that Ends Well</i>, <i>Cymbeline</i>, and others, depend for
+their illusion on the character of the various dresses worn by
+the hero or the heroine; the delightful scene in <i>Henry the
+Sixth</i>, on the modern miracles of healing by faith, loses all
+its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and the
+<i>d&eacute;no&ucirc;ment</i> of the <i>Merry Wives of
+Windsor</i> hinges on the colour of Anne Page&rsquo;s gown.&nbsp;
+As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises the instances are
+almost numberless.&nbsp; Posthumus hides his passion under a
+peasant&rsquo;s garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an
+idiot&rsquo;s rags; Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer, and
+Rosalind is attired in &lsquo;all points as a man&rsquo;; the
+cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen to the Youth Fidele; Jessica
+flees from her father&rsquo;s house in boy&rsquo;s dress, and
+Julia ties up her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons
+hose and doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd,
+and Romeo his as a pilgrim; Prince Hal and Poins appear first as
+footpads in buckram suits, and then in white aprons and leather
+jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as for Falstaff, does he
+not come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as Herne the
+Hunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?</p>
+<p>Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of
+intensifying dramatic situation less numerous.&nbsp; After
+slaughter of Duncan, Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if
+aroused from sleep; Timon ends in rags the play he had begun in
+splendour; Richard flatters the London citizens in a suit of mean
+and shabby armour, and, as soon as he has stepped in blood to the
+throne, marches through the streets in crown and George and
+Garter; the climax of <i>The Tempest</i> is reached when
+Prospero, throwing off his enchanter&rsquo;s robes, sends Ariel
+for his hat and rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian
+Duke; the very Ghost in <i>Hamlet</i> changes his mystical
+apparel to produce different effects; and as for Juliet, a modern
+playwright would probably have laid her out in her shroud, and
+made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare arrays
+her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the
+vault &lsquo;a feasting presence full of light,&rsquo; turns the
+tomb into a bridal chamber, and gives the cue and motive for
+Romeo&rsquo;s speech of the triumph of Beauty over Death.</p>
+<p>Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a
+major-domo&rsquo;s stockings, the pattern on a wife&rsquo;s
+handkerchief, the sleeve of a young soldier, and a fashionable
+woman&rsquo;s bonnets, become in Shakespeare&rsquo;s hands points
+of actual dramatic importance, and by some of them the action of
+the play in question is conditioned absolutely.&nbsp; Many other
+dramatists have availed themselves of costume as a method of
+expressing directly to the audience the character of a person on
+his entrance, though hardly so brilliantly as Shakespeare has
+done in the case of the dandy Parolles, whose dress, by the way,
+only an arch&aelig;ologist can understand; the fun of a master
+and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of
+shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine
+clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in
+his cups, may be regarded as part of that great career which
+costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes
+down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details of apparel
+and adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast, such
+immediate and tragic effect, such pity and such pathos, as
+Shakespeare himself.&nbsp; Armed cap-&agrave;-pie, the dead King
+stalks on the battlements of Elsinore because all is not right
+with Denmark; Shylock&rsquo;s Jewish gaberdine is part of the
+stigma under which that wounded and embittered nature writhes;
+Arthur begging for his life can think of no better plea than the
+handkerchief he had given Hubert&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Have you the heart? when your head did but
+ache,<br />
+I knit my handkerchief about your brows,<br />
+(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)<br />
+And I did never ask it you again;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and Orlando&rsquo;s blood-stained napkin strikes the first
+sombre note in that exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the
+depth of feeling that underlies Rosalind&rsquo;s fanciful wit and
+wilful jesting.</p>
+<blockquote><p>Last night &rsquo;twas on my arm; I kissed it;<br
+/>
+I hope it be not gone to tell my lord<br />
+That I kiss aught but he,</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was
+already on its way to Rome to rob her of her husband&rsquo;s
+faith; the little Prince passing to the Tower plays with the
+dagger in his uncle&rsquo;s girdle; Duncan sends a ring to Lady
+Macbeth on the night of his own murder, and the ring of Portia
+turns the tragedy of the merchant into a wife&rsquo;s
+comedy.&nbsp; The great rebel York dies with a paper crown on his
+head; Hamlet&rsquo;s black suit is a kind of colour-motive in the
+piece, like the mourning of the Chim&egrave;ne in the <i>Cid</i>;
+and the climax of Antony&rsquo;s speech is the production of
+C&aelig;sar&rsquo;s cloak:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I
+remember<br />
+The first time ever C&aelig;sar put it on.<br />
+&rsquo;Twas on a summer&rsquo;s evening, in his tent,<br />
+The day he overcame the Nervii:&mdash;<br />
+Look, in this place ran Cassius&rsquo; dagger through:<br />
+See what a rent the envious Casca made:<br />
+Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . .<br />
+Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold<br />
+Our C&aelig;sar&rsquo;s vesture wounded?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are
+as pathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of
+Lear&rsquo;s wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words
+by his fantastic attire; and when Cloten, stung by the taunt of
+that simile which his sister draws from her husband&rsquo;s
+raiment, arrays himself in that husband&rsquo;s very garb to work
+upon her the deed of shame, we feel that there is nothing in the
+whole of modern French realism, nothing even in
+<i>Th&eacute;r&egrave;se Raquin</i>, that masterpiece of horror,
+which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with this
+strange scene in <i>Cymbeline</i>.</p>
+<p>In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages
+are those suggested by costume.&nbsp; Rosalind&rsquo;s</p>
+<blockquote><p>Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a
+man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Constance&rsquo;s</p>
+<blockquote><p>Grief fills the place of my absent child,<br />
+Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Ah! cut my lace asunder!&mdash;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>are only a few of the many examples one might quote.&nbsp; One
+of the finest effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini,
+in the last act of <i>Lear</i>, tearing the plume from
+Kent&rsquo;s cap and applying it to Cordelia&rsquo;s lips when he
+came to the line,</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">This feather stirs; she
+lives!</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion,
+plucked, I remember, some fur from his
+arch&aelig;ologically-incorrect ermine for the same business; but
+Salvini&rsquo;s was the finer effect of the two, as well as the
+truer.&nbsp; And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last act of
+<i>Richard the Third</i> have not, I am sure, forgotten how much
+the agony and terror of his dream was intensified, by contrast,
+through the calm and quiet that preceded it, and the delivery of
+such lines as</p>
+<blockquote><p>What, is my beaver easier than it was?<br />
+And all my armour laid into my tent?<br />
+Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy&mdash;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering
+the last words which Richard&rsquo;s mother called after him as
+he was marching to Bosworth:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>Therefore take with thee my most grievous
+curse,<br />
+Which in the day of battle tire thee more<br />
+Than all the complete armour that thou wear&rsquo;st.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his
+disposal, it is to be remarked that, while he more than once
+complains of the smallness of the stage on which he has to
+produce big historical plays, and of the want of scenery which
+obliges him to cut out many effective open-air incidents, he
+always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a most
+elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors
+taking pains about their make-up.&nbsp; Even now it is difficult
+to produce such a play as the <i>Comedy of Errors</i>; and to the
+picturesque accident of Miss Ellen Terry&rsquo;s brother
+resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing <i>Twelfth
+Night</i> adequately performed.&nbsp; Indeed, to put any play of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s on the stage, absolutely as he himself wished
+it to be done, requires the services of a good property-man, a
+clever wig-maker, a costumier with a sense of colour and a
+knowledge of textures, a master of the methods of making-up, a
+fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an artist to direct
+personally the whole production.&nbsp; For he is most careful to
+tell us the dress and appearance of each character.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Racine abhorre la r&eacute;alit&eacute;,&rsquo; says
+Auguste Vacquerie somewhere; &lsquo;il ne daigne pas
+s&rsquo;occuper de son costume.&nbsp; Si l&rsquo;on s&rsquo;en
+rapportait aux indications du po&egrave;te, Agamemnon serait
+v&ecirc;tu d&rsquo;un sceptre et Achille d&rsquo;une
+&eacute;p&eacute;e.&rsquo;&nbsp; But with Shakespeare it is very
+different.&nbsp; He gives us directions about the costumes of
+Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in <i>Macbeth</i>, and
+the apothecary in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, several elaborate
+descriptions of his fat knight, and a detailed account of the
+extraordinary garb in which Petruchio is to be married.&nbsp;
+Rosalind, he tells us, is tall, and is to carry a spear and a
+little dagger; Celia is smaller, and is to paint her face brown
+so as to look sunburnt.&nbsp; The children who play at fairies in
+Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white and green&mdash;a
+compliment, by the way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite
+colours they were&mdash;and in white, with green garlands and
+gilded vizors, the angels are to come to Katherine in
+Kimbolton.&nbsp; Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished
+from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has
+holes in his boots.&nbsp; The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a
+white sheet with her husband in mourning beside her.&nbsp; The
+motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the Cardinal, and the French
+lilies broidered on the English coats, are all made occasion for
+jest or taunt in the dialogue.&nbsp; We know the patterns on the
+Dauphin&rsquo;s armour and the Pucelle&rsquo;s sword, the crest
+on Warwick&rsquo;s helmet and the colour of Bardolph&rsquo;s
+nose.&nbsp; Portia has golden hair, Phoebe is black-haired,
+Orlando has chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek&rsquo;s hair
+hangs like flax on a distaff, and won&rsquo;t curl at all.&nbsp;
+Some of the characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some
+hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to blacken their
+faces.&nbsp; Lear has a white beard, Hamlet&rsquo;s father a
+grizzled, and Benedick is to shave his in the course of the
+play.&nbsp; Indeed, on the subject of stage beards Shakespeare is
+quite elaborate; tells us of the many different colours in use,
+and gives a hint to actors always to see that their own are
+properly tied on.&nbsp; There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw
+hats, and of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs; a masque of
+Amazons, a masque of Russians, and a classical masque; several
+immortal scenes over a weaver in an ass&rsquo;s head, a riot over
+the colour of a coat which it takes the Lord Mayor of London to
+quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband and his
+wife&rsquo;s milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.</p>
+<p>As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the
+aphorisms he makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age,
+particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies&rsquo; bonnets,
+and the many descriptions of the <i>mundus muliebris</i>, from
+the long of Autolycus in the <i>Winter&rsquo;s Tale</i> down to
+the account of the Duchess of Milan&rsquo;s gown in <i>Much Ado
+About Nothing</i>, they are far too numerous to quote; though it
+may be worth while to remind people that the whole of the
+Philosophy of Clothes is to be found in Lear&rsquo;s scene with
+Edgar&mdash;a passage which has the advantage of brevity and
+style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing metaphysics
+of <i>Sartor Resartus</i>.&nbsp; But I think that from what I
+have already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very
+much interested in costume.&nbsp; I do not mean in that shallow
+sense by which it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds
+and daffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the
+Elizabethan age; but that he saw that costume could be made at
+once impressive of a certain effect on the audience and
+expressive of certain types of character, and is one of the
+essential factors of the means which a true illusionist has at
+his disposal.&nbsp; Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard
+was of as much value as Juliet&rsquo;s loveliness; he sets the
+serge of the radical beside the silks of the lord, and sees the
+stage effects to be got from each: he has as much delight in
+Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth of gold,
+and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.</p>
+<p>The difficulty Ducis felt about translating <i>Othello</i> in
+consequence of the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a
+handkerchief, and his attempt to soften its grossness by making
+the Moor reiterate &lsquo;Le bandeau! le bandeau!&rsquo; may be
+taken as an example of the difference between <i>la
+trag&eacute;die philosophique</i> and the drama of real life; and
+the introduction for the first time of the word <i>mouchoir</i>
+at the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais was an era in that
+romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and M.
+Zola the <i>enfant terrible</i>, just as the classicism of the
+earlier part of the century was emphasised by Talma&rsquo;s
+refusal to play Greek heroes any longer in a powdered
+periwig&mdash;one of the many instances, by the way, of that
+desire for arch&aelig;ological accuracy in dress which has
+distinguished the great actors of our age.</p>
+<p>In criticising the importance given to money in <i>La
+Com&eacute;die Humaine</i>, Th&eacute;ophile Gautier says that
+Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero in fiction, <i>le
+h&eacute;ros m&eacute;tallique</i>.&nbsp; Of Shakespeare it may
+be said he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets,
+and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.</p>
+<p>The burning of the Globe Theatre&mdash;an event due, by the
+way, to the results of the passion for illusion that
+distinguished Shakespeare&rsquo;s stage-management&mdash;has
+unfortunately robbed us of many important documents; but in the
+inventory, still in existence, of the costume-wardrobe of a
+London theatre in Shakespeare&rsquo;s time, there are mentioned
+particular costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns,
+friars, and fools; green coats for Robin Hood&rsquo;s men, and a
+green gown for Maid Marian; a white and gold doublet for Henry
+the Fifth, and a robe for Longshanks; besides surplices, copes,
+damask gowns, gowns of cloth of gold and of cloth of silver,
+taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet coats, satin coats, frieze
+coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather, red suits,
+grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe &lsquo;for to goo
+invisibell,&rsquo; which seems inexpensive at &pound;3, 10s., and
+four incomparable fardingales&mdash;all of which show a desire to
+give every character an appropriate dress.&nbsp; There are also
+entries of Spanish, Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets,
+lances, painted shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as
+well as of costumes for Turkish Janissaries, Roman Senators, and
+all the gods and goddesses of Olympus, which evidence a good deal
+of arch&aelig;ological research on the part of the manager of the
+theatre.&nbsp; It is true that there is a mention of a bodice for
+Eve, but probably the <i>donn&eacute;e</i> of the play was after
+the Fall.</p>
+<p>Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare
+will see that arch&aelig;ology was one of its special
+characteristics.&nbsp; After that revival of the classical forms
+of architecture which was one of the notes of the Renaissance,
+and the printing at Venice and elsewhere of the masterpieces of
+Greek and Latin literature, had come naturally an interest in the
+ornamentation and costume of the antique world.&nbsp; Nor was it
+for the learning that they could acquire, but rather for the
+loveliness that they might create, that the artists studied these
+things.&nbsp; The curious objects that were being constantly
+brought to light by excavations were not left to moulder in a
+museum, for the contemplation of a callous curator, and the
+<i>ennui</i> of a policeman bored by the absence of crime.&nbsp;
+They were used as motives for the production of a new art, which
+was to be not beautiful merely, but also strange.</p>
+<p>Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the
+Appian Way came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with
+the name &lsquo;Julia, daughter of Claudius.&rsquo;&nbsp; On
+opening the coffer they found within its marble womb the body of
+a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age, preserved by the
+embalmer&rsquo;s skill from corruption and the decay of
+time.&nbsp; Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her
+in crisp curling gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of
+maidenhood had not yet departed.&nbsp; Borne back to the Capitol,
+she became at once the centre of a new cult, and from all parts
+of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at the wonderful shrine,
+till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the secret of
+beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets
+Jud&aelig;a&rsquo;s rough and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had
+the body conveyed away by night, and in secret buried.&nbsp;
+Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the less valuable
+as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique
+world.&nbsp; Arch&aelig;ology to them was not a mere science for
+the antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry
+dust of antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and
+fill with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been
+old and outworn.&nbsp; From the pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to
+Mantegna&rsquo;s &lsquo;Triumph of C&aelig;sar,&rsquo; and the
+service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this
+spirit can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile
+arts&mdash;the arts of arrested movement&mdash;but its influence
+was to be seen also in the great Gr&aelig;co-Roman masques which
+were the constant amusement of the gay courts of the time, and in
+the public pomps and processions with which the citizens of big
+commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that chanced to
+visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so
+important that large prints were made of them and
+published&mdash;a fact which is a proof of the general interest
+at the time in matters of such kind.</p>
+<p>And this use of arch&aelig;ology in shows, so far from being a
+bit of priggish pedantry, is in every way legitimate and
+beautiful.&nbsp; For the stage is not merely the meeting-place of
+all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.&nbsp;
+Sometimes in an arch&aelig;ological novel the use of strange and
+obsolete terms seems to hide the reality beneath the learning,
+and I dare say that many of the readers of <i>Notre Dame de
+Paris</i> have been much puzzled over the meaning of such
+expressions as <i>la casaque &agrave; mahoitres</i>, <i>les
+voulgiers</i>, <i>le gallimard tach&eacute; d&rsquo;encre</i>,
+<i>les craaquiniers</i>, and the like; but with the stage how
+different it is!&nbsp; The ancient world wakes from its sleep,
+and history moves as a pageant before our eyes, without obliging
+us to have recourse to a dictionary or an encyclop&aelig;dia for
+the perfection of our enjoyment.&nbsp; Indeed, there is not the
+slightest necessity that the public should know the authorities
+for the mounting of any piece.&nbsp; From such materials, for
+instance, as the disk of Theodosius, materials with which the
+majority of people are probably not very familiar, Mr. E. W.
+Godwin, one of the most artistic spirits of this century in
+England, created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of
+<i>Claudian</i>, and showed us the life of Byzantium in the
+fourth century, not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts,
+not by a novel which requires a glossary to explain it, but by
+the visible presentation before us of all the glory of that great
+town.&nbsp; And while the costumes were true to the smallest
+points of colour and design, yet the details were not assigned
+that abnormal importance which they must necessarily be given in
+a piecemeal lecture, but were subordinated to the rules of lofty
+composition and the unity of artistic effect.&nbsp; Mr. Symonds,
+speaking of that great picture of Mantegna&rsquo;s, now in
+Hampton Court, says that the artist has converted an antiquarian
+motive into a theme for melodies of line.&nbsp; The same could
+have been said with equal justice of Mr. Godwin&rsquo;s
+scene.&nbsp; Only the foolish called it pedantry, only those who
+would neither look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play
+being killed by its paint.&nbsp; It was in reality a scene not
+merely perfect in its picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic
+also, getting rid of any necessity for tedious descriptions, and
+showing us, by the colour and character of Claudian&rsquo;s
+dress, and the dress of his attendants, the whole nature and life
+of the man, from what school of philosophy he affected, down to
+what horses he backed on the turf.</p>
+<p>And indeed arch&aelig;ology is only really delightful when
+transfused into some form of art.&nbsp; I have no desire to
+underrate the services of laborious scholars, but I feel that the
+use Keats made of Lempri&egrave;re&rsquo;s Dictionary is of far
+more value to us than Professor Max M&uuml;ller&rsquo;s treatment
+of the same mythology as a disease of language.&nbsp; Better
+<i>Endymion</i> than any theory, however sound, or, as in the
+present instance, unsound, of an epidemic among adjectives!&nbsp;
+And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi&rsquo;s
+book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his
+&lsquo;Ode on a Grecian Urn&rsquo;?&nbsp; Art, and art only, can
+make arch&aelig;ology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it
+most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one
+exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the
+wonder of the unreal world.&nbsp; But the sixteenth century was
+not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio
+also.&nbsp; Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested
+in the dress of its neighbours.&nbsp; Europe began to investigate
+its own clothes, and the amount of books published on national
+costumes is quite extraordinary.&nbsp; At the beginning of the
+century the <i>Nuremberg Chronicle</i>, with its two thousand
+illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
+was over seventeen editions were published of Munster&rsquo;s
+<i>Cosmography</i>.&nbsp; Besides these two books there were also
+the works of Michael Colyns, of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of
+Vecellio himself, all of them well illustrated, some of the
+drawings in Vecellio being probably from the hand of Titian.</p>
+<p>Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired
+their knowledge.&nbsp; The development of the habit of foreign
+travel, the increased commercial intercourse between countries,
+and the frequency of diplomatic missions, gave every nation many
+opportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary
+dress.&nbsp; After the departure from England, for instance, of
+the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of
+Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in
+the strange attire of their visitors.&nbsp; Later on London saw,
+perhaps too often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and
+to Elizabeth came envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare
+tells us, had an important influence on English costume.</p>
+<p>And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress,
+or the dress of foreign nations; there was also a good deal of
+research, amongst theatrical people especially, into the ancient
+costume of England itself: and when Shakespeare, in the prologue
+to one of his plays, expresses his regret at being unable to
+produce helmets of the period, he is speaking as an Elizabethan
+manager and not merely as an Elizabethan poet.&nbsp; At
+Cambridge, for instance, during his day, a play of <i>Richard The
+Third</i> was performed, in which the actors were attired in real
+dresses of the time, procured from the great collection of
+historical costume in the Tower, which was always open to the
+inspection of managers, and sometimes placed at their
+disposal.&nbsp; And I cannot help thinking that this performance
+must have been far more artistic, as regards costume, than
+Garrick&rsquo;s mounting of Shakespeare&rsquo;s own play on the
+subject, in which he himself appeared in a nondescript fancy
+dress, and everybody else in the costume of the time of George
+the Third, Richmond especially being much admired in the uniform
+of a young guardsman.</p>
+<p>For what is the use to the stage of that arch&aelig;ology
+which has so strangely terrified the critics, but that it, and it
+alone, can give us the architecture and apparel suitable to the
+time in which the action of the play passes?&nbsp; It enables us
+to see a Greek dressed like a Greek, and an Italian like an
+Italian; to enjoy the arcades of Venice and the balconies of
+Verona; and, if the play deals with any of the great eras in our
+country&rsquo;s history, to contemplate the age in its proper
+attire, and the king in his habit as he lived.&nbsp; And I
+wonder, by the way, what Lord Lytton would have said some time
+ago, at the Princess&rsquo;s Theatre, had the curtain risen on
+his father&rsquo;s Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair,
+attired in a flowing wig and a flowered dressing-gown, a costume
+which in the last century was considered peculiarly appropriate
+to an antique Roman!&nbsp; For in those halcyon days of the drama
+no arch&aelig;ology troubled the stage, or distressed the
+critics, and our inartistic grandfathers sat peaceably in a
+stifling atmosphere of anachronisms, and beheld with the calm
+complacency of the age of prose an Iachimo in powder and patches,
+a Lear in lace ruffles, and a Lady Macbeth in a large
+crinoline.&nbsp; I can understand arch&aelig;ology being attacked
+on the ground of its excessive realism, but to attack it as
+pedantic seems to be very much beside the mark.&nbsp; However, to
+attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as well speak
+disrespectfully of the equator.&nbsp; For arch&aelig;ology, being
+a science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply.&nbsp; Its
+value depends entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can
+use it.&nbsp; We look to the arch&aelig;ologist for the
+materials, to the artist for the method.</p>
+<p>In designing the scenery and costumes for any of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays, the first thing the artist has to
+settle is the best date for the drama.&nbsp; This should be
+determined by the general spirit of the play, more than by any
+actual historical references which may occur in it.&nbsp; Most
+<i>Hamlets</i> I have seen were placed far too early.&nbsp;
+<i>Hamlet</i> is essentially a scholar of the Revival of
+Learning; and if the allusion to the recent invasion of England
+by the Danes puts it back to the ninth century, the use of foils
+brings it down much later.&nbsp; Once, however, that the date has
+been fixed, then the arch&aelig;ologist is to supply us with the
+facts which the artist is to convert into effects.</p>
+<p>It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves
+show us that Shakespeare was indifferent to historical accuracy,
+and a great deal of capital has been made out of Hector&rsquo;s
+indiscreet quotation from Aristotle.&nbsp; Upon the other hand,
+the anachronisms are really few in number, and not very
+important, and, had Shakespeare&rsquo;s attention been drawn to
+them by a brother artist, he would probably have corrected
+them.&nbsp; For, though they can hardly be called blemishes, they
+are certainly not the great beauties of his work; or, at least,
+if they are, their anachronistic charm cannot be emphasised
+unless the play is accurately mounted according to its proper
+date.&nbsp; In looking at Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays as a whole,
+however, what is really remarkable is their extraordinary
+fidelity as regards his personages and his plots.&nbsp; Many of
+his <i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> are people who had actually
+existed, and some of them might have been seen in real life by a
+portion of his audience.&nbsp; Indeed the most violent attack
+that was made on Shakespeare in his time was for his supposed
+caricature of Lord Cobham.&nbsp; As for his plots, Shakespeare
+constantly draws them either from authentic history, or from the
+old ballads and traditions which served as history to the
+Elizabethan public, and which even now no scientific historian
+would dismiss as absolutely untrue.&nbsp; And not merely did he
+select fact instead of fancy as the basis of much of his
+imaginative work, but he always gives to each play the general
+character, the social atmosphere in a word, of the age in
+question.&nbsp; Stupidity he recognises as being one of the
+permanent characteristics of all European civilisations; so he
+sees no difference between a London mob of his own day and a
+Roman mob of pagan days, between a silly watchman in Messina and
+a silly Justice of the Peace in Windsor.&nbsp; But when he deals
+with higher characters, with those exceptions of each age which
+are so fine that they become its types, he gives them absolutely
+the stamp and seal of their time.&nbsp; Virgilia is one of those
+Roman wives on whose tomb was written &lsquo;Domi mansit, lanam
+fecit,&rsquo; as surely as Juliet is the romantic girl of the
+Renaissance.&nbsp; He is even true to the characteristics of
+race.&nbsp; Hamlet has all the imagination and irresolution of
+the Northern nations, and the Princess Katharine is as entirely
+French as the heroine of <i>Divor&ccedil;ons</i>.&nbsp; Harry the
+Fifth is a pure Englishman, and Othello a true Moor.</p>
+<p>Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from
+the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it is wonderful how
+careful he is to have his facts perfectly right&mdash;indeed he
+follows Holinshed with curious fidelity.&nbsp; The incessant wars
+between France and England are described with extraordinary
+accuracy down to the names of the besieged towns, the ports of
+landing and embarkation, the sites and dates of the battles, the
+titles of the commanders on each side, and the lists of the
+killed and wounded.&nbsp; And as regards the Civil Wars of the
+Roses we have many elaborate genealogies of the seven sons of
+Edward the Third; the claims of the rival Houses of York and
+Lancaster to the throne are discussed at length; and if the
+English aristocracy will not read Shakespeare as a poet, they
+should certainly read him as a sort of early Peerage.&nbsp; There
+is hardly a single title in the Upper House, with the exception
+of course of the uninteresting titles assumed by the law lords,
+which does not appear in Shakespeare along with many details of
+family history, creditable and discreditable.&nbsp; Indeed if it
+be really necessary that the School Board children should know
+all about the Wars of the Roses, they could learn their lessons
+just as well out of Shakespeare as out of shilling primers, and
+learn them, I need not say, far more pleasurably.&nbsp; Even in
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s own day this use of his plays was
+recognised.&nbsp; &lsquo;The historical plays teach history to
+those who cannot read it in the chronicles,&rsquo; says Heywood
+in a tract about the stage, and yet I am sure that
+sixteenth-century chronicles were much more delightful reading
+than nineteenth-century primers are.</p>
+<p>Of course the &aelig;sthetic value of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+plays does not, in the slightest degree, depend on their facts,
+but on their Truth, and Truth is independent of facts always,
+inventing or selecting them at pleasure.&nbsp; But still
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s use of facts is a most interesting part of
+his method of work, and shows us his attitude towards the stage,
+and his relations to the great art of illusion.&nbsp; Indeed he
+would have been very much surprised at any one classing his plays
+with &lsquo;fairy tales,&rsquo; as Lord Lytton does; for one of
+his aims was to create for England a national historical drama,
+which should deal with incidents with which the public was well
+acquainted, and with heroes that lived in the memory of a
+people.&nbsp; Patriotism, I need hardly say, is not a necessary
+quality of art; but it means, for the artist, the substitution of
+a universal for an individual feeling, and for the public the
+presentation of a work of art in a most attractive and popular
+form.&nbsp; It is worth noticing that Shakespeare&rsquo;s first
+and last successes were both historical plays.</p>
+<p>It may be asked, what has this to do with Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+attitude towards costume?&nbsp; I answer that a dramatist who
+laid such stress on historical accuracy of fact would have
+welcomed historical accuracy of costume as a most important
+adjunct to his illusionist method.&nbsp; And I have no hesitation
+in saying that he did so.&nbsp; The reference to helmets of the
+period in the prologue to <i>Henry the Fifth</i> may be
+considered fanciful, though Shakespeare must have often seen</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The
+very casque<br />
+That did affright the air at Agincourt,</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey,
+along with the saddle of that &lsquo;imp of fame,&rsquo; and the
+dinted shield with its torn blue velvet lining and its tarnished
+lilies of gold; but the use of military tabards in <i>Henry the
+Sixth</i> is a bit of pure arch&aelig;ology, as they were not
+worn in the sixteenth century; and the King&rsquo;s own tabard, I
+may mention, was still suspended over his tomb in St.
+George&rsquo;s Chapel, Windsor, in Shakespeare&rsquo;s day.&nbsp;
+For, up to the time of the unfortunate triumph of the Philistines
+in 1645, the chapels and cathedrals of England were the great
+national museums of arch&aelig;ology, and in them were kept the
+armour and attire of the heroes of English history.&nbsp; A good
+deal was of course preserved in the Tower, and even in
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s day tourists were brought there to see such
+curious relics of the past as Charles Brandon&rsquo;s huge lance,
+which is still, I believe, the admiration of our country
+visitors; but the cathedrals and churches were, as a rule,
+selected as the most suitable shrines for the reception of the
+historic antiquities.&nbsp; Canterbury can still show us the helm
+of the Black Prince, Westminster the robes of our kings, and in
+old St. Paul&rsquo;s the very banner that had waved on Bosworth
+field was hung up by Richmond himself.</p>
+<p>In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London, he saw
+the apparel and appurtenances of past ages, and it is impossible
+to doubt that he made use of his opportunities.&nbsp; The
+employment of lance and shield, for instance, in actual warfare,
+which is so frequent in his plays, is drawn from
+arch&aelig;ology, and not from the military accoutrements of his
+day; and his general use of armour in battle was not a
+characteristic of his age, a time when it was rapidly
+disappearing before firearms.&nbsp; Again, the crest on
+Warwick&rsquo;s helmet, of which such a point is made in <i>Henry
+the Sixth</i>, is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century play
+when crests were generally worn, but would not have been so in a
+play of Shakespeare&rsquo;s own time, when feathers and plumes
+had taken their place&mdash;a fashion which, as he tells us in
+<i>Henry the Eighth</i>, was borrowed from France.&nbsp; For the
+historical plays, then, we may be sure that arch&aelig;ology was
+employed, and as for the others I feel certain that it was the
+case also.&nbsp; The appearance of Jupiter on his eagle,
+thunderbolt in hand, of Juno with her peacocks, and of Iris with
+her many-coloured bow; the Amazon masque and the masque of the
+Five Worthies, may all be regarded as arch&aelig;ological; and
+the vision which Posthumus sees in prison of Sicilius
+Leonatus&mdash;&lsquo;an old man, attired like a warrior, leading
+an ancient matron&rsquo;&mdash;is clearly so.&nbsp; Of the
+&lsquo;Athenian dress&rsquo; by which Lysander is distinguished
+from Oberon I have already spoken; but one of the most marked
+instances is in the case of the dress of Coriolanus, for which
+Shakespeare goes directly to Plutarch.&nbsp; That historian, in
+his Life of the great Roman, tells us of the oak-wreath with
+which Caius Marcius was crowned, and of the curious kind of dress
+in which, according to ancient fashion, he had to canvass his
+electors; and on both of these points he enters into long
+disquisitions, investigating the origin and meaning of the old
+customs.&nbsp; Shakespeare, in the spirit of the true artist,
+accepts the facts of the antiquarian and converts them into
+dramatic and picturesque effects: indeed the gown of humility,
+the &lsquo;woolvish gown,&rsquo; as Shakespeare calls it, is the
+central note of the play.&nbsp; There are other cases I might
+quote, but this one is quite sufficient for my purpose; and it is
+evident from it at any rate that, in mounting a play in the
+accurate costume of the time, according to the best authorities,
+we are carrying out Shakespeare&rsquo;s own wishes and
+method.</p>
+<p>Even if it were not so, there is no more reason that we should
+continue any imperfections which may be supposed to have
+characterised Shakespeare&rsquo;s stage mounting than that we
+should have Juliet played by a young man, or give up the
+advantage of changeable scenery.&nbsp; A great work of dramatic
+art should not merely be made expressive of modern passion by
+means of the actor, but should be presented to us in the form
+most suitable to the modern spirit.&nbsp; Racine produced his
+Roman plays in Louis Quatorze dress on a stage crowded with
+spectators; but we require different conditions for the enjoyment
+of his art.&nbsp; Perfect accuracy of detail, for the sake of
+perfect illusion, is necessary for us.&nbsp; What we have to see
+is that the details are not allowed to usurp the principal
+place.&nbsp; They must be subordinate always to the general
+motive of the play.&nbsp; But subordination in art does not mean
+disregard of truth; it means conversion of fact into effect, and
+assigning to each detail its proper relative value</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Les petits d&eacute;tails d&rsquo;histoire
+et de vie domestique (says Hugo) doivent &ecirc;tre
+scrupuleusement &eacute;tudi&eacute;s et reproduits par le
+po&egrave;te, mais uniquement comme des moyens
+d&rsquo;accro&icirc;tre la r&eacute;alit&eacute; de
+l&rsquo;ensemble, et de faire p&eacute;n&eacute;trer jusque dans
+les coins les plus obscurs de l&rsquo;&oelig;uvre cette vie
+g&eacute;n&eacute;rale et puissante au milieu de laquelle les
+personnages sont plus vrais, et les catastrophes, par
+cons&eacute;queut, plus poignantes.&nbsp; Tout doit &ecirc;tre
+subordonn&eacute; &agrave; ce but.&nbsp; L&rsquo;Homme sur le
+premier plan, le reste au fond.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This passage is interesting as coming from the first great
+French dramatist who employed arch&aelig;ology on the stage, and
+whose plays, though absolutely correct in detail, are known to
+all for their passion, not for their pedantry&mdash;for their
+life, not for their learning.&nbsp; It is true that he has made
+certain concessions in the case of the employment of curious or
+strange expressions.&nbsp; Ruy Blas talks of M, de Priego as
+&lsquo;sujet du roi&rsquo; instead of &lsquo;noble du roi,&rsquo;
+and Angelo Malipieri speaks of &lsquo;la croix rouge&rsquo;
+instead of &lsquo;la croix de gueules.&rsquo;&nbsp; But they are
+concessions made to the public, or rather to a section of
+it.&nbsp; &lsquo;J&rsquo;en offre ici toute mes excuses aux
+spectateurs intelligents,&rsquo; he says in a note to one of the
+plays; &lsquo;esp&eacute;rons qu&rsquo;un jour un seigneur
+v&eacute;nitien pourra dire tout bonnement sans p&eacute;ril son
+blason sur le th&eacute;&acirc;tre.&nbsp; C&rsquo;est un
+progr&egrave;s qui viendra.&rsquo;&nbsp; And, though the
+description of the crest is not couched in accurate language,
+still the crest itself was accurately right.&nbsp; It may, of
+course, be said that the public do not notice these things; upon
+the other hand, it should be remembered that Art has no other aim
+but her own perfection, and proceeds simply by her own laws, and
+that the play which Hamlet describes as being caviare to the
+general is a play he highly praises.&nbsp; Besides, in England,
+at any rate, the public have undergone a transformation; there is
+far more appreciation of beauty now than there was a few years
+ago; and though they may not be familiar with the authorities and
+arch&aelig;ological data for what is shown to them, still they
+enjoy whatever loveliness they look at.&nbsp; And this is the
+important thing.&nbsp; Better to take pleasure in a rose than to
+put its root under a microscope.&nbsp; Arch&aelig;ological
+accuracy is merely a condition of illusionist stage effect; it is
+not its quality.&nbsp; And Lord Lytton&rsquo;s proposal that the
+dresses should merely be beautiful without being accurate is
+founded on a misapprehension of the nature of costume, and of its
+value on the stage.&nbsp; This value is twofold, picturesque and
+dramatic; the former depends on the colour of the dress, the
+latter on its design and character.&nbsp; But so interwoven are
+the two that, whenever in our own day historical accuracy has
+been disregarded, and the various dresses in a play taken from
+different ages, the result has been that the stage has been
+turned into that chaos of costume, that caricature of the
+centuries, the Fancy Dress Ball, to the entire ruin of all
+dramatic and picturesque effect.&nbsp; For the dresses of one age
+do not artistically harmonise with the dresses of another: and,
+as far as dramatic value goes, to confuse the costumes is to
+confuse the play.&nbsp; Costume is a growth, an evolution, and a
+most important, perhaps the most important, sign of the manners,
+customs and mode of life of each century.&nbsp; The Puritan
+dislike of colour, adornment and grace in apparel was part of the
+great revolt of the middle classes against Beauty in the
+seventeenth century.&nbsp; A historian who disregarded it would
+give us a most inaccurate picture of the time, and a dramatist
+who did not avail himself of it would miss a most vital element
+in producing an illusionist effect.&nbsp; The effeminacy of dress
+that characterised the reign of Richard the Second was a constant
+theme of contemporary authors.&nbsp; Shakespeare, writing two
+hundred years after, makes the king&rsquo;s fondness for gay
+apparel and foreign fashions a point in the play, from John of
+Gaunt&rsquo;s reproaches down to Richard&rsquo;s own speech in
+the third act on his deposition from the throne.&nbsp; And that
+Shakespeare examined Richard&rsquo;s tomb in Westminster Abbey
+seems to me certain from York&rsquo;s speech:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>See, see, King Richard doth himself appear<br />
+As doth the blushing discontented sun<br />
+From out the fiery portal of the east,<br />
+When he perceives the envious clouds are bent<br />
+To dim his glory.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>For we can still discern on the King&rsquo;s robe his
+favourite badge&mdash;the sun issuing from a cloud.&nbsp; In
+fact, in every age the social conditions are so exemplified in
+costume, that to produce a sixteenth-century play in
+fourteenth-century attire, or <i>vice versa</i>, would make the
+performance seem unreal because untrue.&nbsp; And, valuable as
+beauty of effect on the stage is, the highest beauty is not
+merely comparable with absolute accuracy of detail, but really
+dependent on it.&nbsp; To invent, an entirely new costume is
+almost impossible except in burlesque or extravaganza, and as for
+combining the dress of different centuries into one, the
+experiment would be dangerous, and Shakespeare&rsquo;s opinion of
+the artistic value of such a medley may be gathered from his
+incessant satire of the Elizabethan dandies for imagining that
+they were well dressed because they got their doublets in Italy,
+their hats in Germany, and their hose in France.&nbsp; And it
+should be noted that the most lovely scenes that have been
+produced on our stage have been those that have been
+characterised by perfect accuracy, such as Mr. and Mrs.
+Bancroft&rsquo;s eighteenth-century revivals at the Haymarket,
+Mr. Irying&rsquo;s superb production of <i>Much Ado About
+Nothing</i>, and Mr. Barrett&rsquo;s <i>Claudian</i>.&nbsp;
+Besides, and this is perhaps the most complete answer to Lord
+Lytton&rsquo;s theory, it must be remembered that neither in
+costume nor in dialogue is beauty the dramatist&rsquo;s primary
+aim at all.&nbsp; The true dramatist aims first at what is
+characteristic, and no more desires that all his personages
+should be beautifully attired than he desires that they should
+all have beautiful natures or speak beautiful English.&nbsp; The
+true dramatist, in fact, shows us life under the conditions of
+art, not art in the form of life.&nbsp; The Greek dress was the
+loveliest dress the world has ever seen, and the English dress of
+the last century one of the most monstrous; yet we cannot costume
+a play by Sheridan as we would costume a play by Sophokles.&nbsp;
+For, as Polonius says in his excellent lecture, a lecture to
+which I am glad to have the opportunity of expressing my
+obligations, one of the first qualities of apparel is its
+expressiveness.&nbsp; And the affected style of dress in the last
+century was the natural characteristic of a society of affected
+manners and affected conversation&mdash;a characteristic which
+the realistic dramatist will highly value down to the smallest
+detail of accuracy, and the materials for which he can get only
+from arch&aelig;ology.</p>
+<p>But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate; it must
+be also appropriate to the stature and appearance of the actor,
+and to his supposed condition, as well as to his necessary action
+in the play.&nbsp; In Mr. Hare&rsquo;s production of <i>As You
+Like It</i> at the St. James&rsquo;s Theatre, for instance, the
+whole point of Orlando&rsquo;s complaint that he is brought up
+like a peasant, and not like a gentleman, was spoiled by the
+gorgeousness of his dress, and the splendid apparel worn by the
+banished Duke and his friends was quite out of place.&nbsp; Mr.
+Lewis Wingfield&rsquo;s explanation that the sumptuary laws of
+the period necessitated their doing so, is, I am afraid, hardly
+sufficient.&nbsp; Outlaws, lurking in a forest and living by the
+chase, are not very likely to care much about ordinances of
+dress.&nbsp; They were probably attired like Robin Hood&rsquo;s
+men, to whom, indeed, they are compared in the course of the
+play.&nbsp; And that their dress was not that of wealthy noblemen
+may be seen by Orlando&rsquo;s words when he breaks in upon
+them.&nbsp; He mistakes them for robbers, and is amazed to find
+that they answer him in courteous and gentle terms.&nbsp; Lady
+Archibald Campbell&rsquo;s production, under Mr. E. W.
+Godwin&rsquo;s direction, of the same play in Coombe Wood was, as
+regards mounting, far more artistic.&nbsp; At least it seemed so
+to me.&nbsp; The Duke and his companions were dressed in serge
+tunics, leathern jerkins, high boots and gauntlets, and wore
+bycocket hats and hoods.&nbsp; And as they were playing in a real
+forest, they found, I am sure, their dresses extremely
+convenient.&nbsp; To every character in the play was given a
+perfectly appropriate attire, and the brown and green of their
+costumes harmonised exquisitely with the ferns through which they
+wandered, the trees beneath which they lay, and the lovely
+English landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players.&nbsp; The
+perfect naturalness of the scene was due to the absolute accuracy
+and appropriateness of everything that was worn.&nbsp; Nor could
+arch&aelig;ology have been put to a severer test, or come out of
+it more triumphantly.&nbsp; The whole production showed once for
+all that, unless a dress is arch&aelig;ologically correct, and
+artistically appropriate, it always looks unreal, unnatural, and
+theatrical in the sense of artificial.</p>
+<p>Nor, again, is it enough that there should be accurate and
+appropriate costumes of beautiful colours; there must be also
+beauty of colour on the stage as a whole, and as long as the
+background is painted by one artist, and the foreground figures
+independently designed by another, there is the danger of a want
+of harmony in the scene as a picture.&nbsp; For each scene the
+colour-scheme should be settled as absolutely as for the
+decoration of a room, and the textures which it is proposed to
+use should be mixed and re-mixed in every possible combination,
+and what is discordant removed.&nbsp; Then, as regards the
+particular kinds of colours, the stage is often too glaring,
+partly through the excessive use of hot, violent reds, and partly
+through the costumes looking too new.&nbsp; Shabbiness, which in
+modern life is merely the tendency of the lower orders towards
+tone, is not without its artistic value, and modern colours are
+often much improved by being a little faded.&nbsp; Blue also is
+too frequently used: it is not merely a dangerous colour to wear
+by gaslight, but it is really difficult in England to get a
+thoroughly good blue.&nbsp; The fine Chinese blue, which we all
+so much admire, takes two years to dye, and the English public
+will not wait so long for a colour.&nbsp; Peacock blue, of
+course, has been employed on the stage, notably at the Lyceum,
+with great advantage; but all attempts at a good light blue, or
+good dark blue, which I have seen have been failures.&nbsp; The
+value of black is hardly appreciated; it was used effectively by
+Mr. Irving in <i>Hamlet</i> as the central note of a composition,
+but as a tone-giving neutral its importance is not
+recognised.&nbsp; And this is curious, considering the general
+colour of the dress of a century in which, as Baudelaire says,
+&lsquo;Nous c&eacute;l&eacute;brons tous quelque
+enterrement.&rsquo;&nbsp; The arch&aelig;ologist of the future
+will probably point to this age as the time when the beauty of
+black was understood; but I hardly think that, as regards
+stage-mounting or house decoration, it really is.&nbsp; Its
+decorative value is, of course, the same as that of white or
+gold; it can separate and harmonise colours.&nbsp; In modern
+plays the black frock-coat of the hero becomes important in
+itself, and should be given a suitable background.&nbsp; But it
+rarely is.&nbsp; Indeed the only good background for a play in
+modern dress which I have ever seen was the dark grey and
+cream-white scene of the first act of the <i>Princesse
+Georges</i> in Mrs. Langtry&rsquo;s production.&nbsp; As a rule,
+the hero is smothered in <i>bric-&agrave;-brac</i> and
+palm-trees, lost in the gilded abyss of Louis Quatorze furniture,
+or reduced to a mere midge in the midst of marqueterie; whereas
+the background should always be kept as a background, and colour
+subordinated to effect.&nbsp; This, of course, can only be done
+when there is one single mind directing the whole
+production.&nbsp; The facts of art are diverse, but the essence
+of artistic effect is unity.&nbsp; Monarchy, Anarchy, and
+Republicanism may contend for the government of nations; but a
+theatre should be in the power of a cultured despot.&nbsp; There
+may be division of labour, but there must be no division of
+mind.&nbsp; Whoever understands the costume of an age understands
+of necessity its architecture and its surroundings also, and it
+is easy to see from the chairs of a century whether it was a
+century of crinolines or not.&nbsp; In fact, in art there is no
+specialism, and a really artistic production should bear the
+impress of one master, and one master only, who not merely should
+design and arrange everything, but should have complete control
+over the way in which each dress is to be worn.</p>
+<p>Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of <i>Hernani</i>,
+absolutely refused to call her lover &lsquo;<i>Mon
+Lion</i>!&rsquo; unless she was allowed to wear a little
+fashionable <i>toque</i> then much in vogue on the Boulevards;
+and many young ladies on our own stage insist to the present day
+on wearing stiff starched petticoats under Greek dresses, to the
+entire ruin of all delicacy of line and fold; but these wicked
+things should not be allowed.&nbsp; And there should be far more
+dress rehearsals than there are now.&nbsp; Actors such as Mr.
+Forbes-Robertson, Mr. Conway, Mr. George Alexander, and others,
+not to mention older artists, can move with ease and elegance in
+the attire of any century; but there are not a few who seem
+dreadfully embarrassed about their hands if they have no side
+pockets, and who always wear their dresses as if they were
+costumes.&nbsp; Costumes, of course, they are to the designer;
+but dresses they should be to those that wear them.&nbsp; And it
+is time that a stop should be put to the idea, very prevalent on
+the stage, that the Greeks and Romans always went about
+bareheaded in the open air&mdash;a mistake the Elizabethan
+managers did not fall into, for they gave hoods as well as gowns
+to their Roman senators.</p>
+<p>More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining to
+the actors that there is a form of gesture and movement that is
+not merely appropriate to each style of dress, but really
+conditioned by it.&nbsp; The extravagant use of the arms in the
+eighteenth century, for instance, was the necessary result of the
+large hoop, and the solemn dignity of Burleigh owed as much to
+his ruff as to his reason.&nbsp; Besides until an actor is at
+home in his dress, he is not at home in his part.</p>
+<p>Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistic
+temperament in the audience, and producing that joy in beauty for
+beauty&rsquo;s sake without which the great masterpieces of art
+can never be understood, I will not here speak; though it is
+worth while to notice how Shakespeare appreciated that side of
+the question in the production of his tragedies, acting them
+always by artificial light, and in a theatre hung with black; but
+what I have tried to point out is that arch&aelig;ology is not a
+pedantic method, but a method of artistic illusion, and that
+costume is a means of displaying character without description,
+and of producing dramatic situations and dramatic effects.&nbsp;
+And I think it is a pity that so many critics should have set
+themselves to attack one of the most important movements on the
+modern stage before that movement has at all reached its proper
+perfection.&nbsp; That it will do so, however, I feel as certain
+as that we shall require from our dramatic critics in the future
+higher qualification than that they can remember Macready or have
+seen Benjamin Webster; we shall require of them, indeed, that
+they cultivate a sense of beauty.&nbsp; <i>Pour &ecirc;tre plus
+difficile</i>, <i>la t&acirc;che n&rsquo;en est que plus
+glorieuse</i>.&nbsp; And if they will not encourage, at least
+they must not oppose, a movement of which Shakespeare of all
+dramatists would have most approved, for it has the illusion of
+truth for its method, and the illusion of beauty for its
+result.&nbsp; Not that I agree with everything that I have said
+in this essay.&nbsp; There is much with which I entirely
+disagree.&nbsp; The essay simply represents an artistic
+standpoint, and in &aelig;sthetic criticism attitude is
+everything.&nbsp; For in art there is no such thing as a
+universal truth.&nbsp; A Truth in art is that whose contradictory
+is also true.&nbsp; And just as it is only in art-criticism, and
+through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas,
+so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can
+realise Hegel&rsquo;s system of contraries.&nbsp; The truths of
+metaphysics are the truths of masks.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTENTIONS***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Intentions, by Oscar Wilde
+(#11 in our series by Oscar Wilde)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
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+
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+Title: Intentions
+
+Author: Oscar Wilde
+
+Release Date: April, 1997  [EBook #887]
+[This file was first posted on April 24, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: May 11, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, INTENTIONS ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+INTENTIONS
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+The Decay of Lying
+Pen, Pencil, and Poison
+The Critic as Artist
+The Truth of Masks
+
+
+
+THE DECAY OF LYING:  AN OBSERVATION
+
+
+
+A DIALOGUE.  Persons:  Cyril and Vivian.  Scene:  the Library of a
+country house in Nottinghamshire.
+
+CYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace).  My
+dear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all day in the library.  It is
+a perfectly lovely afternoon.  The air is exquisite.  There is a
+mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum.  Let us go
+and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.
+
+VIVIAN.  Enjoy Nature!  I am glad to say that I have entirely lost
+that faculty.  People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more
+than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and
+that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in
+her that had escaped our observation.  My own experience is that
+the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.  What Art
+really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious
+crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished
+condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as
+Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.  When I look at a
+landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects.  It is fortunate
+for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we
+should have no art at all.  Art is our spirited protest, our
+gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.  As for the
+infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth.  It is not to be
+found in Nature herself.  It resides in the imagination, or fancy,
+or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.
+
+CYRIL.  Well, you need not look at the landscape.  You can lie on
+the grass and smoke and talk.
+
+VIVIAN.  But Nature is so uncomfortable.  Grass is hard and lumpy
+and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.  Why, even Morris's
+poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the
+whole of Nature can.  Nature pales before the furniture of 'the
+street which from Oxford has borrowed its name,' as the poet you
+love so much once vilely phrased it.  I don't complain.  If Nature
+had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented
+architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.  In a house we
+all feel of the proper proportions.  Everything is subordinated to
+us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.  Egotism itself, which
+is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the
+result of indoor life.  Out of doors one becomes abstract and
+impersonal.  One's individuality absolutely leaves one.  And then
+Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative.  Whenever I am walking
+in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the
+cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the
+ditch.  Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.
+Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die
+of it just as they die of any other disease.  Fortunately, in
+England at any rate, thought is not catching.  Our splendid
+physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.  I
+only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of
+our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are
+beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable
+of learning has taken to teaching--that is really what our
+enthusiasm for education has come to.  In the meantime, you had
+better go back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave me
+to correct my proofs.
+
+CYRIL.  Writing an article!  That is not very consistent after what
+you have just said.
+
+VIVIAN.  Who wants to be consistent?  The dullard and the
+doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to
+the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice.
+Not I.  Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word
+'Whim.'  Besides, my article is really a most salutary and valuable
+warning.  If it is attended to, there may be a new Renaissance of
+Art.
+
+CYRIL.  What is the subject?
+
+VIVIAN.  I intend to call it 'The Decay of Lying:  A Protest.'
+
+CYRIL.  Lying!  I should have thought that our politicians kept up
+that habit.
+
+VIVIAN.  I assure you that they do not.  They never rise beyond the
+level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to
+discuss, to argue.  How different from the temper of the true liar,
+with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility,
+his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind!  After all, what
+is a fine lie?  Simply that which is its own evidence.  If a man is
+sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie,
+he might just as well speak the truth at once.  No, the politicians
+won't do.  Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar.
+The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members.  Their feigned
+ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful.  They can make the
+worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh from
+Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant
+juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even
+when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and
+unmistakeably innocent.  But they are briefed by the prosaic, and
+are not ashamed to appeal to precedent.  In spite of their
+endeavours, the truth will out.  Newspapers, even, have
+degenerated.  They may now be absolutely relied upon.  One feels it
+as one wades through their columns.  It is always the unreadable
+that occurs.  I am afraid that there is not much to be said in
+favour of either the lawyer or the journalist.  Besides, what I am
+pleading for is Lying in art.  Shall I read you what I have
+written?  It might do you a great deal of good.
+
+CYRIL.  Certainly, if you give me a cigarette.  Thanks.  By the
+way, what magazine do you intend it for?
+
+VIVIAN.  For the Retrospective Review.  I think I told you that the
+elect had revived it.
+
+CYRIL.  Whom do you mean by 'the elect'?
+
+VIVIAN.  Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course.  It is a club to which
+I belong.  We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes
+when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian.  I am afraid
+you are not eligible.  You are too fond of simple pleasures.
+
+CYRIL.  I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits, I
+suppose?
+
+VIVIAN.  Probably.  Besides, you are a little too old.  We don't
+admit anybody who is of the usual age.
+
+CYRIL.  Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with
+each other.
+
+VIVIAN.  We are.  This is one of the objects of the club.  Now, if
+you promise not to interrupt too often, I will read you my article.
+
+CYRIL.  You will find me all attention.
+
+VIVIAN (reading in a very clear, musical voice).  THE DECAY OF
+LYING:  A PROTEST.--One of the chief causes that can be assigned
+for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature
+of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science,
+and a social pleasure.  The ancient historians gave us delightful
+fiction in the form of fact; the modem novelist presents us with
+dull facts under the guise of fiction.  The Blue-Book is rapidly
+becoming his ideal both for method and manner.  He has his tedious
+document humain, his miserable little coin de la creation, into
+which he peers with his microscope.  He is to be found at the
+Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading
+up his subject.  He has not even the courage of other people's
+ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything, and
+ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he
+comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle
+or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of
+useful information from which never, even in his most meditative
+moments, can he thoroughly free himself.
+
+'The lose that results to literature in general from this false
+ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.  People have a
+careless way of talking about a "born liar," just as they talk
+about a "born poet."  But in both cases they are wrong.  Lying and
+poetry are arts--arts, as Pinto saw, not unconnected with each
+other--and they require the most careful study, the most
+disinterested devotion.  Indeed, they have their technique, just as
+the more material arts of painting and sculpture have, their subtle
+secrets of form and colour, their craft-mysteries, their deliberate
+artistic methods.  As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one
+can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in
+neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice.
+Here, as elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection.  But in
+modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too
+common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of
+lying has almost fallen into disrepute.  Many a young man starts in
+life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in
+congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the
+best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful.
+But, as a rule, he comes to nothing.  He either falls into careless
+habits of accuracy--'
+
+CYRIL.  My dear fellow!
+
+VIVIAN.  Please don't interrupt in the middle of a sentence.  'He
+either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to
+frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed.  Both
+things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would
+be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he
+develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to
+verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in
+contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often
+ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one can
+possibly believe in their probability.  This is no isolated
+instance that we are giving.  It is simply one example out of many;
+and if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify,
+our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty
+will pass away from the land.
+
+'Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of
+delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for
+we know positively no other name for it.  There is such a thing as
+robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and
+The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single
+anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll
+reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet.  As for Mr.
+Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a
+perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected
+of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels
+bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a
+footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.  Nor are our other
+novelists much better.  Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it
+were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible
+"points of view" his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases,
+his swift and caustic satire.  Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at
+the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice.  He is
+so loud that one cannot bear what he says.  Mr. James Payn is an
+adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding.  He hunts
+down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective.
+As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes
+almost unbearable.  The horses of Mr. William Black's phaeton do
+not soar towards the sun.  They merely frighten the sky at evening
+into violent chromolithographic effects.  On seeing them approach,
+the peasants take refuge in dialect.  Mrs. Oliphant prattles
+pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and
+other wearisome things.  Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself
+upon the altar of local colour.  He is like the lady in the French
+comedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel d'Italie."  Besides,
+he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes.  He
+is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to be
+bad is to be wicked.  At times he is almost edifying.  Robert
+Elsmere is of course a masterpiece--a masterpiece of the "genre
+ennuyeux," the one form of literature that the English people seems
+thoroughly to enjoy.  A thoughtful young friend of ours once told
+us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at
+a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we
+can quite believe it.  Indeed it is only in England that such a
+book could be produced.  England is the home of lost ideas.  As for
+that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the
+sun always rises in the East-End, the only thing that can be said
+about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.
+
+'In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as Robert
+Elsmere has been produced, things are not much better.  M. Guy de
+Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style,
+strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us
+foul sore and festering wound.  He writes lurid little tragedies in
+which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot
+laugh for very tears.  M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he
+lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de
+genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has
+not got genius, he can at least be dull.  And how well he succeeds!
+He is not without power.  Indeed at times, as in Germinal, there is
+something almost epic in his work.  But his work is entirely wrong
+from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, but
+on the ground of art.  From any ethical standpoint it is just what
+it should be.  The author is perfectly truthful, and describes
+things exactly as they happen.  What more can any moralist desire?
+We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time
+against M. Zola.  It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being
+exposed.  But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in
+favour of the author of L'Assommoir, Nana and Pot-Bouille?
+Nothing.  Mr. Ruskin once described the characters in George
+Eliot's novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonville
+omnibus, but M. Zola's characters are much worse.  They have their
+dreary vices, and their drearier virtues.  The record of their
+lives is absolutely without interest.  Who cares what happens to
+them?  In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and
+imaginative power.  We don't want to be harrowed and disgusted with
+an account of the doings of the lower orders.  M. Daudet is better.
+He has wit, a light touch and an amusing style.  But he has lately
+committed literary suicide.  Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle
+with his "Il faut lutter pour l'art," or for Valmajour with his
+eternal refrain about the nightingale, or for the poet in Jack with
+his "mots cruels," now that we have learned from Vingt Ans de ma
+Vie litteraire that these characters were taken directly from life.
+To us they seem to have suddenly lost all their vitality, all the
+few qualities they ever possessed.  The only real people are the
+people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to
+life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are
+creations, and not boast of them as copies.  The justification of a
+character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are,
+but that the author is what he is.  Otherwise the novel is not a
+work of art.  As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the roman
+psychologique, he commits the error of imagining that the men and
+women of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for
+an innumerable series of chapters.  In point of fact what is
+interesting about people in good society--and M. Bourget rarely
+moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,--
+is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies
+behind the mask.  It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of
+us made out of the same stuff.  In Falstaff there is something of
+Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff.  The fat
+knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his
+moments of coarse humour.  Where we differ from each other is
+purely in accidentals:  in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious
+opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like.  The
+more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis
+disappear.  Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal
+thing called human nature.  Indeed, as any one who has ever worked
+among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no
+mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality;
+and if a writer insists upon analysing the upper classes, he might
+just as well write of match-girls and costermongers at once.'
+However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain you any further just
+here.  I quite admit that modern novels have many good points.  All
+I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable.
+
+CYRIL.  That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I must
+say that I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures.
+I like The Deemster, and The Daughter of Heth, and Le Disciple, and
+Mr. Isaacs, and as for Robert Elsmere, I am quite devoted to it.
+Not that I can look upon it as a serious work.  As a statement of
+the problems that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous
+and antiquated.  It is simply Arnold's Literature and Dogma with
+the literature left out.  It is as much behind the age as Paley's
+Evidences, or Colenso's method of Biblical exegesis.  Nor could
+anything be less impressive than the unfortunate hero gravely
+heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so completely missing its
+true significance that he proposes to carry on the business of the
+old firm under the new name.  On the other hand, it contains
+several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful quotations,
+and Green's philosophy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitter
+pill of the author's fiction.  I also cannot help expressing my
+surprise that you have said nothing about the two novelists whom
+you are always reading, Balzac and George Meredith.  Surely they
+are realists, both of them?
+
+VIVIAN.  Ah!  Meredith!  Who can define him?  His style is chaos
+illumined by flashes of lightning.  As a writer he has mastered
+everything except language:  as a novelist he can do everything,
+except tell a story:  as an artist he is everything except
+articulate.  Somebody in Shakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talks
+about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and
+it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism
+of Meredith's method.  But whatever he is, he is not a realist.  Or
+rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on
+speaking terms with his father.  By deliberate choice he has made
+himself a romanticist.  He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and
+after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt against the
+noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite sufficient of
+itself to keep life at a respectful distance.  By its means he has
+planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
+wonderful roses.  As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable
+combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.
+The latter he bequeathed to his disciples.  The former was entirely
+his own.  The difference between such a book as M. Zola's
+L'Assommoir and Balzac's Illusions Perdues is the difference
+between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.  'All
+Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the same
+ardour of life that animated himself.  All his fictions are as
+deeply coloured as dreams.  Each mind is a weapon loaded to the
+muzzle with will.  The very scullions have genius.'  A steady
+course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
+acquaintances to the shadows of shades.  His characters have a kind
+of fervent fiery-coloured existence.  They dominate us, and defy
+scepticism.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death
+of Lucien de Rubempre.  It is a grief from which I have never been
+able completely to rid myself.  It haunts me in my moments of
+pleasure.  I remember it when I laugh.  But Balzac is no more a
+realist than Holbein was.  He created life, he did not copy it.  I
+admit, however, that he set far too high a value on modernity of
+form, and that, consequently, there is no book of his that, as an
+artistic masterpiece, can rank with Salammbo or Esmond, or The
+Cloister and the Hearth, or the Vicomte de Bragelonne.
+
+CYRIL.  Do you object to modernity of form, then?
+
+VIVIAN.  Yes.  It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result.
+Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising.  It cannot
+help being so.  The public imagine that, because they are
+interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be
+interested in them also, and should take them as her subject-
+matter.  But the mere fact that they are interested in these things
+makes them unsuitable subjects for Art.  The only beautiful things,
+as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us.  As
+long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any
+way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our
+sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live,
+it is outside the proper sphere of art.  To art's subject-matter we
+should be more or less indifferent.  We should, at any rate, have
+no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind.  It
+is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are
+such an admirable motive for a tragedy.  I do not know anything in
+the whole history of literature sadder than the artistic career of
+Charles Reade.  He wrote one beautiful book, The Cloister and the
+Hearth, a book as much above Romola as Romola is above Daniel
+Deronda, and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be
+modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict
+prisons, and the management of our private lunatic asylums.
+Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he
+tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor-law
+administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with
+a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of
+contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational
+journalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over.  Believe
+me, my dear Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of subject-
+matter are entirely and absolutely wrong.  We have mistaken the
+common livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spend
+our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile
+cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo.
+Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for
+a mess of facts.
+
+CYRIL.  There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt
+that whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely model
+novel, we have rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it.  And
+this is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what
+is not.  If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again,
+there is no use reading it at all.  But what do you say about the
+return to Life and Nature?  This is the panacea that is always
+being recommended to us.
+
+VIVIAN.  I will read you what I say on that subject.  The passage
+comes later on in the article, but I may as well give it to you
+now:-
+
+'The popular cry of our time is "Let us return to Life and Nature;
+they will recreate Art for us, and send the red blood coursing
+through her veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make
+her hand strong."  But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and
+well-meaning efforts.  Nature is always behind the age.  And as for
+Life, she is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays
+waste her house.'
+
+CYRIL.  What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind the
+age?
+
+VIVIAN.  Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic.  What I mean is
+this.  If we take Nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed
+to self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence
+is always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date.  One touch of
+Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will
+destroy any work of Art.  If, on the other hand, we regard Nature
+as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only
+discover in her what they bring to her.  She has no suggestions of
+her own.  Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake
+poet.  He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.
+He went moralising about the district, but his good work was
+produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry.  Poetry
+gave him 'Laodamia,' and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such
+as it is.  Nature gave him 'Martha Ray' and 'Peter Bell,' and the
+address to Mr. Wilkinson's spade.
+
+CYRIL.  I think that view might be questioned.  I am rather
+inclined to believe in 'the impulse from a vernal wood,' though of
+course the artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on
+the kind of temperament that receives it, so that the return to
+Nature would come to mean simply the advance to a great
+personality.  You would agree with that, I fancy.  However, proceed
+with your article.
+
+VIVIAN (reading).  'Art begins with abstract decoration, with
+purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal
+and non-existent.  This is the first stage.  Then Life becomes
+fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the
+charmed circle.  Art takes life as part of her rough material,
+recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely
+indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between
+herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of
+decorative or ideal treatment.  The third stage is when Life gets
+the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness.  That is
+the true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.
+
+'Take the case of the English drama.  At first in the hands of the
+monks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological.  Then
+she enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's external
+forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows
+were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys
+were keener than lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and
+the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins,
+monstrous and marvellous virtues.  To them she gave a language
+different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant
+music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or made
+delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and
+enriched with lofty diction.  She clothed her children in strange
+raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world
+rose from its marble tomb.  A new Caesar stalked through the
+streets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and flute-led oars
+another Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch.  Old myth and
+legend and dream took shape and substance.  History was entirely
+re-written, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not
+recognise that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex
+beauty.  In this they were perfectly right.  Art itself is really a
+form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of
+art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
+
+'But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form.  Even in
+Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end.  It shows itself
+by the gradual breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays,
+by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance
+assigned to characterisation.  The passages in Shakespeare--and
+they are many--where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated,
+fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for an
+echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful
+style, through which alone should life be suffered to find
+expression.  Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist.  He
+is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life's natural
+utterance.  He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative
+medium she surrenders everything.  Goethe says, somewhere -
+
+
+In der Beschrankung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,
+
+
+"It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,"
+and the limitation, the very condition of any art is style.
+However, we need not linger any longer over Shakespeare's realism.
+The Tempest is the most perfect of palinodes.  All that we desired
+to point out was, that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and
+Jacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its own
+dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its strength from using
+life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life as
+an artistic method.  As the inevitable result of this substitution
+of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an
+imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama.  The
+characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would
+talk off it; they have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are
+taken directly from life and reproduce its vulgarity down to the
+smallest detail; they present the gait, manner, costume and accent
+of real people; they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway
+carriage.  And yet how wearisome the plays are!  They do not
+succeed in producing even that impression of reality at which they
+aim, and which is their only reason for existing.  As a method,
+realism is a complete failure.
+
+'What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about
+those arts that we call the decorative arts.  The whole history of
+these arts in Europe is the record of the struggle between
+Orientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of
+artistic convention, its dislike to the actual representation of
+any object in Nature, and our own imitative spirit.  Wherever the
+former has been paramount, as in Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by
+actual contact, or in the rest of Europe by the influence of the
+Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative work in which the
+visible things of life are transmuted into artistic conventions,
+and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned for her
+delight.  But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
+work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting.  Modern
+tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its
+broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism,
+has no beauty whatsoever.  The pictorial glass of Germany is
+absolutely detestable.  We are beginning to weave possible carpets
+in England, but only because we have returned to the method and
+spirit of the East.  Our rugs and carpets of twenty years ago, with
+their solemn depressing truths, their inane worship of Nature,
+their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have become, even to
+the Philistine, a source of laughter.  A cultured Mahomedan once
+remarked to us, "You Christians are so occupied in misinterpreting
+the fourth commandment that you have never thought of making an
+artistic application of the second."  He was perfectly right, and
+the whole truth of the matter is this:  The proper school to learn
+art in is not Life but Art.'
+
+And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the
+question very completely.
+
+'It was not always thus.  We need not say anything about the poets,
+for they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have
+been really faithful to their high mission, and are universally
+recognised as being absolutely unreliable.  But in the works of
+Herodotus, who, in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts of
+modem sciolists to verify his history, may justly be called the
+"Father of Lies"; in the published speeches of Cicero and the
+biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny's
+Natural History; in Hanno's Periplus; in all the early chronicles;
+in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in
+the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and
+Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent Prodigiorum et Ostentorum
+Chronicon; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the
+memoirs of Casanova; in Defoe's History of the Plague; in Boswell's
+Life of Johnson; in Napoleon's despatches, and in the works of our
+own Carlyle, whose French Revolution is one of the most fascinating
+historical novels ever written, facts are either kept in their
+proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the
+general ground of dulness.  Now, everything is changed.  Facts are
+not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are
+usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of
+Romance.  Their chilling touch is over everything.  They are
+vulgarising mankind.  The crude commercialism of America, its
+materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of
+things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable
+ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its
+national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was
+incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the
+story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm,
+and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the
+whole of literature.'
+
+CYRIL.  My dear boy!
+
+VIVIAN.  I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the
+whole thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute
+myth.  However, you must not think that I am too despondent about
+the artistic future either of America or of our own country.
+Listen to this:-
+
+'That some change will take place before this century has drawn to
+its close we have no doubt whatsoever.  Bored by the tedious and
+improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to
+exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent
+person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose
+statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any
+time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens
+to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost
+leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.  Who he was who first,
+without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the wandering
+cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the
+purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in single
+combat and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not
+one of our modern anthropologists, for all their much-boasted
+science, has had the ordinary courage to tell us.  Whatever was his
+name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social
+intercourse.  For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to
+delight, to give pleasure.  He is the very basis of civilised
+society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions of
+the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a
+debate at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand's
+farcical comedies.
+
+'Nor will he be welcomed by society alone.  Art, breaking from the
+prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his
+false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of
+the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth
+is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life--poor,
+probable, uninteresting human life--tired of repeating herself for
+the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the
+compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him,
+and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of
+the marvels of which he talks.
+
+'No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer
+in the Saturday Review, will gravely censure the teller of fairy
+tales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who will
+measure imaginative work by their own lack of any imaginative
+faculty, and will hold up their ink-stained hands in horror if some
+honest gentleman, who has never been farther than the yew-trees of
+his own garden, pens a fascinating book of travels like Sir John
+Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole history of the
+world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past.  To
+excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of him
+who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as
+his servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round the
+coral reefs of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each
+other in a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim
+procession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a
+cave with the weird sisters.  They will call upon Shakespeare--they
+always do--and will quote that hackneyed passage forgetting that
+this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up to
+Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the
+bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.'
+
+CYRIL.  Ahem!  Another cigarette, please.
+
+VIVIAN.  My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a
+dramatic utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare's real views
+upon art than the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon
+morals.  But let me get to the end of the passage:
+
+'Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
+She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.
+She is a veil, rather than a mirror.  She has flowers that no
+forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses.  She makes and
+unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a
+scarlet thread.  Hers are the "forms more real than living man,"
+and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence
+are but unfinished copies.  Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no
+uniformity.  She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls
+monsters from the deep they come.  She can bid the almond-tree
+blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.  At
+her word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of
+June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian
+hills.  The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the
+brown fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them.  She
+has hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at
+her side.'
+
+CYRIL.  I like that.  I can see it.  Is that the end?
+
+VIVIAN.  No.  There is one more passage, but it is purely
+practical.  It simply suggests some methods by which we could
+revive this lost art of Lying.
+
+CYRIL.  Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you a
+question.  What do you mean by saying that life, 'poor, probable,
+uninteresting human life,' will try to reproduce the marvels of
+art?  I can quite understand your objection to art being treated as
+a mirror.  You think it would reduce genius to the position of a
+cracked looking-glass.  But you don't mean to say that you
+seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the
+mirror, and Art the reality?
+
+VIVIAN.  Certainly I do.  Paradox though it may seem--and paradoxes
+are always dangerous things--it is none the less true that Life
+imitates art far more than Art imitates life.  We have all seen in
+our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type
+of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has
+so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to
+an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's
+dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the
+loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet
+maidenhood of 'The Golden Stair,' the blossom-like mouth and weary
+loveliness of the 'Laus Amoris,' the passion-pale face of
+Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in
+'Merlin's Dream.'  And it has always been so.  A great artist
+invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a
+popular form, like an enterprising publisher.  Neither Holbein nor
+Vandyck found in England what they have given us.  They brought
+their types with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty set
+herself to supply the master with models.  The Greeks, with their
+quick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride's
+chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear
+children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her
+rapture or her pain.  They knew that Life gains from art not merely
+spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-
+peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours
+of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the
+grace of Praxiteles.  Hence came their objection to realism.  They
+disliked it on purely social grounds.  They felt that it inevitably
+makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right.  We try to
+improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free
+sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the
+better housing of the lower orders.  But these things merely
+produce health, they do not produce beauty.  For this, Art is
+required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his
+studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be
+they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in
+a word, Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil.
+
+As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature.  The most
+obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the
+case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack
+Sheppard or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-
+women, break into sweet-shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who
+are returning home from the city by leaping out on them in suburban
+lanes, with black masks and unloaded revolvers.  This interesting
+phenomenon, which always occurs after the appearance of a new
+edition of either of the books I have alluded to, is usually
+attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination.  But
+this is a mistake.  The imagination is essentially creative, and
+always seeks for a new form.  The boy-burglar is simply the
+inevitable result of life's imitative instinct.  He is Fact,
+occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and
+what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the
+whole of life.  Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that
+characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it.  The world
+has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.  The Nihilist,
+that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without
+enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely
+literary product.  He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by
+Dostoieffski.  Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as
+surely as the People's Palace rose out of the debris of a novel.
+Literature always anticipates life.  It does not copy it, but
+moulds it to its purpose.  The nineteenth century, as we know it,
+is largely an invention of Balzac.  Our Luciens de Rubempre, our
+Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage
+of the Comedie Humaine.  We are merely carrying out, with footnotes
+and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of
+a great novelist.  I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray
+intimately, whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp.  She told
+me that Becky was an invention, but that the idea of the character
+had been partly suggested by a governess who lived in the
+neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and was the companion of a very
+selfish and rich old woman.  I inquired what became of the
+governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after the
+appearance of Vanity Fair, she ran away with the nephew of the lady
+with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splash
+in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's style, and entirely by
+Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's methods.  Ultimately she came to grief,
+disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at
+Monte Carlo and other gambling places.  The noble gentleman from
+whom the same great sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few
+months after The Newcomer had reached a fourth edition, with the
+word 'Adsum' on his lips.  Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published
+his curious psychological story of transformation, a friend of
+mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the north of London, and being
+anxious to get to a railway station, took what he thought would be
+a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a network of mean,
+evil-looking streets.  Feeling rather nervous he began to walk
+extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right
+between his legs.  It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and
+trampled upon it.  Being of course very much frightened and a
+little hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole
+street was full of rough people who came pouring out of the houses
+like ants.  They surrounded him, and asked him his name.  He was
+just about to give it when he suddenly remembered the opening
+incident in Mr. Stevenson's story.  He was so filled with horror at
+having realised in his own person that terrible and well-written
+scene, and at having done accidentally, though in fact, what the
+Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate intent, that he ran
+away as hard as he could go.  He was, however, very closely
+followed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door of
+which happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant,
+who happened to be there, exactly what had occurred.  The
+humanitarian crowd were induced to go away on his giving them a
+small sum of money, and as soon as the coast was clear he left.  As
+he passed out, the name on the brass door-plate of the surgery
+caught his eye.  It was 'Jekyll.'  At least it should have been.
+
+Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course accidental.
+In the following case the imitation was self-conscious.  In the
+year 1879, just after I had left Oxford, I met at a reception at
+the house of one of the Foreign Ministers a woman of very curious
+exotic beauty.  We became great friends, and were constantly
+together.  And yet what interested me most in her was not her
+beauty, but her character, her entire vagueness of character.  She
+seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the possibility of
+many types.  Sometimes she would give herself up entirely to art,
+turn her drawing-room into a studio, and spend two or three days a
+week at picture galleries or museums.  Then she would take to
+attending race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, and talk
+about nothing but betting.  She abandoned religion for mesmerism,
+mesmerism for politics, and politics for the melodramatic
+excitements of philanthropy.  In fact, she was a kind of Proteus,
+and as much a failure in all her transformations as was that
+wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of him.  One day a serial
+began in one of the French magazines.  At that time I used to read
+serial stories, and I well remember the shock of surprise I felt
+when I came to the description of the heroine.  She was so like my
+friend that I brought her the magazine, and she recognised herself
+in it immediately, and seemed fascinated by the resemblance.  I
+should tell you, by the way, that the story was translated from
+some dead Russian writer, so that the author had not taken his type
+from my friend.  Well, to put the matter briefly, some months
+afterwards I was in Venice, and finding the magazine in the
+reading-room of the hotel, I took it up casually to see what had
+become of the heroine.  It was a most piteous tale, as the girl had
+ended by running away with a man absolutely inferior to her, not
+merely in social station, but in character and intellect also.  I
+wrote to my friend that evening about my views on John Bellini, and
+the admirable ices at Florian's, and the artistic value of
+gondolas, but added a postscript to the effect that her double in
+the story had behaved in a very silly manner.  I don't know why I
+added that, but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she
+might do the same thing.  Before my letter had reached her, she had
+run away with a man who deserted her in six months.  I saw her in
+1884 in Paris, where she was living with her mother, and I asked
+her whether the story had had anything to do with her action.  She
+told me that she had felt an absolutely irresistible impulse to
+follow the heroine step by step in her strange and fatal progress,
+and that it was with a feeling of real terror that she had looked
+forward to the last few chapters of the story.  When they appeared,
+it seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them in life,
+and she did so.  It was a most clear example of this imitative
+instinct of which I was speaking, and an extremely tragic one.
+
+However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual
+instances.  Personal experience is a most vicious and limited
+circle.  All that I desire to point out is the general principle
+that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and I feel
+sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is
+true.  Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some
+strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact
+what has been dreamed in fiction.  Scientifically speaking, the
+basis of life--the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it--is
+simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting
+various forms through which this expression can be attained.  Life
+seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt.
+Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by
+their own hand because by his own hand Werther died.  Think of what
+we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation
+of Caesar.
+
+CYRIL.  The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make it
+complete you must show that Nature, no less than Life, is an
+imitation of Art.  Are you prepared to prove that?
+
+VIVIAN.  My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.
+
+CYRIL.  Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her
+effects from him?
+
+VIVIAN.  Certainly.  Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we
+get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets,
+blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous
+shadows?  To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the
+lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint
+forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge?  The
+extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London
+during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of
+Art.  You smile.  Consider the matter from a scientific or a
+metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right.  For
+what is Nature?  Nature is no great mother who has borne us.  She
+is our creation.  It is in our brain that she quickens to life.
+Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it,
+depends on the Arts that have influenced us.  To look at a thing is
+very different from seeing a thing.  One does not see anything
+until one sees its beauty.  Then, and then only, does it come into
+existence.  At present, people see fogs, not because there are
+fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the
+mysterious loveliness of such effects.  There may have been fogs
+for centuries in London.  I dare say there were.  But no one saw
+them, and so we do not know anything about them.  They did not
+exist till Art had invented them.  Now, it must be admitted, fogs
+are carried to excess.  They have become the mere mannerism of a
+clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull
+people bronchitis.  Where the cultured catch an effect, the
+uncultured catch cold.  And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to
+turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.  She has done so already,
+indeed.  That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France,
+with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet
+shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces
+it quite admirably.  Where she used to give us Corots and
+Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing
+Pissaros.  Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to
+be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely
+modern.  Of course she is not always to be relied upon.  The fact
+is that she is in this unfortunate position.  Art creates an
+incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to
+other things.  Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that
+imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on
+repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
+Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about
+the beauty of a sunset.  Sunsets are quite old-fashioned.  They
+belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art.  To admire
+them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.  Upon the
+other hand they go on.  Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on
+my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she
+called it.  Of course I had to look at it.  She is one of those
+absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing.  And what
+was it?  It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad
+period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over-
+emphasised.  Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very
+often commits the same error.  She produces her false Renes and her
+sham Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp,
+and on another a more than questionable Rousseau.  Still, Nature
+irritates one more when she does things of that kind.  It seems so
+stupid, so obvious, so unnecessary.  A false Vautrin might be
+delightful.  A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable.  However, I don't want
+to be too hard on Nature.  I wish the Channel, especially at
+Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry Moore, grey
+pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied, Nature
+will, no doubt, be more varied also.  That she imitates Art, I
+don't think even her worst enemy would deny now.  It is the one
+thing that keeps her in touch with civilised man.  But have I
+proved my theory to your satisfaction?
+
+CYRIL.  You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better.
+But even admitting this strange imitative instinct in Life and
+Nature, surely you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper
+of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions
+that surround it, and under whose influence it is produced.
+
+VIVIAN.  Certainly not!  Art never expresses anything but itself.
+This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more
+than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr.
+Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts.  Of
+course, nations and individuals, with that healthy natural vanity
+which is the secret of existence, are always under the impression
+that it is of them that the Muses are talking, always trying to
+find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their
+own turbid passions, always forgetting that the singer of life is
+not Apollo but Marsyas.  Remote from reality, and with her eyes
+turned away from the shadows of the cave, Art reveals her own
+perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the
+marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history
+that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression
+in a new form.  But it is not so.  The highest art rejects the
+burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a
+fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from
+any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human
+consciousness.  She develops purely on her own lines.  She is not
+symbolic of any age.  It is the ages that are her symbols.
+
+Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place
+and people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is,
+the less it represents to us the spirit of its age.  The evil faces
+of the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and
+spotted jasper in which the realistic artists of the day delighted
+to work, and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual
+jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire.  But it was
+not so.  The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supreme
+civilisation, any more than the virtues of the Antonines could save
+it.  It fell for other, for less interesting reasons.  The sibyls
+and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some
+that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the
+Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of
+Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland?  The more
+abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the
+temper of its age.  If we wish to understand a nation by means of
+its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.
+
+CYRIL.  I quite agree with you there.  The spirit of an age may be
+best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is
+abstract and ideal.  Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of
+an age, for its look, as the phrase goes, we must of course go to
+the arts of imitation.
+
+VIVIAN.  I don't think so.  After all, what the imitative arts
+really give us are merely the various styles of particular artists,
+or of certain schools of artists.  Surely you don't imagine that
+the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the
+figures on mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stone and wood
+carving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminated
+MSS.  They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with nothing
+grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance.  The
+Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of
+style, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style
+should not be produced in the nineteenth century.  No great artist
+ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would cease to
+be an artist.  Take an example from our own day.  I know that you
+are fond of Japanese things.  Now, do you really imagine that the
+Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any
+existence?  If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at
+all.  The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious
+creation of certain individual artists.  If you set a picture by
+Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a
+real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the
+slightest resemblance between them.  The actual people who live in
+Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to
+say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or
+extraordinary about them.  In fact the whole of Japan is a pure
+invention.  There is no such country, there are no such people.
+One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the
+Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese.  All he
+saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and
+some fans.  He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his
+delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only
+too well.  He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have
+said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.  And so,
+if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a
+tourist and go to Tokio.  On the contrary, you will stay at home
+and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and
+then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught
+their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and
+sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an
+absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.
+Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the
+ancient Greeks.  Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the
+Greek people were like?  Do you believe that the Athenian women
+were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or
+like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments
+of the same building?  If you judge from the art, they certainly
+were so.  But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance.
+You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-
+heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their
+faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen
+creature of our own day.  The fact is that we look back on the ages
+entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has
+never once told us the truth.
+
+CYRIL.  But modern portraits by English painters, what of them?
+Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent?
+
+VIVIAN.  Quite so.  They are so like them that a hundred years from
+now no one will believe in them.  The only portraits in which one
+believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter,
+and a very great deal of the artist.  Holbein's drawings of the men
+and women of his time impress us with a sense of their absolute
+reality.  But this is simply because Holbein compelled life to
+accept his conditions, to restrain itself within his limitations,
+to reproduce his type, and to appear as he wished it to appear.  It
+is style that makes us believe in a thing--nothing but style.  Most
+of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion.
+They never paint what they see.  They paint what the public sees,
+and the public never sees anything.
+
+CYRIL.  Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end of
+your article.
+
+VIVIAN.  With pleasure.  Whether it will do any good I really
+cannot say.  Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century
+possible.  Why, even Sleep has played us false, and has closed up
+the gates of ivory, and opened the gates of horn.  The dreams of
+the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr.
+Myers's two bulky volumes on the subject, and in the Transactions
+of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing things that I
+have ever read.  There is not even a fine nightmare among them.
+They are commonplace, sordid and tedious.  As for the Church, I
+cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than
+the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in
+the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that
+mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination.  But
+in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for
+belief, but through his capacity for disbelief.  Ours is the only
+Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas
+is regarded as the ideal apostle.  Many a worthy clergyman, who
+passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives and
+dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallow
+uneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpit
+and express his doubts about Noah's ark, or Balaam's ass, or Jonah
+and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit
+open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect.  The
+growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much
+to be regretted.  It is really a degrading concession to a low form
+of realism.  It is silly, too.  It springs from an entire ignorance
+of psychology.  Man can believe the impossible, but man can never
+believe the improbable.  However, I must read the end of my
+article:-
+
+'What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to
+revive this old art of Lying.  Much of course may be done, in the
+way of educating the public, by amateurs in the domestic circle, at
+literary lunches, and at afternoon teas.  But this is merely the
+light and graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard at
+Cretan dinner-parties.  There are many other forms.  Lying for the
+sake of gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance--
+lying with a moral purpose, as it is usually called--though of late
+it has been rather looked down upon, was extremely popular with the
+antique world.  Athena laughs when Odysseus tells her "his words of
+sly devising," as Mr. William Morris phrases it, and the glory of
+mendacity illumines the pale brow of the stainless hero of
+Euripidean tragedy, and sets among the noble women of the past the
+young bride of one of Horace's most exquisite odes.  Later on, what
+at first had been merely a natural instinct was elevated into a
+self-conscious science.  Elaborate rules were laid down for the
+guidance of mankind, and an important school of literature grew up
+round the subject.  Indeed, when one remembers the excellent
+philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question, one cannot
+help regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheap
+and condensed edition of the works of that great casuist.  A short
+primer, "When to Lie and How," if brought out in an attractive and
+not too expensive a form, would no doubt command a large sale, and
+would prove of real practical service to many earnest and deep-
+thinking people.  Lying for the sake of the improvement of the
+young, which is the basis of home education, still lingers amongst
+us, and its advantages are so admirably set forth in the early
+books of Plato's Republic that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them
+here.  It is a mode of lying for which all good mothers have
+peculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still further
+development, and has been sadly overlooked by the School Board.
+Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in
+Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader-writer is
+not without its advantages.  But it is said to be a somewhat dull
+occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of
+ostentatious obscurity.  The only form of lying that is absolutely
+beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest
+development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in
+Art.  Just as those who do not love Plato more than Truth cannot
+pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love
+Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.  The
+solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the
+Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, La Chimere,
+dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.
+It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored
+to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will
+hearken to her and try to borrow her wings.
+
+'And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall
+all be!  Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be
+found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of
+wonder, will return to the land.  The very aspect of the world will
+change to our startled eyes.  Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and
+Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on
+the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were
+actually readable.  Dragons will wander about the waste places, and
+the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air.  We shall
+lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad's
+head.  Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our
+stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of
+beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that
+never happen, of things that are not and that should be.  But
+before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.'
+
+CYRIL.  Then we must entirely cultivate it at once.  But in order
+to avoid making any error I want you to tell me briefly the
+doctrines of the new aesthetics.
+
+VIVIAN.  Briefly, then, they are these.  Art never expresses
+anything but itself.  It has an independent life, just as Thought
+has, and develops purely on its own lines.  It is not necessarily
+realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith.
+So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct
+opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is
+the history of its own progress.  Sometimes it returns upon its
+footsteps, and revives some antique form, as happened in the
+archaistic movement of late Greek Art, and in the pre-Raphaelite
+movement of our own day.  At other times it entirely anticipates
+its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another
+century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy.  In no case does
+it reproduce its age.  To pass from the art of a time to the time
+itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.
+
+The second doctrine is this.  All bad art comes from returning to
+Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.  Life and Nature
+may sometimes be used as part of Art's rough material, but before
+they are of any real service to art they must be translated into
+artistic conventions.  The moment Art surrenders its imaginative
+medium it surrenders everything.  As a method Realism is a complete
+failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are
+modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter.  To us, who live
+in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for
+art except our own.  The only beautiful things are the things that
+do not concern us.  It is, to have the pleasure of quoting myself,
+exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are so
+suitable a motive for a tragedy.  Besides, it is only the modern
+that ever becomes old-fashioned.  M. Zola sits down to give us a
+picture of the Second Empire.  Who cares for the Second Empire now?
+It is out of date.  Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism
+is always in front of Life.
+
+The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art
+imitates Life.  This results not merely from Life's imitative
+instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is
+to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms
+through which it may realise that energy.  It is a theory that has
+never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, and
+throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art.
+
+It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also
+imitates Art.  The only effects that she can show us are effects
+that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings.  This is
+the secret of Nature's charm, as well as the explanation of
+Nature's weakness.
+
+The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
+things, is the proper aim of Art.  But of this I think I have
+spoken at sufficient length.  And now let us go out on the terrace,
+where 'droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,' while the
+evening star 'washes the dusk with silver.'  At twilight nature
+becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without
+loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate
+quotations from the poets.  Come!  We have talked long enough.
+
+
+
+PEN, PENCIL AND POISON--A STUDY IN GREEN
+
+
+
+It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists
+and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and
+completeness of nature.  As a rule this must necessarily be so.
+That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is
+the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode
+of limitation.  To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of
+form nothing else seems of much importance.  Yet there are many
+exceptions to this rule.  Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe
+as state councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell.
+Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the humourists,
+essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire nothing
+better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their
+country; and Charles Lamb's friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright,
+the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic
+temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely
+a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer
+of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of
+things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary
+capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without
+rival in this or any age.
+
+This remarkable man, so powerful with 'pen, pencil and poison,' as
+a great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at
+Chiswick, in 1794.  His father was the son of a distinguished
+solicitor of Gray's Inn and Hatton Garden.  His mother was the
+daughter of the celebrated Dr. Griffiths, the editor and founder of
+the Monthly Review, the partner in another literary speculation of
+Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that he
+was not a bookseller, but 'a gentleman who dealt in books,' the
+friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the most well-known
+men of his day.  Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him birth, at the
+early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the Gentleman's
+Magazine tells us of her 'amiable disposition and numerous
+accomplishments,' and adds somewhat quaintly that 'she is supposed
+to have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any
+person of either sex now living.'  His father did not long survive
+his young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up
+by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his
+uncle George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned.  His
+boyhood was passed at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those
+many fine Georgian mansions that have unfortunately disappeared
+before the inroads of the suburban builder, and to its lovely
+gardens and well-timbered park he owed that simple and impassioned
+love of nature which never left him all through his life, and which
+made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual influences of
+Wordsworth's poetry.  He went to school at Charles Burney's academy
+at Hammersmith.  Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of music,
+and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn
+out his most remarkable pupil.  He seems to have been a man of a
+good deal of culture, and in after years Mr. Wainewright often
+spoke of him with much affection as a philosopher, an
+archaeologist, and an admirable teacher who, while he valued the
+intellectual side of education, did not forget the importance of
+early moral training.  It was under Mr. Burney that he first
+developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us that a
+drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays
+great talent and natural feeling.  Indeed, painting was the first
+art that fascinated him.  It was not till much later that he sought
+to find expression by pen or poison.
+
+Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish
+dreams of the romance and chivalry of a soldier's life, and to have
+become a young guardsman.  But the reckless dissipated life of his
+companions failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of
+one who was made for other things.  In a short time he wearied of
+the service.  'Art,' he tells us, in words that still move many by
+their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, 'Art touched her
+renegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists were
+purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated
+with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.'
+But Art was not the only cause of the change.  'The writings of
+Wordsworth,' he goes on to say, 'did much towards calming the
+confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations.  I wept
+over them tears of happiness and gratitude.'  He accordingly left
+the army, with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-
+tattle, and returned to Linden House, full of this new-born
+enthusiasm for culture.  A severe illness, in which, to use his own
+words, he was 'broken like a vessel of clay,' prostrated him for a
+time.  His delicately strung organisation, however indifferent it
+might have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most
+keenly sensitive to pain.  He shrank from suffering as a thing that
+mars and maims human life, and seems to have wandered through that
+terrible valley of melancholia from which so many great, perhaps
+greater, spirits have never emerged.  But he was young--only
+twenty-five years of age--and he soon passed out of the 'dead black
+waters,' as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic
+culture.  As he was recovering from the illness that had led him
+almost to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up
+literature as an art.  'I said with John Woodvil,' he cries, 'it
+were a life of gods to dwell in such an element,' to see and hear
+and write brave things:-
+
+
+'These high and gusty relishes of life
+Have no allayings of mortality.'
+
+
+It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the
+utterance of a man who had a true passion for letters.  'To see and
+hear and write brave things,' this was his aim.
+
+Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, struck by the young man's
+genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he
+exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series
+of articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful
+pseudonym he began to contribute to the literature of his day.
+Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of
+the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness
+or to reveal his levity.  A mask tells us more than a face.  These
+disguises intensified his personality.  In an incredibly short time
+he seems to have made his mark.  Charles Lamb speaks of 'kind,
+light-hearted Wainewright,' whose prose is 'capital.'  We hear of
+him entertaining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir
+Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and others, at a petit-diner.
+Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and
+his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale
+lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were
+regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in
+literature:  while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite
+white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of
+being different from others.  There was something in him of
+Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre.  At times he reminds us of Julien
+Sorel.  De Quincey saw him once.  It was at a dinner at Charles
+Lamb's.  'Amongst the company, all literary men, sat a murderer,'
+he tells us, and he goes on to describe how on that day he had been
+ill, and had hated the face of man and woman, and yet found himself
+looking with intellectual interest across the table at the young
+writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to
+lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on 'what sudden
+growth of another interest' would have changed his mood, had he
+known of what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much
+attention was even then guilty.
+
+His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by
+Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside
+his achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left
+to us hardly justifies his reputation.
+
+But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a
+personality by the vulgar test of production.  This young dandy
+sought to be somebody, rather than to do something.  He recognised
+that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than
+the arts that seek to express it.  Nor is his work without
+interest.  We hear of William Blake stopping in the Royal Academy
+before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be 'very fine.'
+His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised.
+He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
+culture that are regarded by many as true essentials.  He writes
+about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian
+Renaissance.  He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and
+Elizabethan translations of Cupid and Psyche, and the
+Hypnerotomachia, and book-binding and early editions, and wide-
+margined proofs.  He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful
+surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the rooms in
+which he lived, or would have liked to live.  He had that curious
+love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle
+artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if
+not a decadence of morals.  Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond
+of cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that 'sweet marble
+monster' of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the
+Louvre.
+
+There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions
+for decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself
+from the false taste of his time.  But it is clear that he was one
+of the first to recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote of
+aesthetic eclecticism, I mean the true harmony of all really
+beautiful things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner.
+He saw that in decorating a room, which is to be, not a room for
+show, but a room to live in, we should never aim at any
+archaeological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves
+with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy.  In this
+artistic perception he was perfectly right.  All beautiful things
+belong to the same age.
+
+And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the
+delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted
+figures and the faint [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
+finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of
+the 'Delphic Sibyl' of Michael Angelo, or of the 'Pastoral' of
+Giorgione.  Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude
+lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours,
+'cased in a cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices
+and studded with small brilliants and rubies,' and close by it
+'squats a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny
+fields of corn-bearing Sicily.'  Some dark antique bronzes contrast
+with the pale gleam of two noble Christi Crucifixi, one carved in
+ivory, the other moulded in wax.'  He has his trays of Tassie's
+gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze bonbonniere with a miniature by
+Petitot, his highly prized 'brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-
+worked,' his citron morocco letter-case, and his 'pomona-green'
+chair.
+
+One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts
+and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over
+his fine collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner's 'Liber
+Studiorum,' of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with a
+magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, 'the head of
+Alexander on an onyx of two strata,' or 'that superb altissimo
+relievo on cornelian, Jupiter AEgiochus.'  He was always a great
+amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful suggestions as to
+the best means of forming a collection.  Indeed, while fully
+appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of
+reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that
+he says about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.
+
+As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex
+impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step
+in aesthetic criticism is to realise one's own impressions.  He
+cared nothing for abstract discussions on the nature of the
+Beautiful, and the historical method, which has since yielded such
+rich fruit, did not belong to his day, but he never lost sight of
+the great truth that Art's first appeal is neither to the intellect
+nor to the emotions, but purely to the artistic temperament, and he
+more than once points out that this temperament, this 'taste,' as
+he calls it, being unconsciously guided and made perfect by
+frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a form of
+right judgment.  Of course there are fashions in art just as there
+are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free
+ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of
+novelty.  He certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how
+difficult it is to form any fair estimate of contemporary work.
+But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound.  He admired Turner
+and Constable at a time when they were not so much thought of as
+they are now, and saw that for the highest landscape art we require
+more than 'mere industry and accurate transcription.'  Of Crome's
+'Heath Scene near Norwich' he remarks that it shows 'how much a
+subtle observation of the elements, in their wild moods, does for a
+most uninteresting flat,' and of the popular type of landscape of
+his day he says that it is 'simply an enumeration of hill and dale,
+stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses;
+little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which
+rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through
+rifted clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of
+the real painter, are not.'  He had a thorough dislike of what is
+obvious or commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to
+entertain Wilkie at dinner, he cared as little for Sir David's
+pictures as he did for Mr. Crabbe's poems.  With the imitative and
+realistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy and he tells us
+frankly that his great admiration for Fuseli was largely due to the
+fact that the little Swiss did not consider it necessary that an
+artist should paint only what he sees.  The qualities that he
+sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity of
+line, richness of colour, and imaginative power.  Upon the other
+hand, he was not a doctrinaire.  'I hold that no work of art can be
+tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself:  whether or not
+it be consistent with itself is the question.'  This is one of his
+excellent aphorisms.  And in criticising painters so different as
+Landseer and Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a
+phrase now classical, he is trying 'to see the object as in itself
+it really is.'
+
+However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease
+in his criticisms of contemporary work.  'The present,' he says,
+'is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first
+perusal. . . . Modern things dazzle me.  I must look at them
+through Time's telescope.  Elia complains that to him the merit of
+a MS. poem is uncertain; "print," as he excellently says, "settles
+it."  Fifty years' toning does the same thing to a picture.'  He is
+happier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubens
+and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and Michael Angelo;
+happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things.  What is
+Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of
+the Renaissance were always dear to him.  He saw what our English
+school could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies
+of pointing out to the young student the artistic possibilities
+that lie dormant in Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work.
+In his judgments on the great Italian Masters, says De Quincey,
+'there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as in
+one who spoke for himself, and was not merely a copier from books.'
+The highest praise that we can give to him is that he tried to
+revive style as a conscious tradition.  But he saw that no amount
+of art lectures or art congresses, or 'plans for advancing the fine
+arts,' will ever produce this result.  The people, he says very
+wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have
+'the best models constantly before their eyes.'
+
+As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often
+extremely technical in his art criticisms.  Of Tintoret's 'St.
+George delivering the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,' he
+remarks:-
+
+
+The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved
+from the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the
+full hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower
+key by the purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of
+the saint, besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on
+the foreground in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding
+the castle.
+
+
+And elsewhere he talks learnedly of 'a delicate Schiavone, various
+as a tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,' of 'a glowing portrait,
+remarkable for morbidezza, by the scarce Moroni,' and of another
+picture being 'pulpy in the carnations.'
+
+But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an
+artistic whole, and tries to translate those impressions into
+words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for the
+imaginative and mental effect.  He was one of the first to develop
+what has been called the art-literature of the nineteenth century,
+that form of literature which has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr.
+Browning, its two most perfect exponents.  His description of
+Lancret's Repas Italien, in which 'a dark-haired girl, "amorous of
+mischief," lies on the daisy-powdered grass,' is in some respects
+very charming.  Here is his account of 'The Crucifixion,' by
+Rembrandt.  It is extremely characteristic of his style:-
+
+
+Darkness--sooty, portentous darkness--shrouds the whole scene:
+only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the
+murky ceiling, a rainy deluge--'sleety-flaw, discoloured water'--
+streams down amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more
+horrible than that palpable night.  Already the Earth pants thick
+and fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt--the air
+is stagnant--a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and
+some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill.  The
+horses snuff the coming terror, and become unmanageable through
+fear.  The moment rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by
+His own weight, fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in
+narrower rivulets from His slit veins, His temples and breast
+drowned in sweat, and His black tongue parched with the fiery
+death-fever, Jesus cries, 'I thirst.'  The deadly vinegar is
+elevated to Him.
+
+His head sinks, and the sacred corpse 'swings senseless of the
+cross.'  A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air
+and vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the
+sea rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves.  Earth
+yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers.  The dead and the
+living are mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry
+through the holy city.  New prodigies await them there.  The veil
+of the temple--the unpierceable veil--is rent asunder from top to
+bottom, and that dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries--
+the fatal ark with the tables and seven-branched candelabrum--is
+disclosed by the light of unearthly flames to the God-deserted
+multitude.
+
+Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right.  It
+would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing
+veil of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the
+doubting imagination may speculate.  At present it is like a thing
+in another world.  A dark gulf is betwixt us.  It is not tangible
+by the body.  We can only approach it in the spirit.
+
+
+In this passage, written, the author tells us, 'in awe and
+reverence,' there is much that is terrible, and very much that is
+quite horrible, but it is not without a certain crude form of
+power, or, at any rate, a certain crude violence of words, a
+quality which this age should highly appreciate, as it is its chief
+defect.  It is pleasanter, however, to pass to this description of
+Giulio Romano's 'Cephalus and Procris':-
+
+
+We should read Moschus's lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd,
+before looking at this picture, or study the picture as a
+preparation for the lament.  We have nearly the same images in
+both.  For either victim the high groves and forest dells murmur;
+the flowers exhale sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale
+mourns on the craggy lands, and the swallow in the long-winding
+vales; 'the satyrs, too, and fauns dark-veiled groan,' and the
+fountain nymphs within the wood melt into tearful waters.  The
+sheep and goats leave their pasture; and oreads, 'who love to scale
+the most inaccessible tops of all uprightest rocks,' hurry down
+from the song of their wind-courting pines; while the dryads bend
+from the branches of the meeting trees, and the rivers moan for
+white Procris, 'with many-sobbing streams,'
+
+
+Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.
+
+
+The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling
+horn of Aurora's love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight
+on the top of Hymettus.  The foreground of our subject is a grassy
+sunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of
+land-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping roots
+and stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again
+throwing out light-green shoots.  This bank rises rather suddenly
+on the right to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the
+entrance of which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between
+his knees that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone,
+parting the rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading
+alike on thorns and flowers with jealousy-stung foot--now helpless,
+heavy, void of all motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick
+hair in mockery.
+
+From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
+forward with loud cries -
+
+
+And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
+And put strange pity in their horned countenance.
+
+
+Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
+death.  On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with 'vans
+dejected' holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan
+people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing
+their children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along
+from the left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky
+wall, on whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her
+grief-telling waters.  Above and more remote than the Ephidryad,
+another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned
+pillars of an unshorn grove.  The centre of the picture is filled
+by shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is 'the
+vast strength of the ocean stream,' from whose floor the
+extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-
+washed steeds to behold the death-pangs of her rival.
+
+
+Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite
+admirable.  The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is
+excellent.  Much of the best modern literature springs from the
+same aim.  In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not
+from life, but from each other.
+
+His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied.  In everything
+connected with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely
+interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archaeological
+accuracy in costume and scene-painting.  'In art,' he says in one
+of his essays, 'whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing
+well'; and he points out that once we allow the intrusion of
+anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be
+drawn.  In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous
+occasion, he was 'on the side of the angels.'  He was one of the
+first to admire Keats and Shelley--'the tremulously-sensitive and
+poetical Shelley,' as he calls him.  His admiration for Wordsworth
+was sincere and profound.  He thoroughly appreciated William Blake.
+One of the best copies of the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'
+that is now in existence was wrought specially for him.  He loved
+Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and
+Chaucer and Chapman, and Petrarch.  And to him all the arts were
+one.  'Our critics,' he remarks with much wisdom, 'seem hardly
+aware of the identity of the primal seeds of poetry and painting,
+nor that any true advancement in the serious study of one art co-
+generates a proportionate perfection in the other'; and he says
+elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo talks of
+his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his
+listeners.  To his fellow-contributors in the London Magazine he
+was always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan
+Cunningham, Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the
+malice of a friend.  Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are
+admirable in their way, and, with the art of the true comedian,
+borrow their style from their subject:-
+
+
+What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the
+gaiety of a boy with the knowledge of a man:  as gentle a heart as
+ever sent tears to the eyes.
+
+How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit
+most seasonably out of season.  His talk without affectation was
+compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity.
+Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole
+sheets.  He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic
+observation on the FASHION FOR MEN OF GENIUS was a standing dish.
+Sir Thomas Browne was a 'bosom cronie' of his; so was Burton, and
+old Fuller.  In his amorous vein he dallied with that peerless
+Duchess of many-folio odour; and with the heyday comedies of
+Beaumont and Fletcher he induced light dreams.  He would deliver
+critical touches on these, like one inspired, but it was good to
+let him choose his own game; if another began even on the
+acknowledged pets he was liable to interrupt, or rather append, in
+a mode difficult to define whether as misapprehensive or
+mischievous.  One night at C-'s, the above dramatic partners were
+the temporary subject of chat.  Mr. X. commended the passion and
+haughty style of a tragedy (I don't know which of them), but was
+instantly taken up by Elia, who told him 'THAT was nothing; the
+lyrics were the high things--the lyrics!'
+
+
+One side of his literary career deserves especial notice.  Modern
+journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man
+of the early part of this century.  He was the pioneer of Asiatic
+prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous
+exaggerations.  To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the
+subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much
+admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school
+Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented.  He also saw that
+it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public
+interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic
+articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had
+for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in
+what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes
+for some popular newspaper of our own time.  This being the least
+valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious
+influence.  A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community
+with the details of the illegalities of his private life.
+
+Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature.  'I
+hold three things in high estimation,' he says somewhere:  'to sit
+lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed
+by thick trees while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy
+solitude with the consciousness of neighbourhood.  The country
+gives them all to me.'  He writes about his wandering over fragrant
+furze and heath repeating Collins's 'Ode to Evening,' just to catch
+the fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face 'in a
+watery bed of cowslips, wet with May dews'; and about the pleasure
+of seeing the sweet-breathed kine 'pass slowly homeward through the
+twilight,' and hearing 'the distant clank of the sheep-bell.'  One
+phrase of his, 'the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of earth,
+like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel,' is
+curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage is
+rather pretty in its way:-
+
+
+The short tender grass was covered with marguerites--'such that men
+called DAISIES in our town'--thick as stars on a summer's night.
+The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a
+high dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was
+heard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown
+seeds.  The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine;
+not a cloud streaked the calm aether; only round the horizon's edge
+streamed a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near
+village with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with
+blinding whiteness.  I thought of Wordsworth's 'Lines written in
+March.'
+
+
+However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who
+penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian
+influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir,
+one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age.
+How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell
+us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his
+terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted, has
+unfortunately been lost to us.  Even in later days, too, he was
+always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about 'The
+Excursion,' and the 'Poems founded on the Affections.'  There is no
+doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine.  In
+one of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which
+served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands,
+he used to carry crystals of the Indian nux vomica, a poison, one
+of his biographers tells us, 'nearly tasteless, difficult of
+discovery, and capable of almost infinite dilution.'  His murders,
+says De Quincey, were more than were ever made known judicially.
+This is no doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention.  His
+first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths.  He poisoned him
+in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had
+always been very much attached.  In the August of the next year he
+poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife's mother, and in the following
+December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his sister-in-
+law.  Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained.  It may
+have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power
+that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no
+reason.  But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by
+himself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about 18,000 pounds,
+for which they had insured her life in various offices.  The
+circumstances were as follows.  On the 12th of December, he and his
+wife and child came up to London from Linden House, and took
+lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street.  With them were
+the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie.  On the evening
+of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night
+Helen sickened.  The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr.
+Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in to attend her.  She lived
+till Monday, the 20th, when, after the doctor's morning visit, Mr.
+and Mrs. Wainewright brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went
+out for a walk.  When they returned Helen Abercrombie was dead.
+She was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair
+hair.  A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her brother-in-
+law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as an
+artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whose
+work he had always entertained a great admiration.  De Quincey says
+that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder.  Let us
+hope that she was not.  Sin should be solitary, and have no
+accomplices.
+
+The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case,
+declined to pay the policy on the technical ground of
+misrepresentation and want of interest, and, with curious courage,
+the poisoner entered an action in the Court of Chancery against the
+Imperial, it being agreed that one decision should govern all the
+cases.  The trial, however, did not come on for five years, when,
+after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately given in the
+companies' favour.  The judge on the occasion was Lord Abinger.
+Egomet Bonmot was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet,
+and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for the
+other side.  The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present
+at either of the trials.  The refusal of the companies to give him
+the 18,000 pounds had placed him in a position of most painful
+pecuniary embarrassment.  Indeed, a few months after the murder of
+Helen Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the
+streets of London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of
+one of his friends.  This difficulty was got over at the time, but
+shortly afterwards he thought it better to go abroad till he could
+come to some practical arrangement with his creditors.  He
+accordingly went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of the young
+lady in question, and while he was there induced him to insure his
+life with the Pelican Company for 3000 pounds.  As soon as the
+necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
+executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as
+they sat together one evening after dinner.  He himself did not
+gain any monetary advantage by doing this.  His aim was simply to
+revenge himself on the first office that had refused to pay him the
+price of his sin.  His friend died the next day in his presence,
+and he left Boulogne at once for a sketching tour through the most
+picturesque parts of Brittany, and was for some time the guest of
+an old French gentleman, who had a beautiful country house at St.
+Omer.  From this he moved to Paris, where he remained for several
+years, living in luxury, some say, while others talk of his
+'skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all who
+knew him.'  In 1837 he returned to England privately.  Some strange
+mad fascination brought him back.  He followed a woman whom he
+loved.
+
+It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels
+in Covent Garden.  His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and he
+prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen.  Thirteen
+years before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica
+and Marc Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a
+power of attorney, which enabled him to get possession of some of
+the money which he had inherited from his mother, and had brought
+into marriage settlement.  He knew that this forgery had been
+discovered, and that by returning to England he was imperilling his
+life.  Yet he returned.  Should one wonder?  It was said that the
+woman was very beautiful.  Besides, she did not love him.
+
+It was by a mere accident that he was discovered.  A noise in the
+street attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in
+modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment.  Some one
+outside called out, 'That's Wainewright, the Bank-forger.'  It was
+Forrester, the Bow Street runner.
+
+On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey.  The
+following report of the proceedings appeared in the Times:-
+
+
+Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
+Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance,
+wearing mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain
+power of attorney for 2259 pounds, with intent to defraud the
+Governor and Company of the Bank of England.
+
+There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which
+he pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant
+Arabin in the course of the morning.  On being brought before the
+judges, however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former
+plea, and then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were
+not of a capital nature.
+
+The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three
+other indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood,
+the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the
+prisoner at the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to
+transportation for life.
+
+
+He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the
+colonies.  In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had
+fancied himself 'lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death'
+for having been unable to resist the temptation of stealing some
+Marc Antonios from the British Museum in order to complete his
+collection.  The sentence now passed on him was to a man of his
+culture a form of death.  He complained bitterly of it to his
+friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some people
+may fancy, that the money was practically his own, having come to
+him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had been
+committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase, was
+at least a circonstance attenuante.  The permanence of personality
+is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English
+law solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner.
+There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy
+punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal
+influence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the
+worst of all his sins.
+
+While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came
+across him by chance.  They had been going over the prisons of
+London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they
+suddenly caught sight of Wainewright.  He met them with a defiant
+stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was 'horrified to recognise a
+man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he
+had dined.'
+
+Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of
+fashionable lounge.  Many men of letters went down to visit their
+old literary comrade.  But he was no longer the kind light-hearted
+Janus whom Charles Lamb admired.  He seems to have grown quite
+cynical.
+
+To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one
+afternoon, and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing
+out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied:
+'Sir, you City men enter on your speculations, and take the chances
+of them.  Some of your speculations succeed, some fail.  Mine
+happen to have failed, yours happen to have succeeded.  That is the
+only difference, sir, between my visitor and me.  But, sir, I will
+tell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last.  I have
+been determined through life to hold the position of a gentleman.
+I have always done so.  I do so still.  It is the custom of this
+place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning's
+turn of sweeping it out.  I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a
+sweep, but they never offer me the broom!'  When a friend
+reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
+shoulders and said, 'Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she
+had very thick ankles.'
+
+From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent
+from there in the Susan to Van Diemen's Land along with three
+hundred other convicts.  The voyage seems to have been most
+distasteful to him, and in a letter written to a friend he spoke
+bitterly about the ignominy of 'the companion of poets and artists'
+being compelled to associate with 'country bumpkins.'  The phrase
+that he applies to his companions need not surprise us.  Crime in
+England is rarely the result of sin.  It is nearly always the
+result of starvation.  There was probably no one on board in whom
+he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a
+psychologically interesting nature.
+
+His love of art, however, never deserted him.  At Hobart Town he
+started a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting,
+and his conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm.
+Nor did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases
+on record in which he tried to make away with people who had
+offended him.  But his hand seems to have lost its cunning.  Both
+of his attempts were complete failures, and in 1844, being
+thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he presented a
+memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir John Eardley
+Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave.  In it he speaks of himself
+as being 'tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and
+realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of
+the exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.'  His
+request, however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge
+consoled himself by making those marvellous Paradis Artificiels
+whose secret is only known to the eaters of opium.  In 1852 he died
+of apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for which he
+had evinced at extraordinary affection.
+
+His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art.  They
+gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early
+work certainly lacked.  In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster
+mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother,
+Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil
+portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that
+'he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into
+the portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl.'  M. Zola, in one of his
+novels, tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder,
+takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of
+perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious
+resemblance to his victim.  The development of Mr. Wainewright's
+style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive.  One can fancy an
+intense personality being created out of sin.
+
+This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled
+literary London, and made so brilliant a debut in life and letters,
+is undoubtedly a most interesting study.  Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his
+latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts
+contained in this memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite
+invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art and
+nature was a mere pretence and assumption, and others have denied
+to him all literary power.  This seems to me a shallow, or at least
+a mistaken, view.  The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing
+against his prose.  The domestic virtues are not the true basis of
+art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for
+second-rate artists.  It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated
+his critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is
+much in his published works that is too familiar, too common, too
+journalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word.  Here and there he
+is distinctly vulgar in expression, and he is always lacking in the
+self-restraint of the true artist.  But for some of his faults we
+must blame the time in which he lived, and, after all, prose that
+Charles Lamb thought 'capital' has no small historic interest.
+That he had a sincere love of art and nature seems to me quite
+certain.  There is no essential incongruity between crime and
+culture.  We cannot re-write the whole of history for the purpose
+of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
+
+Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to
+form any purely artistic judgment about him.  It is impossible not
+to feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned
+Lord Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol.  But had
+the man worn a costume and spoken a language different from our
+own, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian
+Renaissance, or in Spain in the seventeenth century, or in any land
+or any century but this century and this land, we would be quite
+able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position
+and value.  I know that there are many historians, or at least
+writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to
+apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise
+or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster.
+This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral
+instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will
+make its appearance wherever it is not required.  Nobody with the
+true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding
+Tiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia.  These personages have become
+like the puppets of a play.  They may fill us with terror, or
+horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us.  They are not in
+immediate relation to us.  We have nothing to fear from them.  They
+have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor
+science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.  And so it
+may be some day with Charles Lamb's friend.  At present I feel that
+he is just a little too modern to be treated in that fine spirit of
+disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming studies of
+the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr.
+John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee,
+and other distinguished writers.  However, Art has not forgotten
+him.  He is the hero of Dickens's Hunted Down, the Varney of
+Bulwer's Lucretia; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has
+paid some homage to one who was so powerful with 'pen, pencil and
+poison.'  To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance
+than a fact.
+
+
+
+THE CRITIC AS ARTIST:  WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF
+DOING NOTHING
+
+
+
+A DIALOGUE.  Part I.  Persons:  Gilbert and Ernest.  Scene:  the
+library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.
+
+GILBERT (at the Piano).  My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?
+
+ERNEST (looking up).  At a capital story that I have just come
+across in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your
+table.
+
+GILBERT.  What is the book?  Ah! I see.  I have not read it yet.
+Is it good?
+
+ERNEST.  Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning
+over the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike
+modern memoirs.  They are generally written by people who have
+either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything
+worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true
+explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels
+perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
+
+GILBERT.  Yes:  the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives
+everything except genius.  But I must confess that I like all
+memoirs.  I like them for their form, just as much as for their
+matter.  In literature mere egotism is delightful.  It is what
+fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as
+Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de
+Sevigne.  Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is
+rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it.
+Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins,
+not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant nymphs that
+Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the green
+and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
+the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not
+given it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the
+supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his
+splendour and his shame.  The opinions, the character, the
+achievements of the man, matter very little.  He may be a sceptic
+like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son
+of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm
+our ears to listening and our lips to silence.  The mode of thought
+that Cardinal Newman represented--if that can be called a mode of
+thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of
+the supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot, I think, survive.
+But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in
+its progress from darkness to darkness.  The lonely church at
+Littlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, and
+worshippers are few,' will always be dear to it, and whenever men
+see the yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they
+will think of that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower's
+sure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the
+Benign Mother of his days--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or
+her folly, suffered not to be fulfilled.  Yes; autobiography is
+irresistible.  Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has
+chattered his way into the circle of the Immortals, and, conscious
+that indiscretion is the better part of valour, bustles about among
+them in that 'shaggy purple gown with gold buttons and looped lace'
+which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, and
+prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue
+petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the 'good hog's hars-
+let,' and the 'pleasant French fricassee of veal' that he loved to
+eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his 'gadding after
+beauties,' and his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday, and his playing
+of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things.  Even
+in actual life egotism is not without its attractions.  When people
+talk to us about others they are usually dull.  When they talk to
+us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one
+could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one
+can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be
+perfect absolutely.
+
+ERNEST.  There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say.
+But do you seriously propose that every man should become his own
+Boswell?  What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives
+and Recollections in that case?
+
+GILBERT.  What has become of them?  They are the pest of the age,
+nothing more and nothing less.  Every great man nowadays has his
+disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
+
+ERNEST.  My dear fellow!
+
+GILBERT.  I am afraid it is true.  Formerly we used to canonise our
+heroes.  The modern method is to vulgarise them.  Cheap editions of
+great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are
+absolutely detestable.
+
+ERNEST.  May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?
+
+GILBERT.  Oh! to all our second-rate litterateurs.  We are overrun
+by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at
+the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty
+is to behave as mutes.  But we won't talk about them.  They are the
+mere body-snatchers of literature.  The dust is given to one, and
+the ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach.  And now,
+let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak?  Shall I play you a fantasy
+by Dvorak?  He writes passionate, curiously-coloured things.
+
+ERNEST.  No; I don't want music just at present.  It is far too
+indefinite.  Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner
+last night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect,
+she insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in
+the German language.  Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad to
+say that it does not sound in the smallest degree like German.
+There are forms of patriotism that are really quite degrading.  No;
+Gilbert, don't play any more.  Turn round and talk to me.  Talk to
+me till the white-horned day comes into the room.  There is
+something in your voice that is wonderful.
+
+GILBERT (rising from the piano).  I am not in a mood for talking
+to-night.  I really am not.  How horrid of you to smile!  Where are
+the cigarettes?  Thanks.  How exquisite these single daffodils are!
+They seem to be made of amber and cool ivory.  They are like Greek
+things of the best period.  What was the story in the confessions
+of the remorseful Academician that made you laugh?  Tell it to me.
+After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins
+that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were
+not my own.  Music always seems to me to produce that effect.  It
+creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills
+one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears.
+I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing
+by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering
+that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed
+through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild
+romantic loves, or great renunciations.  And so tell me this story,
+Ernest.  I want to be amused.
+
+ERNEST.  Oh!  I don't know that it is of any importance.  But I
+thought it a really admirable illustration of the true value of
+ordinary art-criticism.  It seems that a lady once gravely asked
+the remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated
+picture of 'A Spring-Day at Whiteley's,' or, 'Waiting for the Last
+Omnibus,' or some subject of that kind, was all painted by hand?
+
+GILBERT.  And was it?
+
+ERNEST.  You are quite incorrigible.  But, seriously speaking, what
+is the use of art-criticism?  Why cannot the artist be left alone,
+to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth
+the world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would
+each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice
+and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it
+for us, and give to it a momentary perfection.  It seems to me that
+the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it,
+and works best in silence and in isolation.  Why should the artist
+be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism?  Why should those
+who cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value of
+creative work?  What can they know about it?  If a man's work is
+easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .
+
+GILBERT.  And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is
+wicked.
+
+ERNEST.  I did not say that.
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! but you should have.  Nowadays, we have so few
+mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of
+them.  The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians of
+the Broad Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott's Great
+Writers Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain
+their divinity away.  Where one had hoped that Browning was a
+mystic they have sought to show that he was simply inarticulate.
+Where one had fancied that he had something to conceal, they have
+proved that he had but little to reveal.  But I speak merely of his
+incoherent work.  Taken as a whole the man was great.  He did not
+belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the
+Titan.  He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could
+sing.  His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he
+passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos.  Still,
+he was great.  He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a
+man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was
+not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which
+thought moves.  It was the machine he loved, not what the machine
+makes.  The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as
+dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.  So much, indeed,
+did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised
+language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of
+expression.  Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow
+hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands
+of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of
+metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion
+also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of
+ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some
+golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain;
+rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme,
+the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert
+Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made
+him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too
+often with his tongue in his cheek.  There are moments when he
+wounds us by monstrous music.  Nay, if he can only get his music by
+breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in
+discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous
+wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, or
+the interval less harsh.  Yet, he was great:  and though he turned
+language into ignoble clay, he made from it men and women that
+live.  He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare.  If
+Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer
+through a thousand mouths.  Even now, as I am speaking, and
+speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room
+the pageant of his persons.  There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his
+cheeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss.  There, stands
+dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.
+Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred,
+and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's.  The
+spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa
+pass by, looks on Ottima's haggard face, and loathes her and his
+own sin, and himself.  Pale as the white satin of his doublet, the
+melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal
+Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears
+the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go
+down.  Yes, Browning was great.  And as what will he be remembered?
+As a poet?  Ah, not as a poet!  He will be remembered as a writer
+of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that
+we have ever had.  His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled,
+and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put
+problems forth, and what more should an artist do?  Considered from
+the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him
+who made Hamlet.  Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside
+him.  The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George
+Meredith.  Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He
+used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
+
+ERNEST.  There is something in what you say, but there is not
+everything in what you say.  In many points you are unjust.
+
+GILBERT.  It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.  But
+let us return to the particular point at issue.  What was it that
+you said?
+
+ERNEST.  Simply this:  that in the best days of art there were no
+art-critics.
+
+GILBERT.  I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest.  It
+has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old
+friend.
+
+ERNEST.  It is true.  Yes:  there is no use your tossing your head
+in that petulant manner.  It is quite true.  In the best days of
+art there were no art-critics.  The sculptor hewed from the marble
+block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within it.  The
+waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to the statue,
+and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb.  He poured
+the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the river of red
+metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body of
+a god.  With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the
+sightless eyes.  The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his
+graver.  And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit
+portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who
+passed by, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], became
+conscious of a new influence that had come across their lives, and
+dreamily, or with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went to
+their homes or daily labour, or wandered, it may be, through the
+city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young Phaedrus bathed
+his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tall
+wind--whispering planes and flowering agnus castus, began to think
+of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe.  In
+those days the artist was free.  From the river valley he took the
+fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone,
+fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to
+the dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty
+tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and
+the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.
+On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed
+with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with tired feet the
+purple white-starred fields of asphodel, one 'in whose eyelids lay
+the whole of the Trojan War,' Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or
+figured Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords to the
+mast-step, that he might listen without hurt to the singing of the
+Sirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron, where the
+ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persian
+in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the
+galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay.
+He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared
+cedar.  Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted with
+wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated
+irons making it firm.  Panel and marble and linen canvas became
+wonderful as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her own
+image, was still, and dared not speak.  All life, indeed, was his,
+from the merchants seated in the market-place to the cloaked
+shepherd lying on the hill; from the nymph hidden in the laurels
+and the faun that pipes at noon, to the king whom, in long green-
+curtained litter, slaves bore upon oil-bright shoulders, and fanned
+with peacock fans.  Men and women, with pleasure or sorrow in their
+faces, passed before him.  He watched them, and their secret became
+his.  Through form and colour he re-created a world.
+
+All subtle arts belonged to him also.  He held the gem against the
+revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for
+Adonis, and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her
+hounds.  He beat out the gold into roses, and strung them together
+for necklace or armlet.  He beat out the gold into wreaths for the
+conqueror's helmet, or into palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into
+masks for the royal dead.  On the back of the silver mirror he
+graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or love-sick Phaedra with her
+nurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting poppies in her hair.
+The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from the silent wheel,
+the vase rose up beneath his hands.  He decorated the base and stem
+and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated acanthus,
+or curved and crested wave.  Then in black or red he painted lads
+wrestling, or in the race:  knights in full armour, with strange
+heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped
+chariot over rearing steeds:  the gods seated at the feast or
+working their miracles:  the heroes in their victory or in their
+pain.  Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a
+ground of white the languid bridegroom and his bride, with Eros
+hovering round them--an Eros like one of Donatello's angels, a
+little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings.  On the
+curved side he would write the name of his friend.  [Greek text
+which cannot be reproduced] or [Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced] tells us the story of his days.  Again, on the rim of
+the wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at
+rest, as his fancy willed it.  From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed
+Aphrodite at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Maenads in his
+train, Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained
+feet, while, satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated
+skins, or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted
+fir-cone, and wreathed with dark ivy.  And no one came to trouble
+the artist at his work.  No irresponsible chatter disturbed him.
+He was not worried by opinions.  By the Ilyssus, says Arnold
+somewhere, there was no Higginbotham.  By the Ilyssus, my dear
+Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing provincialism
+to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth.  By the
+Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the
+industrious prattle of what they do not understand.  On the reed-
+grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism
+monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in
+the dock.  The Greeks had no art-critics.
+
+GILBERT.  Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are
+terribly unsound.  I am afraid that you have been listening to the
+conversation of some one older than yourself.  That is always a
+dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a
+habit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual
+development.  As for modern journalism, it is not my business to
+defend it.  It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian
+principle of the survival of the vulgarest.  I have merely to do
+with literature.
+
+ERNEST.  But what is the difference between literature and
+journalism?
+
+GILBERT.  Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
+That is all.  But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had
+no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd.  It would be
+more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.
+
+ERNEST.  Really?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, a nation of art-critics.  But I don't wish to
+destroy the delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the
+relation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his
+age.  To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is
+not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the
+inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.  Still less
+do I desire to talk learnedly.  Learned conversation is either the
+affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally
+unemployed.  And, as for what is called improving conversation,
+that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish
+philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the
+criminal classes.  No:  let me play to you some mad scarlet thing
+by Dvorak.  The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us,
+and the heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.
+Don't let us discuss anything solemnly.  I am but too conscious of
+the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated
+seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.  Don't
+degrade me into the position of giving you useful information.
+Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from
+time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
+Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a
+clipped piece of silver.  Like gilded bees the stars cluster round
+her.  The sky is a hard hollow sapphire.  Let us go out into the
+night.  Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
+still.  Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and
+hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?
+
+ERNEST.  You are horribly wilful.  I insist on your discussing this
+matter with me.  You have said that the Greeks were a nation of
+art-critics.  What art-criticism have they left us?
+
+GILBERT.  My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-
+criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it
+would be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-
+critics, and that they invented the criticism of art just as they
+invented the criticism of everything else.  For, after all, what is
+our primary debt to the Greeks?  Simply the critical spirit.  And,
+this spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion and
+science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education, they
+exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme
+and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless system of
+criticism that the world has ever seen.
+
+ERNEST.  But what are the two supreme and highest arts?
+
+GILBERT.  Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of
+life.  The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we
+may not realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.
+The principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many
+cases, so subtle that we can hardly understand them.  Recognising
+that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in
+all his infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism of
+language, considered in the light of the mere material of that art,
+to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or
+emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for
+instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a
+modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need
+hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct.  In this they were
+right, as they were right in all things.  Since the introduction of
+printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst
+the middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a
+tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less
+and less to the ear which is really the sense which, from the
+standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose
+canons of pleasure it should abide always.  Even the work of Mr.
+Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English
+prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of
+mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack
+the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness
+of effect that such rhythmical life produces.  We, in fact, have
+made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as
+a form of elaborate design.  The Greeks, upon the other hand,
+regarded writing simply as a method of chronicling.  Their test was
+always the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations.  The
+voice was the medium, and the ear the critic.  I have sometimes
+thought that the story of Homer's blindness might be really an
+artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to remind us,
+not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less with
+the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but
+that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music,
+repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has
+caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words
+that are winged with light.  Certainly, whether this be so or not,
+it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that
+England's great poet owed much of the majestic movement and
+sonorous splendour of his later verse.  When Milton could no longer
+write he began to sing.  Who would match the measures of Comus with
+the measures of Samson Agonistes, or of Paradise Lost or Regained?
+When Milton became blind he composed, as every one should compose,
+with the voice purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days
+became that mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music
+has all the stateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have
+its swiftness, and is the one imperishable inheritance of English
+literature sweeping through all the ages, because above them, and
+abiding with us ever, being immortal in its form.  Yes:  writing
+has done much harm to writers.  We must return to the voice.  That
+must be our test, and perhaps then we shall be able to appreciate
+some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism.
+
+As it now is, we cannot do so.  Sometimes, when I have written a
+piece of prose that I have been modest enough to consider
+absolutely free from fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I
+may have been guilty of the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic
+and tribrachic movements, a crime for which a learned critic of the
+Augustan age censures with most just severity the brilliant if
+somewhat paradoxical Hegesias.  I grow cold when I think of it, and
+wonder to myself if the admirable ethical effect of the prose of
+that charming writer, who once in a spirit of reckless generosity
+towards the uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed the
+monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life, will not
+some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the paeons
+have been wrongly placed.
+
+ERNEST.  Ah! now you are flippant.
+
+GILBERT.  Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that
+the Greeks had no art-critics?  I can understand it being said that
+the constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but
+not that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not
+criticise.  You will not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art
+criticism from Plato to Plotinus.  The night is too lovely for
+that, and the moon, if she heard us, would put more ashes on her
+face than are there already.  But think merely of one perfect
+little work of aesthetic criticism, Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry.
+It is not perfect in form, for it is badly written, consisting
+perhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or of isolated
+fragments destined for some larger book, but in temper and
+treatment it is perfect, absolutely.  The ethical effect of art,
+its importance to culture, and its place in the formation of
+character, had been done once for all by Plato; but here we have
+art treated, not from the moral, but from the purely aesthetic
+point of view.  Plato had, of course, dealt with many definitely
+artistic subjects, such as the importance of unity in a work of
+art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic value of
+appearances, the relation of the visible arts to the external
+world, and the relation of fiction to fact.  He first perhaps
+stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet
+satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and
+Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order
+of the Kosmos.  The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets
+them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the
+metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but
+transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they are
+still vital and full of meaning.  It may be that it is as a critic
+of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering the
+name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a new
+philosophy.  But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily
+in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and
+investigating the material it uses, which is language, its subject-
+matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is
+action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are
+those of theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is
+plot, and its final aesthetic appeal, which is to the sense of
+beauty realised through the passions of pity and awe.  That
+purification and spiritualising of the nature which he calls [Greek
+text which cannot be reproduced] is, as Goethe saw, essentially
+aesthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied.  Concerning
+himself primarily with the impression that the work of art
+produces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, to
+investigate its source, to see how it is engendered.  As a
+physiologist and psychologist, he knows that the health of a
+function resides in energy.  To have a capacity for a passion and
+not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and limited.  The
+mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom of
+much 'perilous stuff,' and by presenting high and worthy objects
+for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the
+man; nay, not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him
+also into noble feelings of which he might else have known nothing,
+the word [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] having, it has
+sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of
+initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to
+fancy, its true and only meaning here.  This is of course a mere
+outline of the book.  But you see what a perfect piece of aesthetic
+criticism it is.  Who indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so
+well?  After reading it, one does not wonder any longer that
+Alexandria devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and that we
+find the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every
+question of style and manner, discussing the great Academic schools
+of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that
+sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or
+the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing
+actual life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the
+artistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or
+the proper subject-matter for the artist.  Indeed, I fear that the
+inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in
+matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism
+were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin
+colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those
+who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a
+reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed.
+And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about
+painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had their private
+views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and
+Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and
+lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their
+art-historians, and their archaeologists, and all the rest of it.
+Why, even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought
+their dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid
+them very handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices.
+Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks.
+Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.  It is the
+Greeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism, and how
+fine their critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that
+the material they criticised with most care was, as I have already
+said, language.  For the material that painter or sculptor uses is
+meagre in comparison with that of words.  Words have not merely
+music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid
+as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the
+Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which
+reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and
+spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone.  If the
+Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have
+been the great art-critics of the world.  To know the principles of
+the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.
+
+But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud.
+Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion's eye.  She is
+afraid that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, of
+Quinctilian and Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of
+all those who in the antique world wrote or lectured upon art
+matters.  She need not be afraid.  I am tired of my expedition into
+the dim, dull abyss of facts.  There is nothing left for me now but
+the divine [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of another
+cigarette.  Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one
+unsatisfied.
+
+ERNEST.  Try one of mine.  They are rather good.  I get them direct
+from Cairo.  The only use of our attaches is that they supply their
+friends with excellent tobacco.  And as the moon has hidden
+herself, let us talk a little longer.  I am quite ready to admit
+that I was wrong in what I said about the Greeks.  They were, as
+you have pointed out, a nation of art-critics.  I acknowledge it,
+and I feel a little sorry for them.  For the creative faculty is
+higher than the critical.  There is really no comparison between
+them.
+
+GILBERT.  The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary.
+Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all,
+worthy of the name.  You spoke a little while ago of that fine
+spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the
+artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary
+perfection.  Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of
+omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most
+characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical
+faculty can create anything at all in art.  Arnold's definition of
+literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form,
+but it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the
+critical element in all creative work.
+
+ERNEST.  I should have said that great artists work unconsciously,
+that they were 'wiser than they knew,' as, I think, Emerson remarks
+somewhere.
+
+GILBERT.  It is really not so, Ernest.  All fine imaginative work
+is self-conscious and deliberate.  No poet sings because he must
+sing.  At least, no great poet does.  A great poet sings because he
+chooses to sing.  It is so now, and it has always been so.  We are
+sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of
+poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that
+the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they
+walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost
+without changing could pass into song.  The snow lies thick now
+upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but
+once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from
+the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to
+the shepherds in the vale.  But in this we are merely lending to
+other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own.  Our
+historical sense is at fault.  Every century that produces poetry
+is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to
+be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the
+result of the most self-conscious effort.  Believe me, Ernest,
+there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-
+consciousness and the critical spirit are one.
+
+ERNEST.  I see what you mean, and there is much in it.  But surely
+you would admit that the great poems of the early world, the
+primitive, anonymous collective poems, were the result of the
+imagination of races, rather than of the imagination of
+individuals?
+
+GILBERT.  Not when they became poetry.  Not when they received a
+beautiful form.  For there is no art where there is no style, and
+no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.
+No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as
+Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work,
+but they were merely his rough material.  He took them, and shaped
+them into song.  They become his, because he made them lovely.
+They were built out of music,
+
+
+And so not built at all,
+And therefore built for ever.
+
+
+The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one
+feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the
+individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but
+the man who creates the age.  Indeed, I am inclined to think that
+each myth and legend that seems to us to spring out of the wonder,
+or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was in its origin the
+invention of one single mind.  The curiously limited number of the
+myths seems to me to point to this conclusion.  But we must not go
+off into questions of comparative mythology.  We must keep to
+criticism.  And what I want to point out is this.  An age that has
+no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic,
+and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that
+possesses no art at all.  There have been critical ages that have
+not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in which
+the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his
+treasure-house, to separate the gold from the silver, and the
+silver from the lead, to count over the jewels, and to give names
+to the pearls.  But there has never been a creative age that has
+not been critical also.  For it is the critical faculty that
+invents fresh forms.  The tendency of creation is to repeat itself.
+It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that
+springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.  There
+is really not a single form that art now uses that does not come to
+us from the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were
+either stereotyped or invented or made perfect.  I say Alexandria,
+not merely because it was there that the Greek spirit became most
+self-conscious, and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and
+theology, but because it was to that city, and not to Athens, that
+Rome turned for her models, and it was through the survival, such
+as it was, of the Latin language that culture lived at all.  When,
+at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned upon Europe, the soil
+had been in some measure prepared for it.  But, to get rid of the
+details of history, which are always wearisome and usually
+inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been
+due to the Greek critical spirit.  To it we owe the epic, the
+lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including
+burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure,
+the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which
+perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the
+wide meaning of that word.  In fact, we owe it everything, except
+the sonnet, to which, however, some curious parallels of thought-
+movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism, to
+which no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham
+Scotch dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has
+recently proposed should be made the basis for a final and
+unanimous effort on the part of our second-rate poets to make
+themselves really romantic.  Each new school, as it appears, cries
+out against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man
+that it owes its origin.  The mere creative instinct does not
+innovate, but reproduces.
+
+ERNEST.  You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of
+the creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory.  But what
+of criticism outside creation?  I have a foolish habit of reading
+periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is
+perfectly valueless.
+
+GILBERT.  So is most modern creative work also.  Mediocrity
+weighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its
+brother--that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of
+England affords us from time to time.  And yet, I feel I am a
+little unfair in this matter.  As a rule, the critics--I speak, of
+course, of the higher class, of those in fact who write for the
+sixpenny papers--are far more cultured than the people whose work
+they are called upon to review.  This is, indeed, only what one
+would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation
+than creation does.
+
+ERNEST.  Really?
+
+GILBERT.  Certainly.  Anybody can write a three-volumed novel.  It
+merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
+The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the
+difficulty of sustaining any standard.  Where there is no style a
+standard must be impossible.  The poor reviewers are apparently
+reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, the
+chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art.  It is
+sometimes said of them that they do not read all through the works
+they are called upon to criticise.  They do not.  Or at least they
+should not.  If they did so, they would become confirmed
+misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase from one of the pretty
+Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the rest of their
+lives.  Nor is it necessary.  To know the vintage and quality of a
+wine one need not drink the whole cask.  It must be perfectly easy
+in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth
+nothing.  Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the
+instinct for form.  Who wants to wade through a dull volume?  One
+tastes it, and that is quite enough--more than enough, I should
+imagine.  I am aware that there are many honest workers in painting
+as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely.  They
+are quite right.  Their work stands in no intellectual relation to
+their age.  It brings us no new element of pleasure.  It suggests
+no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty.  It should
+not be spoken of.  It should be left to the oblivion that it
+deserves.
+
+ERNEST.  But, my dear fellow--excuse me for interrupting you--you
+seem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a
+great deal too far.  For, after all, even you must admit that it is
+much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.
+
+GILBERT.  More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it?  Not
+at all.  That is a gross popular error.  It is very much more
+difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.  In the sphere of
+actual life that is of course obvious.  Anybody can make history.
+Only a great man can write it.  There is no mode of action, no form
+of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals.  It is
+only by language that we rise above them, or above each other--by
+language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
+Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its
+most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be
+that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have
+nothing whatsoever to do.  No, Ernest, don't talk about action.  It
+is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an
+impulse of whose nature it is unconscious.  It is a thing
+incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and
+ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim.
+Its basis is the lack of imagination.  It is the last resource of
+those who know not how to dream.
+
+ERNEST.  Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball.
+You hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy.
+You do nothing but re-write history.
+
+GILBERT.  The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.  That
+is not the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit.
+When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life,
+we shall realise that the one person who has more illusions than
+the dreamer is the man of action.  He, indeed, knows neither the
+origin of his deeds nor their results.  From the field in which he
+thought that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our vintage, and
+the fig-tree that he planted for our pleasure is as barren as the
+thistle, and more bitter.  It is because Humanity has never known
+where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
+
+ERNEST.  You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious
+aim is a delusion?
+
+GILBERT.  It is worse than a delusion.  If we lived long enough to
+see the results of our actions it may be that those who call
+themselves good would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those
+whom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy.  Each little
+thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may
+grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform
+our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and
+more splendid than any that has gone before.  But men are the
+slaves of words.  They rage against Materialism, as they call it,
+forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has not
+spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if any,
+spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties in
+barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling
+creeds.  What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress.
+Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become
+colourless.  By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the
+race.  Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves
+us from monotony of type.  In its rejection of the current notions
+about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.  And as for the
+virtues!  What are the virtues?  Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares
+little about chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of the
+Magdalen, and not to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern
+life owe their freedom from stain.  Charity, as even those of whose
+religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge,
+creates a multitude of evils.  The mere existence of conscience,
+that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so
+ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development.  It must
+be merged in instinct before we become fine.  Self-denial is simply
+a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a
+survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship
+of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world,
+and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars
+in the land.  Virtues!  Who knows what the virtues are?  Not you.
+Not I.  Not any one.  It is well for our vanity that we slay the
+criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we
+had gained by his crime.  It is well for his peace that the saint
+goes to his martyrdom.  He is spared the sight of the horror of his
+harvest.
+
+ERNEST.  Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note.  Let us go back to
+the more gracious fields of literature.  What was it you said?
+That it was more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it?
+
+GILBERT (after a pause).  Yes:  I believe I ventured upon that
+simple truth.  Surely you see now that I am right?  When man acts
+he is a puppet.  When he describes he is a poet.  The whole secret
+lies in that.  It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy
+Ilion to send the notched arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl
+against the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ash-handled
+spear.  It was easy for the adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian
+carpets for her lord, and then, as he lay couched in the marble
+bath, to throw over his head the purple net, and call to her
+smooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the heart that
+should have broken at Aulis.  For Antigone even, with Death waiting
+for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the tainted
+air at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the
+wretched naked corse that had no tomb.  But what of those who wrote
+about these things?  What of those who gave them reality, and made
+them live for ever?  Are they not greater than the men and women
+they sing of?  'Hector that sweet knight is dead,' and Lucian tells
+us how in the dim under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of
+Helen, and marvelled that it was for so grim a favour that all
+those horned ships were launched, those beautiful mailed men laid
+low, those towered cities brought to dust.  Yet, every day the
+swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the battlements, and looks
+down at the tide of war.  The greybeards wonder at her loveliness,
+and she stands by the side of the king.  In his chamber of stained
+ivory lies her leman.  He is polishing his dainty armour, and
+combing the scarlet plume.  With squire and page, her husband
+passes from tent to tent.  She can see his bright hair, and hears,
+or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice.  In the courtyard
+below, the son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass.  The
+white arms of Andromache are around his neck.  He sets his helmet
+on the ground, lest their babe should be frightened.  Behind the
+embroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles, in perfumed
+raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his soul
+arrays himself to go forth to the fight.  From a curiously carven
+chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lord
+of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that the lip of man
+had never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and with fresh
+water cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black wine
+its burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon the
+ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophets
+worshipped, and prays to Him, and knows not that he prays in vain,
+and that by the hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous' son,
+Euphorbus, whose love-locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid,
+the lion-hearted, Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his
+doom.  Phantoms, are they?  Heroes of mist and mountain?  Shadows
+in a song?  No:  they are real.  Action!  What is action?  It dies
+at the moment of its energy.  It is a base concession to fact.  The
+world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
+
+ERNEST.  While you talk it seems to me to be so.
+
+GILBERT.  It is so in truth.  On the mouldering citadel of Troy
+lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze.  The owl has built
+her nest in the palace of Priam.  Over the empty plain wander
+shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-
+surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as
+Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the
+great galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the
+lonely tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing
+corks of his net.  Yet, every morning the doors of the city are
+thrown open, and on foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors
+go forth to battle, and mock their enemies from behind their iron
+masks.  All day long the fight rages, and when night comes the
+torches gleam by the tents, and the cresset burns in the hall.
+Those who live in marble or on painted panel, know of life but a
+single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its beauty, but limited
+to one note of passion or one mood of calm.  Those whom the poet
+makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage
+and despair, of pleasure and of suffering.  The seasons come and go
+in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the
+years pass by before them.  They have their youth and their
+manhood, they are children, and they grow old.  It is always dawn
+for St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the window.  Through the
+still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God's pain.
+The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from her
+brow.  On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the
+lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon,
+of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim
+naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear
+glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the
+chords.  It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot
+set free among the silver poplars of France.  In eternal twilight
+they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white
+feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on.  But
+those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the
+labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night
+from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting
+can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow.  For them,
+as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that Green-
+tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for
+their pleasure.  The statue is concentrated to one moment of
+perfection.  The image stained upon the canvas possesses no
+spiritual element of growth or change.  If they know nothing of
+death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of
+life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence
+of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the
+future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame.
+Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised
+by Literature alone.  It is Literature that shows us the body in
+its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.
+
+ERNEST.  Yes; I see now what you mean.  But, surely, the higher you
+place the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.
+
+GILBERT.  Why so?
+
+ERNEST.  Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo
+of rich music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form.  It may,
+indeed, be that life is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its
+martyrdoms are mean and its heroisms ignoble; and that it is the
+function of Literature to create, from the rough material of actual
+existence, a new world that will be more marvellous, more enduring,
+and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, and
+through which common natures seek to realise their perfection.  But
+surely, if this new world has been made by the spirit and touch of
+a great artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect that
+there will be nothing left for the critic to do.  I quite
+understand now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far more
+difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.  But it seems to me
+that this sound and sensible maxim, which is really extremely
+soothing to one's feelings, and should be adopted as its motto by
+every Academy of Literature all over the world, applies only to the
+relations that exist between Art and Life, and not to any relations
+that there may be between Art and Criticism.
+
+GILBERT.  But, surely, Criticism is itself an art.  And just as
+artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and,
+indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is
+really creative in the highest sense of the word.  Criticism is, in
+fact, both creative and independent.
+
+ERNEST.  Independent?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes; independent.  Criticism is no more to be judged by
+any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of
+poet or sculptor.  The critic occupies the same relation to the
+work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible
+world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of
+thought.  He does not even require for the perfection of his art
+the finest materials.  Anything will serve his purpose.  And just
+as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a
+small country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l'Abbaye,
+near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make
+a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or of no
+importance, such as the pictures in this year's Royal Academy, or
+in any year's Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris's
+poems, M. Ohnet's novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones,
+the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste
+his faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in
+beauty and instinct with intellectual subtlety.  Why not?  Dulness
+is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity
+is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave.
+To an artist so creative as the critic, what does subject-matter
+signify?  No more and no less than it does to the novelist and the
+painter.  Like them, he can find his motives everywhere.  Treatment
+is the test.  There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or
+challenge.
+
+ERNEST.  But is Criticism really a creative art?
+
+GILBERT.  Why should it not be?  It works with materials, and puts
+them into a form that is at once new and delightful.  What more can
+one say of poetry?  Indeed, I would call criticism a creation
+within a creation.  For just as the great artists, from Homer and
+AEschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to
+life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and
+legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that
+others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative
+form and colour have been already added.  Nay, more, I would say
+that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal
+impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has
+least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in
+fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it,
+in itself, and to itself, an end.  Certainly, it is never
+trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude.  No ignoble
+considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the
+tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever.
+One may appeal from fiction unto fact.  But from the soul there is
+no appeal.
+
+ERNEST.  From the soul?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, from the soul.  That is what the highest criticism
+really is, the record of one's own soul.  It is more fascinating
+than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself.  It is more
+delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not
+abstract, real and not vague.  It is the only civilised form of
+autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the
+thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed
+or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative
+passions of the mind.  I am always amused by the silly vanity of
+those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the
+primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-
+rate work.  The best that one can say of most modern creative art
+is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the
+critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of
+delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or
+through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos
+and clamour of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and
+the veil be torn.  His sole aim is to chronicle his own
+impressions.  It is for him that pictures are painted, books
+written, and marble hewn into form.
+
+ERNEST.  I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.
+
+GILBERT.  Yes:  it has been said by one whose gracious memory we
+all revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from
+her Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in
+vain, the Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to
+see the object as in itself it really is.  But this is a very
+serious error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism's most perfect
+form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to
+reveal its own secret and not the secret of another.  For the
+highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as
+impressive purely.
+
+ERNEST.  But is that really so?
+
+GILBERT.  Of course it is.  Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on
+Turner are sound or not?  What does it matter?  That mighty and
+majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble
+eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and
+certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at
+least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that
+bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery;
+greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because
+its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller
+variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced
+lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
+indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and
+emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,
+with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always
+think, even as Literature is the greater art.  Who, again, cares
+whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something
+that Lionardo never dreamed of?  The painter may have been merely
+the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I
+pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand
+before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirque
+of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,' I murmur to
+myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the
+vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of
+the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their
+fallen day about her:  and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern
+merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as
+St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as
+the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with
+which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the
+eyelids and the hands.'  And I say to my friend, 'The presence that
+thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in
+the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire'; and he
+answers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world
+are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.'
+
+And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is,
+and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing,
+and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was
+that flute-player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda
+those subtle and poisonous curves.  Do you ask me what Lionardo
+would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the
+thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein
+that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the
+outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the
+reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and
+imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
+Borgias?'  He would probably have answered that he had contemplated
+none of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
+arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious colour-
+harmonies of blue and green.  And it is for this very reason that
+the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.
+It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new
+creation.  It does not confine itself--let us at least suppose so
+for the moment--to discovering the real intention of the artist and
+accepting that as final.  And in this it is right, for the meaning
+of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of
+him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.  Nay, it
+is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad
+meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new
+relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our
+lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having
+prayed for, we fear that we may receive.  The longer I study,
+Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts
+is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may
+be marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual
+intention on the part of the artist.  For when the work is finished
+it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver
+a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say.
+Sometimes, when I listen to the overture to Tannhauser, I seem
+indeed to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-
+strewn grass, and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from
+the caverned hill.  But at other times it speaks to me of a
+thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life,
+or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of
+loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions
+that man has not known, and so has sought for.  To-night it may
+fill one with that ??OS ?O? ??????O?, that Amour de l'Impossible,
+which falls like a madness on many who think they live securely and
+out of reach of harm, so that they sicken suddenly with the poison
+of unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of what they may
+not obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble.  To-morrow, like the
+music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music
+of the Greek, it may perform the office of a physician, and give us
+an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and
+'bring the soul into harmony with all right things.'  And what is
+true about music is true about all the arts.  Beauty has as many
+meanings as man has moods.  Beauty is the symbol of symbols.
+Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.  When it
+shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
+
+ERNEST.  But is such work as you have talked about really
+criticism?
+
+GILBERT.  It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely
+the individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with
+wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not
+understood, or understood incompletely.
+
+ERNEST.  The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than
+creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as
+in itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, that is my theory.  To the critic the work of art is
+simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not
+necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it
+criticises.  The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one
+can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one
+chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its
+universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his
+turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not
+present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the
+panel or graved the gem.
+
+It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of
+the highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the
+pictures that the critic loves most to write about are those that
+belong to the anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes
+taken out of literature or history.  But this is not so.  Indeed,
+pictures of this kind are far too intelligible.  As a class, they
+rank with illustrations, and, even considered from this point of
+view are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set
+definite bounds to it.  For the domain of the painter is, as I
+suggested before, widely different from that of the poet.  To the
+latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not merely
+the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to
+also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient
+gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect
+cycle of thought.  The painter is so far limited that it is only
+through the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the
+soul; only through conventional images that he can handle ideas;
+only through its physical equivalents that he can deal with
+psychology.  And how inadequately does he do it then, asking us to
+accept the torn turban of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello,
+or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of Lear!  Yet it seems
+as if nothing could stop him.  Most of our elderly English painters
+spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of
+the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving
+to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is
+invisible, the splendour of what is not seen.  Their pictures are,
+as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious.  They have degraded
+the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not
+worth looking at is the obvious.  I do not say that poet and
+painter may not treat of the same subject.  They have always done
+so and will always do so.  But while the poet can be pictorial or
+not, as he chooses, the painter must be pictorial always.  For a
+painter is limited, not to what he sees in nature, but to what upon
+canvas may be seen.
+
+And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really
+fascinate the critic.  He will turn from them to such works as make
+him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle
+quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from them
+there is an escape into a wider world.  It is sometimes said that
+the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his
+ideal.  But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is
+that they realise their ideal too absolutely.  For, when the ideal
+is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
+becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than
+itself.  This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.
+Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.  This, also, is the
+explanation of the value of limitations in art.  The sculptor
+gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual
+dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to
+avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere
+imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would
+be too purely intellectual.  It is through its very incompleteness
+that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not
+to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to
+the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and
+recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a
+pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and,
+taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses
+their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be
+added to the ultimate impression itself.  You see, then, how it is
+that the aesthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art that
+have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become
+dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest
+reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all
+interpretations true, and no interpretation final.  Some
+resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will have to
+the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such
+resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the
+painter of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her,
+but between Nature and the work of the decorative artist.  Just as
+on the flowerless carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed
+and are lovely to look on, though they are not reproduced in
+visible shape or line; just as the pearl and purple of the sea-
+shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at Venice; just as the
+vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made gorgeous
+by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail, though
+the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
+work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part
+of whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance,
+and shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the
+mystery of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature,
+solves once for all the problem of Art's unity.
+
+But I see it is time for supper.  After we have discussed some
+Chambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of
+the critic considered in the light of the interpreter.
+
+ERNEST.  Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally be
+allowed to see the object as in itself it really is.
+
+GILBERT.  I am not quite sure.  Perhaps I may admit it after
+supper.  There is a subtle influence in supper.
+
+
+
+THE CRITIC AS ARTIST--WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF
+DISCUSSING EVERYTHING
+
+
+
+A DIALOGUE:  Part II.  Persons:  the same.  Scene:  the same.
+
+ERNEST.  The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect,
+and now let us return to the point at issue.
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! don't let us do that.  Conversation should touch
+everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.  Let us talk
+about Moral Indignation, its Cause and Cure, a subject on which I
+think of writing:  or about The Survival of Thersites, as shown by
+the English comic papers; or about any topic that may turn up.
+
+ERNEST.  No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism.  You have
+told me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as
+expressive, but as impressive purely, and is consequently both
+creative and independent, is in fact an art by itself, occupying
+the same relation to creative work that creative work does to the
+visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion
+and of thought.  Well, now, tell me, will not the critic be
+sometimes a real interpreter?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses.
+He can pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a
+whole, to an analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this
+lower sphere, as I hold it to be, there are many delightful things
+to be said and done.  Yet his object will not always be to explain
+the work of art.  He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to
+raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is
+dear to both gods and worshippers alike.  Ordinary people are
+'terribly at ease in Zion.'  They propose to walk arm in arm with
+the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, 'Why should we
+read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton?  We can read the
+plays and the poems.  That is enough.'  But an appreciation of
+Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward
+of consummate scholarship.  And he who desires to understand
+Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which
+Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the
+age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the
+history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical
+forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney,
+and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe's
+greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare's
+disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions
+of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century,
+their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the
+literary criticism of Shakespeare's day, its aims and modes and
+canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and
+blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study
+the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator
+of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word,
+he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of
+Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the history
+of European drama and the drama of the world.  The critic will
+certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a
+riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed
+by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name.  Rather,
+he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province
+to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more
+marvellous in the eyes of men.
+
+And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens.  The critic will
+indeed be an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the
+sense of one who simply repeats in another form a message that has
+been put into his lips to say.  For, just as it is only by contact
+with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains
+that individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by
+curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personality
+that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others,
+and the more strongly this personality enters into the
+interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more
+satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.
+
+ERNEST.  I would have said that personality would have been a
+disturbing element.
+
+GILBERT.  No; it is an element of revelation.  If you wish to
+understand others you must intensify your own individualism.
+
+ERNEST.  What, then, is the result?
+
+GILBERT.  I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by
+definite example.  It seems to me that, while the literary critic
+stands of course first, as having the wider range, and larger
+vision, and nobler material, each of the arts has a critic, as it
+were, assigned to it.  The actor is a critic of the drama.  He
+shows the poet's work under new conditions, and by a method special
+to himself.  He takes the written word, and action, gesture and
+voice become the media of revelation.  The singer or the player on
+lute and viol is the critic of music.  The etcher of a picture robs
+the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a new
+material its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the
+relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for
+the critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form
+different from that of the work itself, and the employment of a new
+material is a critical as well as a creative element.  Sculpture,
+too, has its critic, who may be either the carver of a gem, as he
+was in Greek days, or some painter like Mantegna, who sought to
+reproduce on canvas the beauty of plastic line and the symphonic
+dignity of processional bas-relief.  And in the case of all these
+creative critics of art it is evident that personality is an
+absolute essential for any real interpretation.  When Rubinstein
+plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not
+merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven
+absolutely--Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic
+nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense
+personality.  When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same
+experience.  His own individuality becomes a vital part of the
+interpretation.  People sometimes say that actors give us their own
+Hamlets, and not Shakespeare's; and this fallacy--for it is a
+fallacy--is, I regret to say, repeated by that charming and
+graceful writer who has lately deserted the turmoil of literature
+for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the author of Obiter
+Dicta.  In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare's
+Hamlet.  If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of
+art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life.  There are
+as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.
+
+ERNEST.  As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes:  and as art springs from personality, so it is only
+to personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of the
+two comes right interpretative criticism.
+
+ERNEST.  The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will give
+no less than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows?
+
+GILBERT.  He will be always showing us the work of art in some new
+relation to our age.  He will always be reminding us that great
+works of art are living things--are, in fact, the only things that
+live.  So much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that,
+as civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the
+elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will
+grow less and less interested in actual life, and WILL SEEK TO GAIN
+THEIR IMPRESSIONS ALMOST ENTIRELY FROM WHAT ART HAS TOUCHED.  For
+life is terribly deficient in form.  Its catastrophes happen in the
+wrong way and to the wrong people.  There is a grotesque horror
+about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.
+One is always wounded when one approaches it.  Things last either
+too long, or not long enough.
+
+ERNEST.  Poor life!  Poor human life!  Are you not even touched by
+the tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.
+
+GILBERT.  Too quickly touched by them, I fear.  For when one looks
+back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity,
+and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all
+seems to be a dream and an illusion.  What are the unreal things,
+but the passions that once burned one like fire?  What are the
+incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed?
+What are the improbable things?  The things that one has done
+oneself.  No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-
+master.  We ask it for pleasure.  It gives it to us, with
+bitterness and disappointment in its train.  We come across some
+noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy
+to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take
+its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence
+and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or
+dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had
+once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.
+
+ERNEST.  Life then is a failure?
+
+GILBERT.  From the artistic point of view, certainly.  And the
+chief thing that makes life a failure from this artistic point of
+view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security, the fact
+that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion.  How different
+it is in the world of Art!  On a shelf of the bookcase behind you
+stands the Divine Comedy, and I know that, if I open it at a
+certain place, I shall be filled with a fierce hatred of some one
+who has never wronged me, or stirred by a great love for some one
+whom I shall never see.  There is no mood or passion that Art
+cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her secret can
+settle beforehand what our experiences are going to be.  We can
+choose our day and select our hour.  We can say to ourselves, 'To-
+morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley
+of the shadow of death,' and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure
+wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side.  We pass through the gate
+of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the
+horror of another world.  The hypocrites go by, with their painted
+faces and their cowls of gilded lead.  Out of the ceaseless winds
+that drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic
+rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain.  We break
+the withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies,
+and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds with red blood before us,
+and cries aloud with bitter cries.  Out of a horn of fire Odysseus
+speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame the great
+Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that
+bed becomes ours for a moment.  Through the dim purple air fly
+those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and
+in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of
+body into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia,
+the coiner of false coin.  He bids us listen to his misery; we
+stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day
+and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channels
+gush down the green Casentine hills.  Sinon, the false Greek of
+Troy, mocks at him.  He smites him in the face, and they wrangle.
+We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us
+and leads us away to that city turreted by giants where great
+Nimrod blows his horn.  Terrible things are in store for us, and we
+go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart.  We
+traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat
+through the slimy waves.  He calls to us, and we reject him.  When
+we hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us
+for the bitterness of our scorn.  We tread upon the cold crystal of
+Cocytus, in which traitors stick like straws in glass.  Our foot
+strikes against the head of Bocca.  He will not tell us his name,
+and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming skull.
+Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his face that he may weep a
+little.  We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered his
+dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from
+him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who more base than he
+who has mercy for the condemned of God?  In the jaws of Lucifer we
+see the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who
+slew Caesar.  We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the stars.
+
+In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holy mountain
+rises into the pure light of day.  There is peace for us, and for
+those who for a season abide in it there is some peace also,
+though, pale from the poison of the Maremma, Madonna Pia passes
+before us, and Ismene, with the sorrow of earth still lingering
+about her, is there.  Soul after soul makes us share in some
+repentance or some joy.  He whom the mourning of his widow taught
+to drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us of Nella praying in
+her lonely bed, and we learn from the mouth of Buonconte how a
+single tear may save a dying sinner from the fiend.  Sordello, that
+noble and disdainful Lombard, eyes us from afar like a couchant
+lion.  When he learns that Virgil is one of Mantua's citizens, he
+falls upon his neck, and when he learns that he is the singer of
+Rome he falls before his feet.  In that valley whose grass and
+flowers are fairer than cleft emerald and Indian wood, and brighter
+than scarlet and silver, they are singing who in the world were
+kings; but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg do not move to the music
+of the others, and Philip of France beats his breast and Henry of
+England sits alone.  On and on we go, climbing the marvellous
+stair, and the stars become larger than their wont, and the song of
+the kings grows faint, and at length we reach the seven trees of
+gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise.  In a griffin-drawn
+chariot appears one whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiled
+in white, and mantled in green, and robed in a vesture that is
+coloured like live fire.  The ancient flame wakes within us.  Our
+blood quickens through terrible pulses.  We recognise her.  It is
+Beatrice, the woman we have worshipped.  The ice congealed about
+our heart melts.  Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bow
+our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned.  When
+we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of the
+fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress
+of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven.  Out of that
+eternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us.
+Her beauty troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing that
+falls through water, she passes away, we gaze after her with
+wistful eyes.  The sweet planet of Venus is full of lovers.
+Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the lady of Sordello's heart, is
+there, and Folco, the passionate singer of Provence, who in sorrow
+for Azalais forsook the world, and the Canaanitish harlot whose
+soul was the first that Christ redeemed.  Joachim of Flora stands
+in the sun, and, in the sun, Aquinas recounts the story of St.
+Francis and Bonaventure the story of St. Dominic.  Through the
+burning rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida approaches.  He tells us of the
+arrow that is shot from the bow of exile, and how salt tastes the
+bread of another, and how steep are the stairs in the house of a
+stranger.  In Saturn the soul sings not, and even she who guides us
+dare not smile.  On a ladder of gold the flames rise and fall.  At
+last, we see the pageant of the Mystical Rose.  Beatrice fixes her
+eyes upon the face of God to turn them not again.  The beatific
+vision is granted to us; we know the Love that moves the sun and
+all the stars.
+
+Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make
+ourselves one with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altar
+with him, and share his rapture and his scorn.  And if we grow
+tired of an antique time, and desire to realise our own age in all
+its weariness and sin, are there not books that can make us live
+more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of
+shameful years?  Close to your hand lies a little volume, bound in
+some Nile-green skin that has been powdered with gilded nenuphars
+and smoothed with hard ivory.  It is the book that Gautier loved,
+it is Baudelaire's masterpiece.  Open it at that sad madrigal that
+begins
+
+
+Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
+Sois belle! et sois triste!
+
+
+and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never
+worshipped joy.  Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures
+himself, let its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your
+thoughts, and you will become for a moment what he was who wrote
+it; nay, not for a moment only, but for many barren moonlit nights
+and sunless sterile days will a despair that is not your own make
+its dwelling within you, and the misery of another gnaw your heart
+away.  Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one of its
+secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to know more,
+and will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent of strange
+crimes of which it is guiltless, and to make atonement for terrible
+pleasures that it has never known.  And then, when you are tired of
+these flowers of evil, turn to the flowers that grow in the garden
+of Perdita, and in their dew-drenched chalices cool your fevered
+brow, and let their loveliness heal and restore your soul; or wake
+from his forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and bid the
+lover of Heliodore make you music, for he too has flowers in his
+song, red pomegranate blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh,
+ringed daffodils and dark blue hyacinths, and marjoram and crinkled
+ox-eyes.  Dear to him was the perfume of the bean-field at evening,
+and dear to him the odorous eared-spikenard that grew on the Syrian
+hills, and the fresh green thyme, the wine-cup's charm.  The feet
+of his love as she walked in the garden were like lilies set upon
+lilies.  Softer than sleep-laden poppy petals were her lips, softer
+than violets and as scented.  The flame-like crocus sprang from the
+grass to look at her.  For her the slim narcissus stored the cool
+rain; and for her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that wooed
+them.  And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus was as fair
+as she was.
+
+It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion.  We sicken
+with the same maladies as the poets, and the singer lends us his
+pain.  Dead lips have their message for us, and hearts that have
+fallen to dust can communicate their joy.  We run to kiss the
+bleeding mouth of Fantine, and we follow Manon Lescaut over the
+whole world.  Ours is the love-madness of the Tyrian, and the
+terror of Orestes is ours also.  There is no passion that we cannot
+feel, no pleasure that we may not gratify, and we can choose the
+time of our initiation and the time of our freedom also.  Life!
+Life!  Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our
+experience.  It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in
+its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and
+spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and
+critical temperament.  It makes us pay too high a price for its
+wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is
+monstrous and infinite.
+
+ERNEST.  Must we go, then, to Art for everything?
+
+GILBERT.  For everything.  Because Art does not hurt us.  The tears
+that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions
+that it is the function of Art to awaken.  We weep, but we are not
+wounded.  We grieve, but our grief is not bitter.  In the actual
+life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a
+lesser perfection.  But the sorrow with which Art fills us both
+purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great art
+critic of the Greeks.  It is through Art, and through Art only,
+that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art
+only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual
+existence.  This results not merely from the fact that nothing that
+one can imagine is worth doing, and that one can imagine
+everything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, like the
+forces of the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy.
+One can feel so much, and no more.  And how can it matter with what
+pleasure life tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks to
+maim and mar one's soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of those
+who have never existed one has found the true secret of joy, and
+wept away one's tears over their deaths who, like Cordelia and the
+daughter of Brabantio, can never die?
+
+ERNEST.  Stop a moment.  It seems to me that in everything that you
+have said there is something radically immoral.
+
+GILBERT.  All art is immoral.
+
+ERNEST.  All art?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes.  For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of
+art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of
+that practical organisation of life that we call society.  Society,
+which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the
+concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own
+continuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightly
+demands, of each of its citizens that he should contribute some
+form of productive labour to the common weal, and toil and travail
+that the day's work may be done.  Society often forgives the
+criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.  The beautiful sterile
+emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so
+completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful
+social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at
+Private Views and other places that are open to the general public,
+and saying in a loud stentorian voice, 'What are you doing?'
+whereas 'What are you thinking?' is the only question that any
+single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to
+another.  They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk.
+Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious.
+But some one should teach them that while, in the opinion of
+society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can
+be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper
+occupation of man.
+
+ERNEST.  Contemplation?
+
+GILBERT.  Contemplation.  I said to you some time ago that it was
+far more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.  Let me say
+to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in
+the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.  To Plato,
+with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.
+To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest
+form of energy also.  It was to this that the passion for holiness
+led the saint and the mystic of mediaeval days.
+
+ERNEST.  We exist, then, to do nothing?
+
+GILBERT.  It is to do nothing that the elect exist.  Action is
+limited and relative.  Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him
+who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.
+But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once
+too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too
+curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about
+life in exchange for life itself.  To us the citta divina is
+colourless, and the fruitio Dei without meaning.  Metaphysics do
+not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date.
+The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes 'the
+spectator of all time and of all existence' is not really an ideal
+world, but simply a world of abstract ideas.  When we enter it, we
+starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought.  The courts of the
+city of God are not open to us now.  Its gates are guarded by
+Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our
+nature is most divine.  It is enough that our fathers believed.
+They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.  Their legacy
+to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid.  Had they put it
+into words, it might not live within us as thought.  No, Ernest,
+no.  We cannot go back to the saint.  There is far more to be
+learned from the sinner.  We cannot go back to the philosopher, and
+the mystic leads us astray.  Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere,
+would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless
+intangible Being which Plato rates so high?  What to us is the
+Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Bohme,
+the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's
+blinded eyes?  Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one
+daffodil of the field, far less than the meanest of the visible
+arts, for, just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is
+mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus,
+even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both
+sense and soul alike.  To the aesthetic temperament the vague is
+always repellent.  The Greeks were a nation of artists, because
+they were spared the sense of the infinite.  Like Aristotle, like
+Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete, and nothing
+but the concrete can satisfy us.
+
+ERNEST.  What then do you propose?
+
+GILBERT.  It seems to me that with the development of the critical
+spirit we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but
+the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves
+absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity.  For
+he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows
+nothing of the age in which he lives.  To realise the nineteenth
+century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and
+that has contributed to its making.  To know anything about oneself
+one must know all about others.  There must be no mood with which
+one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make
+alive.  Is this impossible?  I think not.  By revealing to us the
+absolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self-
+imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the
+scientific principle of Heredity has become, as it were, the
+warrant for the contemplative life.  It has shown us that we are
+never less free than when we try to act.  It has hemmed us round
+with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecy
+of our doom.  We may not watch it, for it is within us.  We may not
+see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.  It is Nemesis
+without her mask.  It is the last of the Fates, and the most
+terrible.  It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know.
+
+And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has
+robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the
+subjective sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this
+terrible shadow, with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange
+temperaments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and
+chill moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts of thoughts
+that are at variance with each other, and passions that war against
+themselves.  And so, it is not our own life that we live, but the
+lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single
+spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for
+our service, and entering into us for our joy.  It is something
+that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has
+made its abode.  It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of
+curious sins.  It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter.
+It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we
+know we cannot gain.  One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us.
+It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us
+by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid
+claims are marring the perfection of our development.  It can help
+us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other
+ages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air.  It can teach
+us how to escape from our experience, and to realise the
+experiences of those who are greater than we are.  The pain of
+Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain.  Theocritus
+blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and
+shepherd.  In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the
+hounds, and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the
+Queen.  We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl
+of Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame
+into song.  We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes, and when we
+wander with Endymion the Moon grows amorous of our youth.  Ours is
+the anguish of Atys, and ours the weak rage and noble sorrows of
+the Dane.  Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us
+to live these countless lives?  Yes:  it is the imagination; and
+the imagination is the result of heredity.  It is simply
+concentrated race-experience.
+
+ERNEST.  But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?
+
+GILBERT.  The culture that this transmission of racial experiences
+makes possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone,
+and indeed may be said to be one with it.  For who is the true
+critic but he who bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, and
+feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is
+alien, no emotional impulse obscure?  And who the true man of
+culture, if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious rejection
+has made instinct self-conscious and intelligent, and can separate
+the work that has distinction from the work that has it not, and so
+by contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets of
+style and school, and understands their meanings, and listens to
+their voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity
+which is the real root, as it is the real flower, of the
+intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity, and,
+having learned 'the best that is known and thought in the world,'
+lives--it is not fanciful to say so--with those who are the
+Immortals.
+
+Yes, Ernest:  the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim
+not DOING but BEING, and not BEING merely, but BECOMING--that is
+what the critical spirit can give us.  The gods live thus:  either
+brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as
+Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the
+tragicomedy of the world that they have made.  We, too, might live
+like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions
+the varied scenes that man and nature afford.  We might make
+ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become
+perfect by the rejection of energy.  It has often seemed to me that
+Browning felt something of this.  Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into
+active life, and makes him realise his mission by effort.  Browning
+might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission by
+thought.  Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning.  He
+made the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy, and looked on
+action as the one undramatic element of a play.  To us, at any
+rate, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is the true
+ideal.  From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the
+world.  Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic critic
+contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce
+between the joints of his harness.  He at least is safe.  He has
+discovered how to live.
+
+Is such a mode of life immoral?  Yes:  all the arts are immoral,
+except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to
+excite to action of evil or of good.  For action of every kind
+belongs to the sphere of ethics.  The aim of art is simply to
+create a mood.  Is such a mode of life unpractical?  Ah! it is not
+so easy to be unpractical as the ignorant Philistine imagines.  It
+were well for England if it were so.  There is no country in the
+world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of
+ours.  With us, Thought is degraded by its constant association
+with practice.  Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual
+existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor
+narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant
+section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can
+seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual
+judgment about any one thing?  Each of the professions means a
+prejudice.  The necessity for a career forces every one to take
+sides.  We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-
+educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they
+become absolutely stupid.  And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot
+help saying that such people deserve their doom.  The sure way of
+knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.
+
+ERNEST.  A charming doctrine, Gilbert.
+
+GILBERT.  I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minor
+merit of being true.  That the desire to do good to others produces
+a plentiful crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which it is
+the cause.  The prig is a very interesting psychological study, and
+though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to
+have a pose at all is something.  It is a formal recognition of the
+importance of treating life from a definite and reasoned
+standpoint.  That Humanitarian Sympathy wars against Nature, by
+securing the survival of the failure, may make the man of science
+loathe its facile virtues.  The political economist may cry out
+against it for putting the improvident on the same level as the
+provident, and so robbing life of the strongest, because most
+sordid, incentive to industry.  But, in the eyes of the thinker,
+the real harm that emotional sympathy does is that it limits
+knowledge, and so prevents us from solving any single social
+problem.  We are trying at present to stave off the coming crisis,
+the coming revolution as my friends the Fabianists call it, by
+means of doles and alms.  Well, when the revolution or crisis
+arrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall know nothing.  And
+so, Ernest, let us not be deceived.  England will never be
+civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions.  There is
+more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage
+surrender for so fair a land.  What we want are unpractical people
+who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day.  Those who try
+to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.  It is
+through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of
+the gods must be prepared.
+
+But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of
+beholding, and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, there
+is something that is egotistic.  If you think so, do not say so.
+It takes a thoroughly selfish age, like our own, to deify self-
+sacrifice.  It takes a thoroughly grasping age, such as that in
+which we live, to set above the fine intellectual virtues, those
+shallow and emotional virtues that are an immediate practical
+benefit to itself.  They miss their aim, too, these philanthropists
+and sentimentalists of our day, who are always chattering to one
+about one's duty to one's neighbour.  For the development of the
+race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-
+culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is
+instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost.  If you meet at
+dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself--a rare
+type in our time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met
+with--you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal
+has for a moment touched and sanctified your days.  But oh! my dear
+Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to
+educate others!  What a dreadful experience that is!  How appalling
+is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit
+of imparting opinions!  How limited in range the creature's mind
+proves to be!  How it wearies us, and must weary himself, with its
+endless repetitions and sickly reiteration!  How lacking it is in
+any element of intellectual growth!  In what a vicious circle it
+always moves!
+
+ERNEST.  You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert.  Have you had
+this dreadful experience, as you call it, lately?
+
+ GILBERT.  Few of us escape it. People say that the schoolmaster is
+abroad.  I wish to goodness he were.  But the type of which, after
+all, he is only one, and certainly the least important, of the
+representatives, seems to me to be really dominating our lives; and
+just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere,
+so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so
+occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any
+time to educate himself.  No, Ernest, self-culture is the true
+ideal of man.  Goethe saw it, and the immediate debt that we owe to
+Goethe is greater than the debt we owe to any man since Greek days.
+The Greeks saw it, and have left us, as their legacy to modern
+thought, the conception of the contemplative life as well as the
+critical method by which alone can that life be truly realised.  It
+was the one thing that made the Renaissance great, and gave us
+Humanism.  It is the one thing that could make our own age great
+also; for the real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete
+armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps
+through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome
+courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and
+not intellectual.
+
+I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of
+attainment, still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years to
+come, unpopular with the crowd.  It is so easy for people to have
+sympathy with suffering.  It is so difficult for them to have
+sympathy with thought.  Indeed, so little do ordinary people
+understand what thought really is, that they seem to imagine that,
+when they have said that a theory is dangerous, they have
+pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such theories that
+have any true intellectual value.  An idea that is not dangerous is
+unworthy of being called an idea at all.
+
+ERNEST.  Gilbert, you bewilder me.  You have told me that all art
+is, in its essence, immoral.  Are you going to tell me now that all
+thought is, in its essence, dangerous?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, in the practical sphere it is so.  The security of
+society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of
+the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete
+absence of any intelligence amongst its members.  The great
+majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves
+naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to
+the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusion
+of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life,
+that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always
+loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with
+the dictates of reason.  But let us turn from the practical sphere,
+and say no more about the wicked philanthropists, who, indeed, may
+well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of the Yellow
+River Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such well-meaning
+and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous
+virtue that there is in man.  They are a wearisome topic, and I am
+anxious to get back to the sphere in which criticism is free.
+
+ERNEST.  The sphere of the intellect?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes.  You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in
+his own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be
+merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion
+for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with
+equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the
+use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and
+more perfect.  Well, you seemed to be a little sceptical about the
+theory.  But perhaps I wronged you?
+
+ERNEST.  I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit that
+I feel very strongly that such work as you describe the critic
+producing--and creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to
+be--is, of necessity, purely subjective, whereas the greatest work
+is objective always, objective and impersonal.
+
+GILBERT.  The difference between objective and subjective work is
+one of external form merely.  It is accidental, not essential.  All
+artistic creation is absolutely subjective.  The very landscape
+that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own
+mind; and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem
+to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the
+poets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate
+analysis, simply the poets themselves, not as they thought they
+were, but as they thought they were not; and by such thinking came
+in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to be.  For
+out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation
+what in the creator was not.  Nay, I would say that the more
+objective a creation appears to be, the more subjective it really
+is.  Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the
+white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses
+bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came
+out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.  They were elements
+of his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses that stirred
+so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer
+them to realise their energy, not on the lower plane of actual
+life, where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so
+made imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art where Love can
+indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can stab the
+eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave, and
+make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one's father's
+spirit, beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete
+steel from misty wall to wall.  Action being limited would have
+left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it is
+because he did nothing that he has been able to achieve everything,
+so it is because he never speaks to us of himself in his plays that
+his plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true nature
+and temperament far more completely than do those strange and
+exquisite sonnets, even, in which he bares to crystal eyes the
+secret closet of his heart.  Yes, the objective form is the most
+subjective in matter.  Man is least himself when he talks in his
+own person.  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
+
+ERNEST.  The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form,
+will necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the
+artist, who has always at his disposal the forms that are
+impersonal and objective.
+
+GILBERT.  Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if he
+recognises that each mode of criticism is, in its highest
+development, simply a mood, and that we are never more true to
+ourselves than when we are inconsistent.  The aesthetic critic,
+constant only to the principle of beauty in all things, will ever
+be looking for fresh impressions, winning from the various schools
+the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before foreign
+altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods.  What
+other people call one's past has, no doubt, everything to do with
+them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself.  The man who
+regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look
+forward to.  When one has found expression for a mood, one has done
+with it.  You laugh; but believe me it is so.  Yesterday it was
+Realism that charmed one.  One gained from it that nouveau frisson
+which it was its aim to produce.  One analysed it, explained it,
+and wearied of it.  At sunset came the Luministe in painting, and
+the Symboliste in poetry, and the spirit of mediaevalism, that
+spirit which belongs not to time but to temperament, woke suddenly
+in wounded Russia, and stirred us for a moment by the terrible
+fascination of pain.  To-day the cry is for Romance, and already
+the leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple hill-tops
+walks Beauty with slim gilded feet.  The old modes of creation
+linger, of course.  The artists reproduce either themselves or each
+other, with wearisome iteration.  But Criticism is always moving
+on, and the critic is always developing.
+
+Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of
+expression.  The method of the drama is his, as well as the method
+of the epos.  He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking
+to Marvel on the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and
+Lord Brooke discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks; or
+adopt narration, as Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose
+Imaginary Portraits--is not that the title of the book?--presents
+to us, under the fanciful guise of fiction, some fine and exquisite
+piece of criticism, one on the painter Watteau, another on the
+philosophy of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan elements of the early
+Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the most
+suggestive, on the source of that Aufklarung, that enlightening
+which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to which our own
+culture owes so great a debt.  Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful
+literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to
+Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom
+Carlyle took such delight, the creative critics of the world have
+always employed, can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a
+mode of expression.  By its means he can both reveal and conceal
+himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood.
+By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and
+show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining
+in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes
+from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central
+idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely,
+or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller
+completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the
+delicate charm of chance.
+
+ERNEST.  By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist,
+and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical
+argument.
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! it is so easy to convert others.  It is so difficult
+to convert oneself.  To arrive at what one really believes, one
+must speak through lips different from one's own.  To know the
+truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods.  For what is Truth?
+In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived.
+In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation.  In matters of
+art, it is one's last mood.  And you see now, Ernest, that the
+critic has at his disposal as many objective forms of expression as
+the artist has.  Ruskin put his criticism into imaginative prose,
+and is superb in his changes and contradictions; and Browning put
+his into blank verse and made painter and poet yield us their
+secret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater fiction, and
+Rossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione and
+the design of Ingres, and his own design and colour also, feeling,
+with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that the
+ultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium that
+of words.
+
+ERNEST.  Well, now that you have settled that the critic has at his
+disposal all objective forms, I wish you would tell me what are the
+qualities that should characterise the true critic.
+
+GILBERT.  What would you say they were?
+
+ERNEST.  Well, I should say that a critic should above all things
+be fair.
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! not fair.  A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary
+sense of the word.  It is only about things that do not interest
+one that one can give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt
+the reason why an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.
+The man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who sees
+absolutely nothing at all.  Art is a passion, and, in matters of
+art, Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid
+rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine moods and exquisite
+moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a scientific
+formula or a theological dogma.  It is to the soul that Art speaks,
+and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of the
+body.  One should, of course, have no prejudices; but, as a great
+Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago, it is one's business in
+such matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences one
+ceases to be fair.  It is only an auctioneer who can equally and
+impartially admire all schools of Art.  No; fairness is not one of
+the qualities of the true critic.  It is not even a condition of
+criticism.  Each form of Art with which we come in contact
+dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of every other form.
+We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in question,
+whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret.  For the time,
+we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed.
+
+ERNEST.  The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will he
+not?
+
+GILBERT.  Rational?  There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest.
+One is to dislike it.  The other, to like it rationally.  For Art,
+as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener and
+spectator a form of divine madness.  It does not spring from
+inspiration, but it makes others inspired.  Reason is not the
+faculty to which it appeals.  If one loves Art at all, one must
+love it beyond all other things in the world, and against such
+love, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out.  There is
+nothing sane about the worship of beauty.  It is too splendid to be
+sane.  Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always
+seem to the world to be pure visionaries.
+
+ERNEST.  Well, at least, the critic will be sincere.
+
+GILBERT.  A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal
+of it is absolutely fatal.  The true critic will, indeed, always be
+sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will
+seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will never
+suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or
+stereotyped mode of looking at things.  He will realise himself in
+many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be
+curious of new sensations and fresh points of view.  Through
+constant change, and through constant change alone, he will find
+his true unity.  He will not consent to be the slave of his own
+opinions.  For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?
+The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.  You
+must not be frightened by word, Ernest.  What people call
+insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our
+personalities.
+
+ERNEST.  I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.
+
+GILBERT.  Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity
+and fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least on the
+borderland of morals, and the first condition of criticism is that
+the critic should be able to recognise that the sphere of Art and
+the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.  When
+they are confused, Chaos has come again.  They are too often
+confused in England now, and though our modern Puritans cannot
+destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary
+prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment.  It is
+chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find
+expression.  I regret it because there is much to be said in favour
+of modern journalism.  By giving us the opinions of the uneducated,
+it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.  By
+carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it
+shows us of what very little importance such events really are.  By
+invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what
+things are requisite for culture, and what are not.  But it should
+not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art.  When it
+does this it stultifies itself.  And yet Tartuffe's articles and
+Chadband's notes do this good, at least.  They serve to show how
+extremely limited is the area over which ethics, and ethical
+considerations, can claim to exercise influence.  Science is out of
+the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.
+Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon
+things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.  To morals belong
+the lower and less intellectual spheres.  However, let these
+mouthing Puritans pass; they have their comic side.  Who can help
+laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit
+the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?  Some limitation
+might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of our
+newspapers and newspaper writers.  For they give us the bald,
+sordid, disgusting facts of life.  They chronicle, with degrading
+avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the
+conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic
+details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest
+whatsoever.  But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet
+transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of
+pity or of awe, and shows their colour-element, and their wonder,
+and their true ethical import also, and builds out of them a world
+more real than reality itself, and of loftier and more noble
+import--who shall set limits to him?  Not the apostles of that new
+Journalism which is but the old vulgarity 'writ large.'  Not the
+apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine of the
+hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly.  The mere suggestion
+is ridiculous.  Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed to
+the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the
+true critic.
+
+ERNEST.  And what are they?  Tell me yourself.
+
+GILBERT.  Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic--a
+temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various
+impressions that beauty gives us.  Under what conditions, and by
+what means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual,
+we will not discuss at present.  It is sufficient to note that it
+exists, and that there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the
+other senses and above them, separate from the reason and of nobler
+import, separate from the soul and of equal value--a sense that
+leads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as I think, to
+contemplate merely.  But to be purified and made perfect, this
+sense requires some form of exquisite environment.  Without this it
+starves, or is dulled.  You remember that lovely passage in which
+Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with what
+insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings, telling
+us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and
+sounds, so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul
+for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual.  Insensibly, and
+without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of
+beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true
+aim of education.  By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him
+such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose
+the good in preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar
+and discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all that
+possesses grace and charm and loveliness.  Ultimately, in its due
+course, this taste is to become critical and self-conscious, but at
+first it is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and 'he who
+has received this true culture of the inner man will with clear and
+certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature,
+and with a taste that cannot err, while he praises, and finds his
+pleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and so
+becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now
+in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason
+why':  and so, when, later on, the critical and self-conscious
+spirit develops in him, he 'will recognise and salute it as a
+friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.'  I need
+hardly say, Ernest, how far we in England have fallen short of this
+ideal, and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy
+face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that the
+true aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methods
+by which education should work were the development of temperament,
+the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.
+
+Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and
+the dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one
+can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some
+flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the
+green meadow, among the strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and
+watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded
+vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted
+ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of
+Laud's building in the College of St. John.  Nor is it merely at
+Oxford, or Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed and
+trained and perfected.  All over England there is a Renaissance of
+the decorative Arts.  Ugliness has had its day.  Even in the houses
+of the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are not
+rich have been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in.
+Caliban, poor noisy Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to make
+mows at a thing, the thing ceases to exist.  But if he mocks no
+longer, it is because he has been met with mockery, swifter and
+keener than his own, and for a moment has been bitterly schooled
+into that silence which should seal for ever his uncouth distorted
+lips.  What has been done up to now, has been chiefly in the
+clearing of the way.  It is always more difficult to destroy than
+it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is vulgarity and
+stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage but
+also contempt.  Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure,
+done.  We have got rid of what was bad.  We have now to make what
+is beautiful.  And though the mission of the aesthetic movement is
+to lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet, as
+the creative instinct is strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt who
+leads in art, there is no reason why in future years this strange
+Renaissance should not become almost as mighty in its way as was
+that new birth of Art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of
+Italy.
+
+Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the
+decorative arts:  to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that
+teach us.  Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at.
+At least, some of them are.  But they are quite impossible to live
+with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual.  Their
+meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined.  One
+exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they
+become as tedious as one's relations.  I am very fond of the work
+of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London.
+Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school.  Some of
+their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of the
+unapproachable beauty of Gautier's immortal Symphonie en Blanc
+Majeur, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may
+have suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best
+pictures.  For a class that welcomes the incompetent with
+sympathetic eagerness, and that confuses the bizarre with the
+beautiful, and vulgarity with truth, they are extremely
+accomplished.  They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of
+epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes, and as for
+their portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them, no
+one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm
+which belongs to works of pure fiction.  But even the
+Impressionists, earnest and industrious as they are, will not do.
+I like them.  Their white keynote, with its variations in lilac,
+was an era in colour.  Though the moment does not make the man, the
+moment certainly makes the Impressionist, and for the moment in
+art, and the 'moment's monument,' as Rossetti phrased it, what may
+not be said?  They are suggestive also.  If they have not opened
+the eyes of the blind, they have at least given great encouragement
+to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may have all the
+inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to be
+ever sensible.  Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it
+were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the
+illiterate, and are always prating to us on their coarse gritty
+canvases of their unnecessary selves and their unnecessary
+opinions, and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt
+of nature which is the best and only modest thing about them.  One
+tires, at the end, of the work of individuals whose individuality
+is always noisy, and generally uninteresting.  There is far more to
+be said in favour of that newer school at Paris, the Archaicistes,
+as they call themselves, who, refusing to leave the artist entirely
+at the mercy of the weather, do not find the ideal of art in mere
+atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the imaginative beauty of
+design and the loveliness of fair colour, and rejecting the tedious
+realism of those who merely paint what they see, try to see
+something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual and
+physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is
+as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in
+artistic purpose.  They, at any rate, work under those decorative
+conditions that each art requires for its perfection, and have
+sufficient aesthetic instinct to regret those sordid and stupid
+limitations of absolute modernity of form which have proved the
+ruin of so many of the Impressionists.  Still, the art that is
+frankly decorative is the art to live with.  It is, of all our
+visible arts, the one art that creates in us both mood and
+temperament.  Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with
+definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
+The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and
+masses becomes mirrored in the mind.  The repetitions of pattern
+give us rest.  The marvels of design stir the imagination.  In the
+mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements
+of culture.  Nor is this all.  By its deliberate rejection of
+Nature as the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method
+of the ordinary painter, decorative art not merely prepares the
+soul for the reception of true imaginative work, but develops in it
+that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of
+critical achievement.  For the real artist is he who proceeds, not
+from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion.  He
+does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, 'I will
+put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,' but, realising
+the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of
+music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to
+fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete.  From
+time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic
+poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has
+'nothing to say.'  But if he had something to say, he would
+probably say it, and the result would be tedious.  It is just
+because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work.  He
+gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist
+should.  A real passion would ruin him.  Whatever actually occurs
+is spoiled for art.  All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
+To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be
+inartistic.
+
+ERNEST.  I wonder do you really believe what you say?
+
+GILBERT.  Why should you wonder?  It is not merely in art that the
+body is the soul.  In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of
+things.  The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Plato
+tells us, both rhythm and harmony into the mind.  Forms are the
+food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments of
+sincerity that make us admire and know the man.  He was right,
+though he may not have known how terribly right he was.  The Creeds
+are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are
+repeated.  Yes:  Form is everything.  It is the secret of life.
+Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you.  Find
+expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy.  Do you wish
+to love?  Use Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearning
+from which the world fancies that they spring.  Have you a grief
+that corrodes your heart?  Steep yourself in the Language of grief,
+learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you
+will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that
+Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.
+And so, to return to the sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not
+merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct,
+that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their
+conditions of beauty.  Start with the worship of form, and there is
+no secret in art that will not be revealed to you, and remember
+that in criticism, as in creation, temperament is everything, and
+that it is, not by the time of their production, but by the
+temperaments to which they appeal, that the schools of art should
+be historically grouped.
+
+ERNEST.  Your theory of education is delightful.  But what
+influence will your critic, brought up in these exquisite
+surroundings, possess?  Do you really think that any artist is ever
+affected by criticism?
+
+GILBERT.  The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his
+own existence.  He will represent the flawless type.  In him the
+culture of the century will see itself realised.  You must not ask
+of him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself.  The
+demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel
+itself alive.  The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise
+influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with the
+individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into
+consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it new desires
+and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler
+moods.  The actual art of to-day will occupy him less than the art
+of to-morrow, far less than the art of yesterday, and as for this
+or that person at present toiling away, what do the industrious
+matter?  They do their best, no doubt, and consequently we get the
+worst from them.  It is always with the best intentions that the
+worst work is done.  And besides, my dear Ernest, when a man
+reaches the age of forty, or becomes a Royal Academician, or is
+elected a member of the Athenaeum Club, or is recognised as a
+popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at suburban
+railway stations, one may have the amusement of exposing him, but
+one cannot have the pleasure of reforming him.  And this is, I dare
+say, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation
+is a much more painful process than punishment, is indeed
+punishment in its most aggravated and moral form--a fact which
+accounts for our entire failure as a community to reclaim that
+interesting phenomenon who is called the confirmed criminal.
+
+ERNEST.  But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of
+poetry, and the painter of painting?  Each art must appeal
+primarily to the artist who works in it.  His judgment will surely
+be the most valuable?
+
+GILBERT.  The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic
+temperament.  Art does not address herself to the specialist.  Her
+claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations
+she is one.  Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is
+the best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of
+other people's work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his
+own.  That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist,
+limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation.
+The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his own goal.  The
+wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him.  The
+gods are hidden from each other.  They can recognise their
+worshippers.  That is all.
+
+ERNEST.  You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty of
+work different from his own.
+
+GILBERT.  It is impossible for him to do so.  Wordsworth saw in
+Endymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his
+dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth's message, being
+repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human
+incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud
+nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from
+him.  The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles.  Those
+droppings of warm tears had no music for him.  Milton, with his
+sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of
+Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of
+Gainsborough.  Bad artists always admire each other's work.  They
+call it being large-minded and free from prejudice.  But a truly
+great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty
+fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has
+selected.  Creation employs all its critical faculty within its own
+sphere.  It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others.
+It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper
+judge of it.
+
+ERNEST.  Do you really mean that?
+
+GILBERT.  Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens, the
+vision.
+
+ERNEST.  But what about technique?  Surely each art has its
+separate technique?
+
+GILBERT.  Certainly:  each art has its grammar and its materials.
+There is no mystery about either, and the incompetent can always be
+correct.  But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and
+certain, to find their true realisation they must be touched by the
+imagination into such beauty that they will seem an exception, each
+one of them.  Technique is really personality.  That is the reason
+why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and
+why the aesthetic critic can understand it.  To the great poet,
+there is only one method of music--his own.  To the great painter,
+there is only one manner of painting--that which he himself
+employs.  The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can
+appreciate all forms and modes.  It is to him that Art makes her
+appeal.
+
+ERNEST.  Well, I think I have put all my questions to you.  And now
+I must admit -
+
+GILBERT.  Ah! don't say that you agree with me.  When people agree
+with me I always feel that I must be wrong.
+
+ERNEST.  In that case I certainly won't tell you whether I agree
+with you or not.  But I will put another question.  You have
+explained to me that criticism is a creative art.  What future has
+it?
+
+GILBERT.  It is to criticism that the future belongs.  The subject-
+matter at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited
+in extent and variety.  Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have
+exhausted the obvious.  If creation is to last at all, it can only
+do so on the condition of becoming far more critical than it is at
+present.  The old roads and dusty highways have been traversed too
+often.  Their charm has been worn away by plodding feet, and they
+have lost that element of novelty or surprise which is so essential
+for romance.  He who would stir us now by fiction must either give
+us an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in
+its innermost workings.  The first is for the moment being done for
+us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling.  As one turns over the pages of his
+Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a
+palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.  The bright
+colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes.  The jaded, second-rate
+Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings.
+The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd
+journalistic realism to what he tells us.  From the point of view
+of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.
+From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows
+vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.  Dickens knew its
+clothes and its comedy.  Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its
+seriousness.  He is our first authority on the second-rate, and has
+seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are
+real works of art.  As for the second condition, we have had
+Browning, and Meredith is with us.  But there is still much to be
+done in the sphere of introspection.  People sometimes say that
+fiction is getting too morbid.  As far as psychology is concerned,
+it has never been morbid enough.  We have merely touched the
+surface of the soul, that is all.  In one single ivory cell of the
+brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more
+terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le
+Rouge et le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its most
+secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.  Still,
+there is a limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it
+is possible that a further development of the habit of
+introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it
+seeks to supply fresh material.  I myself am inclined to think that
+creation is doomed.  It springs from too primitive, too natural an
+impulse.  However this may be, it is certain that the subject-
+matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the
+subject-matter of criticism increases daily.  There are always new
+attitudes for the mind, and new points of view.  The duty of
+imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances.
+There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is
+now.  It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of
+the point at which it has arrived.
+
+Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism.  You might
+just as well have asked me the use of thought.  It is Criticism, as
+Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the
+age.  It is Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that
+makes the mind a fine instrument.  We, in our educational system,
+have burdened the memory with a load of unconnected facts, and
+laboriously striven to impart our laboriously-acquired knowledge.
+We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
+It has never occurred to us to try and develop in the mind a more
+subtle quality of apprehension and discernment.  The Greeks did
+this, and when we come in contact with the Greek critical
+intellect, we cannot but be conscious that, while our subject-
+matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs,
+theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can be
+interpreted.  England has done one thing; it has invented and
+established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the
+ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of
+physical force.  But Wisdom has always been hidden from it.
+Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse
+and undeveloped.  The only thing that can purify it is the growth
+of the critical instinct.
+
+It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture
+possible.  It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and
+distils it into a finer essence.  Who that desires to retain any
+sense of form could struggle through the monstrous multitudinous
+books that the world has produced, books in which thought stammers
+or ignorance brawls?  The thread that is to guide us across the
+wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism.  Nay more, where
+there is no record, and history is either lost, or was never
+written, Criticism can re-create the past for us from the very
+smallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as the man of
+science can from some tiny bone, or the mere impress of a foot upon
+a rock, re-create for us the winged dragon or Titan lizard that
+once made the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth out
+of his cave, and make Leviathan swim once more across the startled
+sea.  Prehistoric history belongs to the philological and
+archaeological critic.  It is to him that the origins of things are
+revealed.  The self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly always
+misleading.  Through philological criticism alone we know more of
+the centuries of which no actual record has been preserved, than we
+do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls.  It can do for
+us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics.  It can
+give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming.  It
+can do for us what History cannot do.  It can tell us what man
+thought before he learned how to write.  You have asked me about
+the influence of Criticism.  I think I have answered that question
+already; but there is this also to be said.  It is Criticism that
+makes us cosmopolitan.  The Manchester school tried to make men
+realise the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the commercial
+advantages of peace.  It sought to degrade the wonderful world into
+a common market-place for the buyer and the seller.  It addressed
+itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed.  War followed upon
+war, and the tradesman's creed did not prevent France and Germany
+from clashing together in blood-stained battle.  There are others
+of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or
+to the shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics.
+They have their Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists,
+and their proposals for unarmed International Arbitration, so
+popular among those who have never read history.  But mere
+emotional sympathy will not do.  It is too variable, and too
+closely connected with the passions; and a board of arbitrators
+who, for the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived of the
+power of putting their decisions into execution, will not be of
+much avail.  There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and that
+is Justice without her sword in her hand.  When Right is not Might,
+it is Evil.
+
+No:  the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the
+greed for gain could do so.  It is only by the cultivation of the
+habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise
+superior to race-prejudices.  Goethe--you will not misunderstand
+what I say--was a German of the Germans.  He loved his country--no
+man more so.  Its people were dear to him; and he led them.  Yet,
+when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard and
+cornfield, his lips were silent.  'How can one write songs of
+hatred without hating?' he said to Eckermann, 'and how could I, to
+whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation
+which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe
+so great a part of my own cultivation?'  This note, sounded in the
+modern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting
+point for the cosmopolitanism of the future.  Criticism will
+annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the
+human mind in the variety of its forms.  If we are tempted to make
+war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to
+destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most
+important element.  As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will
+always have its fascination.  When it is looked upon as vulgar, it
+will cease to be popular.  The change will of course be slow, and
+people will not be conscious of it.  They will not say 'We will not
+war against France because her prose is perfect,' but because the
+prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.
+Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far
+closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist.
+It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.
+
+Nor is this all.  It is Criticism that, recognising no position as
+final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of
+any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which
+loves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it
+knows it to be unattainable.  How little we have of this temper in
+England, and how much we need it!  The English mind is always in a
+rage.  The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid
+quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.  It
+was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example of
+that 'sweet reasonableness' of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and,
+alas! to so little effect.  The author of the Origin of Species
+had, at any rate, the philosophic temper.  If one contemplates the
+ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel the
+contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne.  We are
+dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.
+Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically
+unknown amongst us.  People cry out against the sinner, yet it is
+not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame.  There is no sin
+except stupidity.
+
+ERNEST.  Ah! what an antinomian you are!
+
+GILBERT.  The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian
+always.  To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness,
+is obviously quite easy.  It merely requires a certain amount of
+sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain
+low passion for middle-class respectability.  Aesthetics are higher
+than ethics.  They belong to a more spiritual sphere.  To discern
+the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive.
+Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the
+individual, than a sense of right and wrong.  Aesthetics, in fact,
+are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the
+sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection.
+Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible.
+Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful,
+fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and
+change.  And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we
+attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the
+perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they
+make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do
+everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for
+nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so
+divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer
+experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought,
+acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with
+the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile.  Is this
+dangerous?  Yes; it is dangerous--all ideas, as I told you, are so.
+But the night wearies, and the light flickers in the lamp.  One
+more thing I cannot help saying to you.  You have spoken against
+Criticism as being a sterile thing.  The nineteenth century is a
+turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men,
+Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the
+other the critic of the books of God.  Not to recognise this is to
+miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress
+of the world.  Creation is always behind the age.  It is Criticism
+that leads us.  The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.
+
+ERNEST.  And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this
+spirit possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?
+
+GILBERT.  Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet
+pensive Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and
+amaranth are blooming, he will sit contented 'in that deep,
+motionless quiet which mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.'  He
+will look out upon the world and know its secret.  By contact with
+divine things he will become divine.  His will be the perfect life,
+and his only.
+
+ERNEST.  You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert.
+You have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing
+than to do it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult
+thing in the world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, and
+all thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative than
+creation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in
+the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is
+exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge
+of it; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not
+rational.  My friend, you are a dreamer.
+
+GILBERT.  Yes:  I am a dreamer.  For a dreamer is one who can only
+find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the
+dawn before the rest of the world.
+
+ERNEST.  His punishment?
+
+GILBERT.  And his reward.  But, see, it is dawn already.  Draw back
+the curtains and open the windows wide.  How cool the morning air
+is!  Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver.  A
+faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white
+houses are purple.  It is too late to sleep.  Let us go down to
+Covent Garden and look at the roses.  Come!  I am tired of thought.
+
+
+
+THE TRUTH OF MASKS--A NOTE ON ILLUSION
+
+
+
+In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been
+made on that splendour of mounting which now characterises our
+Shakespearian revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly
+assumed by the critics that Shakespeare himself was more or less
+indifferent to the costumes of his actors, and that, could he see
+Mrs. Langtry's production of Antony and Cleopatra, he would
+probably say that the play, and the play only, is the thing, and
+that everything else is leather and prunella.  While, as regards
+any historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article in the
+Nineteenth Century, has laid it down as a dogma of art that
+archaeology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of
+Shakespeare's plays, and the attempt to introduce it one of the
+stupidest pedantries of an age of prigs.
+
+Lord Lytton's position I shall examine later on; but, as regards
+the theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about the
+costume-wardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to study
+Shakespeare's method will see that there is absolutely no dramatist
+of the French, English, or Athenian stage who relies so much for
+his illusionist effects on the dress of his actors as Shakespeare
+does himself.
+
+Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty
+of costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques and
+dances, purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the
+eye; and we have still his stage-directions for the three great
+processions in Henry the Eighth, directions which are characterised
+by the most extraordinary elaborateness of detail down to the
+collars of S.S. and the pearls in Anne Boleyn's hair.  Indeed it
+would be quite easy for a modern manager to reproduce these
+pageants absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed; and so
+accurate were they that one of the court officials of the time,
+writing an account of the last performance of the play at the Globe
+Theatre to a friend, actually complains of their realistic
+character, notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of
+the Garter in the robes and insignia of the order as being
+calculated to bring ridicule on the real ceremonies; much in the
+same spirit in which the French Government, some time ago,
+prohibited that delightful actor, M. Christian, from appearing in
+uniform, on the plea that it was prejudicial to the glory of the
+army that a colonel should be caricatured.  And elsewhere the
+gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English stage under
+Shakespeare's influence was attacked by the contemporary critics,
+not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic tendencies
+of realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are always the
+last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.
+
+The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that
+Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding
+picturesqueness to poetry, but that he saw how important costume is
+as a means of producing certain dramatic effects.  Many of his
+plays, such as Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, The Two
+Gentleman of Verona, All's Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline, and
+others, depend for their illusion on the character of the various
+dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the delightful scene in
+Henry the Sixth, on the modern miracles of healing by faith, loses
+all its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and the
+denoument of the Merry Wives of Windsor hinges on the colour of
+Anne Page's gown.  As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises
+the instances are almost numberless.  Posthumus hides his passion
+under a peasant's garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot's
+rags; Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired
+in 'all points as a man'; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen
+to the Youth Fidele; Jessica flees from her father's house in boy's
+dress, and Julia ties up her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots,
+and dons hose and doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a
+shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim; Prince Hal and Poins appear
+first as footpads in buckram suits, and then in white aprons and
+leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern:  and as for Falstaff,
+does he not come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as Herne the
+Hunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?
+
+Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of
+intensifying dramatic situation less numerous.  After slaughter of
+Duncan, Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep;
+Timon ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richard
+flatters the London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour,
+and, as soon as he has stepped in blood to the throne, marches
+through the streets in crown and George and Garter; the climax of
+The Tempest is reached when Prospero, throwing off his enchanter's
+robes, sends Ariel for his hat and rapier, and reveals himself as
+the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in Hamlet changes his
+mystical apparel to produce different effects; and as for Juliet, a
+modern playwright would probably have laid her out in her shroud,
+and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare arrays
+her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault
+'a feasting presence full of light,' turns the tomb into a bridal
+chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo's speech of the
+triumph of Beauty over Death.
+
+Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo's
+stockings, the pattern on a wife's handkerchief, the sleeve of a
+young soldier, and a fashionable woman's bonnets, become in
+Shakespeare's hands points of actual dramatic importance, and by
+some of them the action of the play in question is conditioned
+absolutely.  Many other dramatists have availed themselves of
+costume as a method of expressing directly to the audience the
+character of a person on his entrance, though hardly so brilliantly
+as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles, whose
+dress, by the way, only an archaeologist can understand; the fun of
+a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience,
+of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of
+fine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in
+his cups, may be regarded as part of that great career which
+costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes
+down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details of apparel
+and adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast, such immediate
+and tragic effect, such pity and such pathos, as Shakespeare
+himself.  Armed cap-a-pie, the dead King stalks on the battlements
+of Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark; Shylock's Jewish
+gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded and
+embittered nature writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of
+no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert -
+
+
+Have you the heart? when your head did but ache,
+I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
+(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)
+And I did never ask it you again;
+
+
+and Orlando's blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre note in
+that exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feeling
+that underlies Rosalind's fanciful wit and wilful jesting.
+
+
+Last night 'twas on my arm; I kissed it;
+I hope it be not gone to tell my lord
+That I kiss aught but he,
+
+
+says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already
+on its way to Rome to rob her of her husband's faith; the little
+Prince passing to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle's
+girdle; Duncan sends a ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own
+murder, and the ring of Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant
+into a wife's comedy.  The great rebel York dies with a paper crown
+on his head; Hamlet's black suit is a kind of colour-motive in the
+piece, like the mourning of the Chimene in the Cid; and the climax
+of Antony's speech is the production of Caesar's cloak:-
+
+
+I remember
+The first time ever Caesar put it on.
+'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent,
+The day he overcame the Nervii:-
+Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through:
+See what a rent the envious Casca made:
+Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . .
+Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
+Our Caesar's vesture wounded?
+
+
+The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as
+pathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of
+Lear's wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words by his
+fantastic attire; and when Cloten, stung by the taunt of that
+simile which his sister draws from her husband's raiment, arrays
+himself in that husband's very garb to work upon her the deed of
+shame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of modern French
+realism, nothing even in Therese Raquin, that masterpiece of
+horror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with
+this strange scene in Cymbeline.
+
+In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are
+those suggested by costume.  Rosalind's
+
+
+Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a
+doublet and hose in my disposition?
+
+
+Constance's
+
+
+Grief fills the place of my absent child,
+Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
+
+
+and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth -
+
+
+Ah! cut my lace asunder! -
+
+
+are only a few of the many examples one might quote.  One of the
+finest effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the
+last act of Lear, tearing the plume from Kent's cap and applying it
+to Cordelia's lips when he came to the line,
+
+
+This feather stirs; she lives!
+
+
+Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked,
+I remember, some fur from his archaeologically-incorrect ermine for
+the same business; but Salvini's was the finer effect of the two,
+as well as the truer.  And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last act
+of Richard the Third have not, I am sure, forgotten how much the
+agony and terror of his dream was intensified, by contrast, through
+the calm and quiet that preceded it, and the delivery of such lines
+as
+
+
+What, is my beaver easier than it was?
+And all my armour laid into my tent?
+Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy -
+
+
+lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the
+last words which Richard's mother called after him as he was
+marching to Bosworth:-
+
+
+Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,
+Which in the day of battle tire thee more
+Than all the complete armour that thou wear'st.
+
+
+As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it
+is to be remarked that, while he more than once complains of the
+smallness of the stage on which he has to produce big historical
+plays, and of the want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many
+effective open-air incidents, he always writes as a dramatist who
+had at his disposal a most elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who
+could rely on the actors taking pains about their make-up.  Even
+now it is difficult to produce such a play as the Comedy of Errors;
+and to the picturesque accident of Miss Ellen Terry's brother
+resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing Twelfth Night
+adequately performed.  Indeed, to put any play of Shakespeare's on
+the stage, absolutely as he himself wished it to be done, requires
+the services of a good property-man, a clever wig-maker, a
+costumier with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, a
+master of the methods of making-up, a fencing-master, a dancing-
+master, and an artist to direct personally the whole production.
+For he is most careful to tell us the dress and appearance of each
+character.  'Racine abhorre la realite,' says Auguste Vacquerie
+somewhere; 'il ne daigne pas s'occuper de son costume.  Si l'on
+s'en rapportait aux indications du poete, Agamemnon serait vetu
+d'un sceptre et Achille d'une epee.'  But with Shakespeare it is
+very different.  He gives us directions about the costumes of
+Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in Macbeth, and the
+apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, several elaborate descriptions of
+his fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb in
+which Petruchio is to be married.  Rosalind, he tells us, is tall,
+and is to carry a spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller, and
+is to paint her face brown so as to look sunburnt.  The children
+who play at fairies in Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white
+and green--a compliment, by the way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose
+favourite colours they were--and in white, with green garlands and
+gilded vizors, the angels are to come to Katherine in Kimbolton.
+Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by his
+wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his boots.  The
+Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her husband in
+mourning beside her.  The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the
+Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are
+all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue.  We know the
+patterns on the Dauphin's armour and the Pucelle's sword, the crest
+on Warwick's helmet and the colour of Bardolph's nose.  Portia has
+golden hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut curls,
+and Sir Andrew Aguecheek's hair hangs like flax on a distaff, and
+won't curl at all.  Some of the characters are stout, some lean,
+some straight, some hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are
+to blacken their faces.  Lear has a white beard, Hamlet's father a
+grizzled, and Benedick is to shave his in the course of the play.
+Indeed, on the subject of stage beards Shakespeare is quite
+elaborate; tells us of the many different colours in use, and gives
+a hint to actors always to see that their own are properly tied on.
+There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats, and of rustics in
+hairy coats like satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque of Russians,
+and a classical masque; several immortal scenes over a weaver in an
+ass's head, a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes the
+Lord Mayor of London to quell, and a scene between an infuriated
+husband and his wife's milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.
+
+As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the
+aphorisms he makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age,
+particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies' bonnets, and the
+many descriptions of the mundus muliebris, from the long of
+Autolycus in the Winter's Tale down to the account of the Duchess
+of Milan's gown in Much Ado About Nothing, they are far too
+numerous to quote; though it may be worth while to remind people
+that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to be found in
+Lear's scene with Edgar--a passage which has the advantage of
+brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing
+metaphysics of Sartor Resartus.  But I think that from what I have
+already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much
+interested in costume.  I do not mean in that shallow sense by
+which it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds and
+daffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan
+age; but that he saw that costume could be made at once impressive
+of a certain effect on the audience and expressive of certain types
+of character, and is one of the essential factors of the means
+which a true illusionist has at his disposal.  Indeed to him the
+deformed figure of Richard was of as much value as Juliet's
+loveliness; he sets the serge of the radical beside the silks of
+the lord, and sees the stage effects to be got from each:  he has
+as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in
+cloth of gold, and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.
+
+The difficulty Ducis felt about translating Othello in consequence
+of the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief,
+and his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor
+reiterate 'Le bandeau! le bandeau!' may be taken as an example of
+the difference between la tragedie philosophique and the drama of
+real life; and the introduction for the first time of the word
+mouchoir at the Theatre Francais was an era in that romantic-
+realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and M. Zola the
+enfant terrible, just as the classicism of the earlier part of the
+century was emphasised by Talma's refusal to play Greek heroes any
+longer in a powdered periwig--one of the many instances, by the
+way, of that desire for archaeological accuracy in dress which has
+distinguished the great actors of our age.
+
+In criticising the importance given to money in La Comedie Humaine,
+Theophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a new
+hero in fiction, le heros metallique.  Of Shakespeare it may be
+said he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and
+that a climax may depend on a crinoline.
+
+The burning of the Globe Theatre--an event due, by the way, to the
+results of the passion for illusion that distinguished
+Shakespeare's stage-management--has unfortunately robbed us of many
+important documents; but in the inventory, still in existence, of
+the costume-wardrobe of a London theatre in Shakespeare's time,
+there are mentioned particular costumes for cardinals, shepherds,
+kings, clowns, friars, and fools; green coats for Robin Hood's men,
+and a green gown for Maid Marian; a white and gold doublet for
+Henry the Fifth, and a robe for Longshanks; besides surplices,
+copes, damask gowns, gowns of cloth of gold and of cloth of silver,
+taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet coats, satin coats, frieze
+coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather, red suits,
+grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe 'for to goo invisibell,'
+which seems inexpensive at 3 pounds, 10s., and four incomparable
+fardingales--all of which show a desire to give every character an
+appropriate dress.  There are also entries of Spanish, Moorish and
+Danish costumes, of helmets, lances, painted shields, imperial
+crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of costumes for Turkish
+Janissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and goddesses of
+Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archaeological research on
+the part of the manager of the theatre.  It is true that there is a
+mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the donnee of the play
+was after the Fall.
+
+Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare will
+see that archaeology was one of its special characteristics.  After
+that revival of the classical forms of architecture which was one
+of the notes of the Renaissance, and the printing at Venice and
+elsewhere of the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature, had
+come naturally an interest in the ornamentation and costume of the
+antique world.  Nor was it for the learning that they could
+acquire, but rather for the loveliness that they might create, that
+the artists studied these things.  The curious objects that were
+being constantly brought to light by excavations were not left to
+moulder in a museum, for the contemplation of a callous curator,
+and the ennui of a policeman bored by the absence of crime.  They
+were used as motives for the production of a new art, which was to
+be not beautiful merely, but also strange.
+
+Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian
+Way came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name
+'Julia, daughter of Claudius.'  On opening the coffer they found
+within its marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about
+fifteen years of age, preserved by the embalmer's skill from
+corruption and the decay of time.  Her eyes were half open, her
+hair rippled round her in crisp curling gold, and from her lips and
+cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet departed.  Borne back to
+the Capitol, she became at once the centre of a new cult, and from
+all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at the wonderful
+shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the secret
+of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judaea's rough
+and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by
+night, and in secret buried.  Legend though it may be, yet the
+story is none the less valuable as showing us the attitude of the
+Renaissance towards the antique world.  Archaeology to them was not
+a mere science for the antiquarian; it was a means by which they
+could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath and
+beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism forms
+that else had been old and outworn.  From the pulpit of Niccola
+Pisano down to Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar,' and the service
+Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit can
+be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts--the
+arts of arrested movement--but its influence was to be seen also in
+the great Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of
+the gay courts of the time, and in the public pomps and processions
+with which the citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet
+the princes that chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which
+were considered so important that large prints were made of them
+and published--a fact which is a proof of the general interest at
+the time in matters of such kind.
+
+And this use of archaeology in shows, so far from being a bit of
+priggish pedantry, is in every way legitimate and beautiful.  For
+the stage is not merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but is
+also the return of art to life.  Sometimes in an archaeological
+novel the use of strange and obsolete terms seems to hide the
+reality beneath the learning, and I dare say that many of the
+readers of Notre Dame de Paris have been much puzzled over the
+meaning of such expressions as la casaque a mahoitres, les
+voulgiers, le gallimard tache d'encre, les craaquiniers, and the
+like; but with the stage how different it is!  The ancient world
+wakes from its sleep, and history moves as a pageant before our
+eyes, without obliging us to have recourse to a dictionary or an
+encyclopaedia for the perfection of our enjoyment.  Indeed, there
+is not the slightest necessity that the public should know the
+authorities for the mounting of any piece.  From such materials,
+for instance, as the disk of Theodosius, materials with which the
+majority of people are probably not very familiar, Mr. E. W.
+Godwin, one of the most artistic spirits of this century in
+England, created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of
+Claudian, and showed us the life of Byzantium in the fourth
+century, not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts, not by a
+novel which requires a glossary to explain it, but by the visible
+presentation before us of all the glory of that great town.  And
+while the costumes were true to the smallest points of colour and
+design, yet the details were not assigned that abnormal importance
+which they must necessarily be given in a piecemeal lecture, but
+were subordinated to the rules of lofty composition and the unity
+of artistic effect.  Mr. Symonds, speaking of that great picture of
+Mantegna's, now in Hampton Court, says that the artist has
+converted an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of line.
+The same could have been said with equal justice of Mr. Godwin's
+scene.  Only the foolish called it pedantry, only those who would
+neither look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play being
+killed by its paint.  It was in reality a scene not merely perfect
+in its picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also, getting rid
+of any necessity for tedious descriptions, and showing us, by the
+colour and character of Claudian's dress, and the dress of his
+attendants, the whole nature and life of the man, from what school
+of philosophy he affected, down to what horses he backed on the
+turf.
+
+And indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused
+into some form of art.  I have no desire to underrate the services
+of laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of
+Lempriere's Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor
+Max Muller's treatment of the same mythology as a disease of
+language.  Better Endymion than any theory, however sound, or, as
+in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic among adjectives!
+And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi's book on
+Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his 'Ode on a
+Grecian Urn'?  Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful;
+and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for
+it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual
+life with the wonder of the unreal world.  But the sixteenth
+century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of
+Vecellio also.  Every nation seems suddenly to have become
+interested in the dress of its neighbours.  Europe began to
+investigate its own clothes, and the amount of books published on
+national costumes is quite extraordinary.  At the beginning of the
+century the Nuremberg Chronicle, with its two thousand
+illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
+was over seventeen editions were published of Munster's
+Cosmography.  Besides these two books there were also the works of
+Michael Colyns, of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself,
+all of them well illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio
+being probably from the hand of Titian.
+
+Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their
+knowledge.  The development of the habit of foreign travel, the
+increased commercial intercourse between countries, and the
+frequency of diplomatic missions, gave every nation many
+opportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary dress.
+After the departure from England, for instance, of the ambassadors
+from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of Morocco, Henry the
+Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the strange attire
+of their visitors.  Later on London saw, perhaps too often, the
+sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came envoys
+from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an important
+influence on English costume.
+
+And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress, or the
+dress of foreign nations; there was also a good deal of research,
+amongst theatrical people especially, into the ancient costume of
+England itself:  and when Shakespeare, in the prologue to one of
+his plays, expresses his regret at being unable to produce helmets
+of the period, he is speaking as an Elizabethan manager and not
+merely as an Elizabethan poet.  At Cambridge, for instance, during
+his day, a play of Richard The Third was performed, in which the
+actors were attired in real dresses of the time, procured from the
+great collection of historical costume in the Tower, which was
+always open to the inspection of managers, and sometimes placed at
+their disposal.  And I cannot help thinking that this performance
+must have been far more artistic, as regards costume, than
+Garrick's mounting of Shakespeare's own play on the subject, in
+which he himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress, and
+everybody else in the costume of the time of George the Third,
+Richmond especially being much admired in the uniform of a young
+guardsman.
+
+For what is the use to the stage of that archaeology which has so
+strangely terrified the critics, but that it, and it alone, can
+give us the architecture and apparel suitable to the time in which
+the action of the play passes?  It enables us to see a Greek
+dressed like a Greek, and an Italian like an Italian; to enjoy the
+arcades of Venice and the balconies of Verona; and, if the play
+deals with any of the great eras in our country's history, to
+contemplate the age in its proper attire, and the king in his habit
+as he lived.  And I wonder, by the way, what Lord Lytton would have
+said some time ago, at the Princess's Theatre, had the curtain
+risen on his father's Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair,
+attired in a flowing wig and a flowered dressing-gown, a costume
+which in the last century was considered peculiarly appropriate to
+an antique Roman!  For in those halcyon days of the drama no
+archaeology troubled the stage, or distressed the critics, and our
+inartistic grandfathers sat peaceably in a stifling atmosphere of
+anachronisms, and beheld with the calm complacency of the age of
+prose an Iachimo in powder and patches, a Lear in lace ruffles, and
+a Lady Macbeth in a large crinoline.  I can understand archaeology
+being attacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but to
+attack it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the mark.
+However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as
+well speak disrespectfully of the equator.  For archaeology, being
+a science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply.  Its value
+depends entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it.
+We look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist for
+the method.
+
+In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's
+plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date
+for the drama.  This should be determined by the general spirit of
+the play, more than by any actual historical references which may
+occur in it.  Most Hamlets I have seen were placed far too early.
+Hamlet is essentially a scholar of the Revival of Learning; and if
+the allusion to the recent invasion of England by the Danes puts it
+back to the ninth century, the use of foils brings it down much
+later.  Once, however, that the date has been fixed, then the
+archaeologist is to supply us with the facts which the artist is to
+convert into effects.
+
+It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves show
+us that Shakespeare was indifferent to historical accuracy, and a
+great deal of capital has been made out of Hector's indiscreet
+quotation from Aristotle.  Upon the other hand, the anachronisms
+are really few in number, and not very important, and, had
+Shakespeare's attention been drawn to them by a brother artist, he
+would probably have corrected them.  For, though they can hardly be
+called blemishes, they are certainly not the great beauties of his
+work; or, at least, if they are, their anachronistic charm cannot
+be emphasised unless the play is accurately mounted according to
+its proper date.  In looking at Shakespeare's plays as a whole,
+however, what is really remarkable is their extraordinary fidelity
+as regards his personages and his plots.  Many of his dramatis
+personae are people who had actually existed, and some of them
+might have been seen in real life by a portion of his audience.
+Indeed the most violent attack that was made on Shakespeare in his
+time was for his supposed caricature of Lord Cobham.  As for his
+plots, Shakespeare constantly draws them either from authentic
+history, or from the old ballads and traditions which served as
+history to the Elizabethan public, and which even now no scientific
+historian would dismiss as absolutely untrue.  And not merely did
+he select fact instead of fancy as the basis of much of his
+imaginative work, but he always gives to each play the general
+character, the social atmosphere in a word, of the age in question.
+Stupidity he recognises as being one of the permanent
+characteristics of all European civilisations; so he sees no
+difference between a London mob of his own day and a Roman mob of
+pagan days, between a silly watchman in Messina and a silly Justice
+of the Peace in Windsor.  But when he deals with higher characters,
+with those exceptions of each age which are so fine that they
+become its types, he gives them absolutely the stamp and seal of
+their time.  Virgilia is one of those Roman wives on whose tomb was
+written 'Domi mansit, lanam fecit,' as surely as Juliet is the
+romantic girl of the Renaissance.  He is even true to the
+characteristics of race.  Hamlet has all the imagination and
+irresolution of the Northern nations, and the Princess Katharine is
+as entirely French as the heroine of Divorcons.  Harry the Fifth is
+a pure Englishman, and Othello a true Moor.
+
+Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from the
+fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it is wonderful how careful
+he is to have his facts perfectly right--indeed he follows
+Holinshed with curious fidelity.  The incessant wars between France
+and England are described with extraordinary accuracy down to the
+names of the besieged towns, the ports of landing and embarkation,
+the sites and dates of the battles, the titles of the commanders on
+each side, and the lists of the killed and wounded.  And as regards
+the Civil Wars of the Roses we have many elaborate genealogies of
+the seven sons of Edward the Third; the claims of the rival Houses
+of York and Lancaster to the throne are discussed at length; and if
+the English aristocracy will not read Shakespeare as a poet, they
+should certainly read him as a sort of early Peerage.  There is
+hardly a single title in the Upper House, with the exception of
+course of the uninteresting titles assumed by the law lords, which
+does not appear in Shakespeare along with many details of family
+history, creditable and discreditable.  Indeed if it be really
+necessary that the School Board children should know all about the
+Wars of the Roses, they could learn their lessons just as well out
+of Shakespeare as out of shilling primers, and learn them, I need
+not say, far more pleasurably.  Even in Shakespeare's own day this
+use of his plays was recognised.  'The historical plays teach
+history to those who cannot read it in the chronicles,' says
+Heywood in a tract about the stage, and yet I am sure that
+sixteenth-century chronicles were much more delightful reading than
+nineteenth-century primers are.
+
+Of course the aesthetic value of Shakespeare's plays does not, in
+the slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth,
+and Truth is independent of facts always, inventing or selecting
+them at pleasure.  But still Shakespeare's use of facts is a most
+interesting part of his method of work, and shows us his attitude
+towards the stage, and his relations to the great art of illusion.
+Indeed he would have been very much surprised at any one classing
+his plays with 'fairy tales,' as Lord Lytton does; for one of his
+aims was to create for England a national historical drama, which
+should deal with incidents with which the public was well
+acquainted, and with heroes that lived in the memory of a people.
+Patriotism, I need hardly say, is not a necessary quality of art;
+but it means, for the artist, the substitution of a universal for
+an individual feeling, and for the public the presentation of a
+work of art in a most attractive and popular form.  It is worth
+noticing that Shakespeare's first and last successes were both
+historical plays.
+
+It may be asked, what has this to do with Shakespeare's attitude
+towards costume?  I answer that a dramatist who laid such stress on
+historical accuracy of fact would have welcomed historical accuracy
+of costume as a most important adjunct to his illusionist method.
+And I have no hesitation in saying that he did so.  The reference
+to helmets of the period in the prologue to Henry the Fifth may be
+considered fanciful, though Shakespeare must have often seen
+
+
+The very casque
+That did affright the air at Agincourt,
+
+
+where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey, along
+with the saddle of that 'imp of fame,' and the dinted shield with
+its torn blue velvet lining and its tarnished lilies of gold; but
+the use of military tabards in Henry the Sixth is a bit of pure
+archaeology, as they were not worn in the sixteenth century; and
+the King's own tabard, I may mention, was still suspended over his
+tomb in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, in Shakespeare's day.  For,
+up to the time of the unfortunate triumph of the Philistines in
+1645, the chapels and cathedrals of England were the great national
+museums of archaeology, and in them were kept the armour and attire
+of the heroes of English history.  A good deal was of course
+preserved in the Tower, and even in Elizabeth's day tourists were
+brought there to see such curious relics of the past as Charles
+Brandon's huge lance, which is still, I believe, the admiration of
+our country visitors; but the cathedrals and churches were, as a
+rule, selected as the most suitable shrines for the reception of
+the historic antiquities.  Canterbury can still show us the helm of
+the Black Prince, Westminster the robes of our kings, and in old
+St. Paul's the very banner that had waved on Bosworth field was
+hung up by Richmond himself.
+
+In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London, he saw the
+apparel and appurtenances of past ages, and it is impossible to
+doubt that he made use of his opportunities.  The employment of
+lance and shield, for instance, in actual warfare, which is so
+frequent in his plays, is drawn from archaeology, and not from the
+military accoutrements of his day; and his general use of armour in
+battle was not a characteristic of his age, a time when it was
+rapidly disappearing before firearms.  Again, the crest on
+Warwick's helmet, of which such a point is made in Henry the Sixth,
+is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century play when crests were
+generally worn, but would not have been so in a play of
+Shakespeare's own time, when feathers and plumes had taken their
+place--a fashion which, as he tells us in Henry the Eighth, was
+borrowed from France.  For the historical plays, then, we may be
+sure that archaeology was employed, and as for the others I feel
+certain that it was the case also.  The appearance of Jupiter on
+his eagle, thunderbolt in hand, of Juno with her peacocks, and of
+Iris with her many-coloured bow; the Amazon masque and the masque
+of the Five Worthies, may all be regarded as archaeological; and
+the vision which Posthumus sees in prison of Sicilius Leonatus--'an
+old man, attired like a warrior, leading an ancient matron'--is
+clearly so.  Of the 'Athenian dress' by which Lysander is
+distinguished from Oberon I have already spoken; but one of the
+most marked instances is in the case of the dress of Coriolanus,
+for which Shakespeare goes directly to Plutarch.  That historian,
+in his Life of the great Roman, tells us of the oak-wreath with
+which Caius Marcius was crowned, and of the curious kind of dress
+in which, according to ancient fashion, he had to canvass his
+electors; and on both of these points he enters into long
+disquisitions, investigating the origin and meaning of the old
+customs.  Shakespeare, in the spirit of the true artist, accepts
+the facts of the antiquarian and converts them into dramatic and
+picturesque effects:  indeed the gown of humility, the 'woolvish
+gown,' as Shakespeare calls it, is the central note of the play.
+There are other cases I might quote, but this one is quite
+sufficient for my purpose; and it is evident from it at any rate
+that, in mounting a play in the accurate costume of the time,
+according to the best authorities, we are carrying out
+Shakespeare's own wishes and method.
+
+Even if it were not so, there is no more reason that we should
+continue any imperfections which may be supposed to have
+characterised Shakespeare's stage mounting than that we should have
+Juliet played by a young man, or give up the advantage of
+changeable scenery.  A great work of dramatic art should not merely
+be made expressive of modern passion by means of the actor, but
+should be presented to us in the form most suitable to the modern
+spirit.  Racine produced his Roman plays in Louis Quatorze dress on
+a stage crowded with spectators; but we require different
+conditions for the enjoyment of his art.  Perfect accuracy of
+detail, for the sake of perfect illusion, is necessary for us.
+What we have to see is that the details are not allowed to usurp
+the principal place.  They must be subordinate always to the
+general motive of the play.  But subordination in art does not mean
+disregard of truth; it means conversion of fact into effect, and
+assigning to each detail its proper relative value
+
+
+'Les petits details d'histoire et de vie domestique (says Hugo)
+doivent etre scrupuleusement etudies et reproduits par le poete,
+mais uniquement comme des moyens d'accroitre la realite de
+l'ensemble, et de faire penetrer jusque dans les coins les plus
+obscurs de l'oeuvre cette vie generale et puissante au milieu de
+laquelle les personnages sont plus vrais, et les catastrophes, par
+consequeut, plus poignantes.  Tout doit etre subordonne a ce but.
+L'Homme sur le premier plan, le reste au fond.'
+
+
+This passage is interesting as coming from the first great French
+dramatist who employed archaeology on the stage, and whose plays,
+though absolutely correct in detail, are known to all for their
+passion, not for their pedantry--for their life, not for their
+learning.  It is true that he has made certain concessions in the
+case of the employment of curious or strange expressions.  Ruy Blas
+talks of M, de Priego as 'sujet du roi' instead of 'noble du roi,'
+and Angelo Malipieri speaks of 'la croix rouge' instead of 'la
+croix de gueules.'  But they are concessions made to the public, or
+rather to a section of it.  'J'en offre ici toute mes excuses aux
+spectateurs intelligents,' he says in a note to one of the plays;
+'esperons qu'un jour un seigneur venitien pourra dire tout
+bonnement sans peril son blason sur le theatre.  C'est un progres
+qui viendra.'  And, though the description of the crest is not
+couched in accurate language, still the crest itself was accurately
+right.  It may, of course, be said that the public do not notice
+these things; upon the other hand, it should be remembered that Art
+has no other aim but her own perfection, and proceeds simply by her
+own laws, and that the play which Hamlet describes as being caviare
+to the general is a play he highly praises.  Besides, in England,
+at any rate, the public have undergone a transformation; there is
+far more appreciation of beauty now than there was a few years ago;
+and though they may not be familiar with the authorities and
+archaeological data for what is shown to them, still they enjoy
+whatever loveliness they look at.  And this is the important thing.
+Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a
+microscope.  Archaeological accuracy is merely a condition of
+illusionist stage effect; it is not its quality.  And Lord Lytton's
+proposal that the dresses should merely be beautiful without being
+accurate is founded on a misapprehension of the nature of costume,
+and of its value on the stage.  This value is twofold, picturesque
+and dramatic; the former depends on the colour of the dress, the
+latter on its design and character.  But so interwoven are the two
+that, whenever in our own day historical accuracy has been
+disregarded, and the various dresses in a play taken from different
+ages, the result has been that the stage has been turned into that
+chaos of costume, that caricature of the centuries, the Fancy Dress
+Ball, to the entire ruin of all dramatic and picturesque effect.
+For the dresses of one age do not artistically harmonise with the
+dresses of another:  and, as far as dramatic value goes, to confuse
+the costumes is to confuse the play.  Costume is a growth, an
+evolution, and a most important, perhaps the most important, sign
+of the manners, customs and mode of life of each century.  The
+Puritan dislike of colour, adornment and grace in apparel was part
+of the great revolt of the middle classes against Beauty in the
+seventeenth century.  A historian who disregarded it would give us
+a most inaccurate picture of the time, and a dramatist who did not
+avail himself of it would miss a most vital element in producing an
+illusionist effect.  The effeminacy of dress that characterised the
+reign of Richard the Second was a constant theme of contemporary
+authors.  Shakespeare, writing two hundred years after, makes the
+king's fondness for gay apparel and foreign fashions a point in the
+play, from John of Gaunt's reproaches down to Richard's own speech
+in the third act on his deposition from the throne.  And that
+Shakespeare examined Richard's tomb in Westminster Abbey seems to
+me certain from York's speech:-
+
+
+See, see, King Richard doth himself appear
+As doth the blushing discontented sun
+From out the fiery portal of the east,
+When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
+To dim his glory.
+
+
+For we can still discern on the King's robe his favourite badge--
+the sun issuing from a cloud.  In fact, in every age the social
+conditions are so exemplified in costume, that to produce a
+sixteenth-century play in fourteenth-century attire, or vice versa,
+would make the performance seem unreal because untrue.  And,
+valuable as beauty of effect on the stage is, the highest beauty is
+not merely comparable with absolute accuracy of detail, but really
+dependent on it.  To invent, an entirely new costume is almost
+impossible except in burlesque or extravaganza, and as for
+combining the dress of different centuries into one, the experiment
+would be dangerous, and Shakespeare's opinion of the artistic value
+of such a medley may be gathered from his incessant satire of the
+Elizabethan dandies for imagining that they were well dressed
+because they got their doublets in Italy, their hats in Germany,
+and their hose in France.  And it should be noted that the most
+lovely scenes that have been produced on our stage have been those
+that have been characterised by perfect accuracy, such as Mr. and
+Mrs. Bancroft's eighteenth-century revivals at the Haymarket, Mr.
+Irying's superb production of Much Ado About Nothing, and Mr,
+Barrett's Claudian.  Besides, and this is perhaps the most complete
+answer to Lord Lytton's theory, it must be remembered that neither
+in costume nor in dialogue is beauty the dramatist's primary aim at
+all.  The true dramatist aims first at what is characteristic, and
+no more desires that all his personages should be beautifully
+attired than he desires that they should all have beautiful natures
+or speak beautiful English.  The true dramatist, in fact, shows us
+life under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life.  The
+Greek dress was the loveliest dress the world has ever seen, and
+the English dress of the last century one of the most monstrous;
+yet we cannot costume a play by Sheridan as we would costume a play
+by Sophokles.  For, as Polonius says in his excellent lecture, a
+lecture to which I am glad to have the opportunity of expressing my
+obligations, one of the first qualities of apparel is its
+expressiveness.  And the affected style of dress in the last
+century was the natural characteristic of a society of affected
+manners and affected conversation--a characteristic which the
+realistic dramatist will highly value down to the smallest detail
+of accuracy, and the materials for which he can get only from
+archaeology.
+
+But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate; it must be
+also appropriate to the stature and appearance of the actor, and to
+his supposed condition, as well as to his necessary action in the
+play.  In Mr. Hare's production of As You Like It at the St.
+James's Theatre, for instance, the whole point of Orlando's
+complaint that he is brought up like a peasant, and not like a
+gentleman, was spoiled by the gorgeousness of his dress, and the
+splendid apparel worn by the banished Duke and his friends was
+quite out of place.  Mr. Lewis Wingfield's explanation that the
+sumptuary laws of the period necessitated their doing so, is, I am
+afraid, hardly sufficient.  Outlaws, lurking in a forest and living
+by the chase, are not very likely to care much about ordinances of
+dress.  They were probably attired like Robin Hood's men, to whom,
+indeed, they are compared in the course of the play.  And that
+their dress was not that of wealthy noblemen may be seen by
+Orlando's words when he breaks in upon them.  He mistakes them for
+robbers, and is amazed to find that they answer him in courteous
+and gentle terms.  Lady Archibald Campbell's production, under Mr.
+E. W. Godwin's direction, of the same play in Coombe Wood was, as
+regards mounting, far more artistic.  At least it seemed so to me.
+The Duke and his companions were dressed in serge tunics, leathern
+jerkins, high boots and gauntlets, and wore bycocket hats and
+hoods.  And as they were playing in a real forest, they found, I am
+sure, their dresses extremely convenient.  To every character in
+the play was given a perfectly appropriate attire, and the brown
+and green of their costumes harmonised exquisitely with the ferns
+through which they wandered, the trees beneath which they lay, and
+the lovely English landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players.
+The perfect naturalness of the scene was due to the absolute
+accuracy and appropriateness of everything that was worn.  Nor
+could archaeology have been put to a severer test, or come out of
+it more triumphantly.  The whole production showed once for all
+that, unless a dress is archaeologically correct, and artistically
+appropriate, it always looks unreal, unnatural, and theatrical in
+the sense of artificial.
+
+Nor, again, is it enough that there should be accurate and
+appropriate costumes of beautiful colours; there must be also
+beauty of colour on the stage as a whole, and as long as the
+background is painted by one artist, and the foreground figures
+independently designed by another, there is the danger of a want of
+harmony in the scene as a picture.  For each scene the colour-
+scheme should be settled as absolutely as for the decoration of a
+room, and the textures which it is proposed to use should be mixed
+and re-mixed in every possible combination, and what is discordant
+removed.  Then, as regards the particular kinds of colours, the
+stage is often too glaring, partly through the excessive use of
+hot, violent reds, and partly through the costumes looking too new.
+Shabbiness, which in modern life is merely the tendency of the
+lower orders towards tone, is not without its artistic value, and
+modern colours are often much improved by being a little faded.
+Blue also is too frequently used:  it is not merely a dangerous
+colour to wear by gaslight, but it is really difficult in England
+to get a thoroughly good blue.  The fine Chinese blue, which we all
+so much admire, takes two years to dye, and the English public will
+not wait so long for a colour.  Peacock blue, of course, has been
+employed on the stage, notably at the Lyceum, with great advantage;
+but all attempts at a good light blue, or good dark blue, which I
+have seen have been failures.  The value of black is hardly
+appreciated; it was used effectively by Mr. Irving in Hamlet as the
+central note of a composition, but as a tone-giving neutral its
+importance is not recognised.  And this is curious, considering the
+general colour of the dress of a century in which, as Baudelaire
+says, 'Nous celebrons tous quelque enterrement.'  The archaeologist
+of the future will probably point to this age as the time when the
+beauty of black was understood; but I hardly think that, as regards
+stage-mounting or house decoration, it really is.  Its decorative
+value is, of course, the same as that of white or gold; it can
+separate and harmonise colours.  In modern plays the black frock-
+coat of the hero becomes important in itself, and should be given a
+suitable background.  But it rarely is.  Indeed the only good
+background for a play in modern dress which I have ever seen was
+the dark grey and cream-white scene of the first act of the
+Princesse Georges in Mrs. Langtry's production.  As a rule, the
+hero is smothered in bric-a-brac and palm-trees, lost in the gilded
+abyss of Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to a mere midge in
+the midst of marqueterie; whereas the background should always be
+kept as a background, and colour subordinated to effect.  This, of
+course, can only be done when there is one single mind directing
+the whole production.  The facts of art are diverse, but the
+essence of artistic effect is unity.  Monarchy, Anarchy, and
+Republicanism may contend for the government of nations; but a
+theatre should be in the power of a cultured despot.  There may be
+division of labour, but there must be no division of mind.  Whoever
+understands the costume of an age understands of necessity its
+architecture and its surroundings also, and it is easy to see from
+the chairs of a century whether it was a century of crinolines or
+not.  In fact, in art there is no specialism, and a really artistic
+production should bear the impress of one master, and one master
+only, who not merely should design and arrange everything, but
+should have complete control over the way in which each dress is to
+be worn.
+
+Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of Hernani, absolutely
+refused to call her lover 'Mon Lion!' unless she was allowed to
+wear a little fashionable toque then much in vogue on the
+Boulevards; and many young ladies on our own stage insist to the
+present day on wearing stiff starched petticoats under Greek
+dresses, to the entire ruin of all delicacy of line and fold; but
+these wicked things should not be allowed.  And there should be far
+more dress rehearsals than there are now.  Actors such as Mr.
+Forbes-Robertson, Mr. Conway, Mr. George Alexander, and others, not
+to mention older artists, can move with ease and elegance in the
+attire of any century; but there are not a few who seem dreadfully
+embarrassed about their hands if they have no side pockets, and who
+always wear their dresses as if they were costumes.  Costumes, of
+course, they are to the designer; but dresses they should be to
+those that wear them.  And it is time that a stop should be put to
+the idea, very prevalent on the stage, that the Greeks and Romans
+always went about bareheaded in the open air--a mistake the
+Elizabethan managers did not fall into, for they gave hoods as well
+as gowns to their Roman senators.
+
+More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining to the
+actors that there is a form of gesture and movement that is not
+merely appropriate to each style of dress, but really conditioned
+by it.  The extravagant use of the arms in the eighteenth century,
+for instance, was the necessary result of the large hoop, and the
+solemn dignity of Burleigh owed as much to his ruff as to his
+reason.  Besides until an actor is at home in his dress, he is not
+at home in his part.
+
+Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistic
+temperament in the audience, and producing that joy in beauty for
+beauty's sake without which the great masterpieces of art can never
+be understood, I will not here speak; though it is worth while to
+notice how Shakespeare appreciated that side of the question in the
+production of his tragedies, acting them always by artificial
+light, and in a theatre hung with black; but what I have tried to
+point out is that archaeology is not a pedantic method, but a
+method of artistic illusion, and that costume is a means of
+displaying character without description, and of producing dramatic
+situations and dramatic effects.  And I think it is a pity that so
+many critics should have set themselves to attack one of the most
+important movements on the modern stage before that movement has at
+all reached its proper perfection.  That it will do so, however, I
+feel as certain as that we shall require from our dramatic critics
+in the future higher qualification than that they can remember
+Macready or have seen Benjamin Webster; we shall require of them,
+indeed, that they cultivate a sense of beauty.  Pour etre plus
+difficile, la tache n'en est que plus glorieuse.  And if they will
+not encourage, at least they must not oppose, a movement of which
+Shakespeare of all dramatists would have most approved, for it has
+the illusion of truth for its method, and the illusion of beauty
+for its result.  Not that I agree with everything that I have said
+in this essay.  There is much with which I entirely disagree.  The
+essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic
+criticism attitude is everything.  For in art there is no such
+thing as a universal truth.  A Truth in art is that whose
+contradictory is also true.  And just as it is only in art-
+criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic
+theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it,
+that we can realise Hegel's system of contraries.  The truths of
+metaphysics are the truths of masks.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, INTENTIONS ***
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>Intentions</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">Intentions, by Oscar Wilde</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Intentions, by Oscar Wilde
+(#11 in our series by Oscar Wilde)
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+
+Title: Intentions
+
+Author: Oscar Wilde
+
+Release Date: April, 1997  [EBook #887]
+[This file was first posted on April 24, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: May 11, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+</pre>
+<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1913 edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h1>INTENTIONS</h1>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Contents</p>
+<p>The Decay of Lying<br />Pen, Pencil, and Poison<br />The Critic as
+Artist<br />The Truth of Masks</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>THE DECAY OF LYING: AN OBSERVATION</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>A DIALOGUE.&nbsp; Persons: Cyril and Vivian.&nbsp; Scene: the Library
+of a country house in Nottinghamshire.</p>
+<p>CYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace).&nbsp;
+My dear Vivian, don&rsquo;t coop yourself up all day in the library.&nbsp;
+It is a perfectly lovely afternoon.&nbsp; The air is exquisite.&nbsp;
+There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum.&nbsp;
+Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Enjoy Nature!&nbsp; I am glad to say that I have entirely
+lost that faculty.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; My own experience is that the
+more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.&nbsp; What Art really
+reveals to us is Nature&rsquo;s lack of design, her curious crudities,
+her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.&nbsp;
+Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said,
+she cannot carry them out.&nbsp; When I look at a landscape I cannot
+help seeing all its defects.&nbsp; It is fortunate for us, however,
+that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art at all.&nbsp;
+Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her
+proper place.&nbsp; As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a
+pure myth.&nbsp; It is not to be found in Nature herself.&nbsp; It resides
+in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who
+looks at her.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Well, you need not look at the landscape.&nbsp; You
+can lie on the grass and smoke and talk.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; But Nature is so uncomfortable.&nbsp; Grass is hard
+and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.&nbsp; Why, even
+Morris&rsquo;s poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat
+than the whole of Nature can.&nbsp; Nature pales before the furniture
+of &lsquo;the street which from Oxford has borrowed its name,&rsquo;
+as the poet you love so much once vilely phrased it.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+complain.&nbsp; If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never
+have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.&nbsp;
+In a house we all feel of the proper proportions.&nbsp; Everything is
+subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.&nbsp; Egotism
+itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is
+entirely the result of indoor life.&nbsp; Out of doors one becomes abstract
+and impersonal.&nbsp; One&rsquo;s individuality absolutely leaves one.&nbsp;
+And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.&nbsp;
+Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of
+it just as they die of any other disease.&nbsp; Fortunately, in England
+at any rate, thought is not catching.&nbsp; Our splendid physique as
+a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.&nbsp; 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&mdash;that is really what our enthusiasm for education has
+come to.&nbsp; In the meantime, you had better go back to your wearisome
+uncomfortable Nature, and leave me to correct my proofs.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Writing an article!&nbsp; That is not very consistent
+after what you have just said.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Who wants to be consistent?&nbsp; The dullard and the
+doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the
+bitter end of action, to the <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of practice.&nbsp;
+Not I.&nbsp; Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word
+&lsquo;Whim.&rsquo;&nbsp; Besides, my article is really a most salutary
+and valuable warning.&nbsp; If it is attended to, there may be a new
+Renaissance of Art.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; What is the subject?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; I intend to call it &lsquo;The Decay of Lying: A Protest.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Lying!&nbsp; I should have thought that our politicians
+kept up that habit.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; I assure you that they do not.&nbsp; They never rise
+beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove,
+to discuss, to argue.&nbsp; 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!&nbsp; After all,
+what is a fine lie?&nbsp; Simply that which is its own evidence.&nbsp;
+If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support
+of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once.&nbsp; No, the
+politicians won&rsquo;t do.&nbsp; Something may, perhaps, be urged on
+behalf of the Bar.&nbsp; The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its
+members.&nbsp; Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+But they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to
+precedent.&nbsp; In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out.&nbsp;
+Newspapers, even, have degenerated.&nbsp; They may now be absolutely
+relied upon.&nbsp; One feels it as one wades through their columns.&nbsp;
+It is always the unreadable that occurs.&nbsp; I am afraid that there
+is not much to be said in favour of either the lawyer or the journalist.&nbsp;
+Besides, what I am pleading for is Lying in art.&nbsp; Shall I read
+you what I have written?&nbsp; It might do you a great deal of good.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Certainly, if you give me a cigarette.&nbsp; Thanks.&nbsp;
+By the way, what magazine do you intend it for?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; For the <i>Retrospective Review</i>.&nbsp; I think
+I told you that the elect had revived it.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Whom do you mean by &lsquo;the elect&rsquo;?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course.&nbsp; It is a club
+to which I belong.&nbsp; We are supposed to wear faded roses in our
+button-holes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian.&nbsp;
+I am afraid you are not eligible.&nbsp; You are too fond of simple pleasures.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits,
+I suppose?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Probably.&nbsp; Besides, you are a little too old.&nbsp;
+We don&rsquo;t admit anybody who is of the usual age.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with
+each other.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; We are.&nbsp; This is one of the objects of the club.&nbsp;
+Now, if you promise not to interrupt too often, I will read you my article.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; You will find me all attention.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN (reading in a very clear, musical voice).&nbsp; THE DECAY
+OF LYING: A PROTEST.&mdash;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming
+his ideal both for method and manner.&nbsp; He has his tedious <i>document
+humain</i>, his miserable little <i>coin de la cr&eacute;ation</i>,
+into which he peers with his microscope.&nbsp; He is to be found at
+the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading
+up his subject.&nbsp; He has not even the courage of other people&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The lose that results to literature in general from this false
+ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.&nbsp; People have a careless
+way of talking about a &ldquo;born liar,&rdquo; just as they talk about
+a &ldquo;born poet.&rdquo;&nbsp; But in both cases they are wrong.&nbsp;
+Lying and poetry are arts&mdash;arts, as Pinto saw, not unconnected
+with each other&mdash;and they require the most careful study, the most
+disinterested devotion.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Here,
+as elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But, as a rule, he comes
+to nothing.&nbsp; He either falls into careless habits of accuracy&mdash;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; My dear fellow!</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Please don&rsquo;t interrupt in the middle of a sentence.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to
+frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; This is no isolated instance that we are giving.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;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.&nbsp; There is such a thing as
+robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and <i>The
+Black Arrow</i> 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 <i>Lancet</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Nor are our other novelists much better.&nbsp; Mr. Henry James writes
+fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and
+imperceptible &ldquo;points of view&rdquo; his neat literary style,
+his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.&nbsp; Mr. Hall
+Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the
+top of his voice.&nbsp; He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says.&nbsp;
+Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth
+finding.&nbsp; He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted
+detective.&nbsp; As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author
+becomes almost unbearable.&nbsp; The horses of Mr. William Black&rsquo;s
+phaeton do not soar towards the sun.&nbsp; They merely frighten the
+sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.&nbsp; On seeing
+them approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect.&nbsp; Mrs. Oliphant
+prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity,
+and other wearisome things.&nbsp; Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated
+himself upon the altar of local colour.&nbsp; He is like the lady in
+the French comedy who keeps talking about &ldquo;le beau ciel d&rsquo;Italie.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes.&nbsp;
+He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to be
+bad is to be wicked.&nbsp; At times he is almost edifying.&nbsp; <i>Robert
+Elsmere</i> is of course a masterpiece&mdash;a masterpiece of the &ldquo;genre
+ennuyeux,&rdquo; the one form of literature that the English people
+seems thoroughly to enjoy.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Indeed it is only in England that such a
+book could be produced.&nbsp; England is the home of lost ideas.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as <i>Robert
+Elsmere</i> has been produced, things are not much better.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He writes lurid little tragedies
+in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot
+laugh for very tears.&nbsp; M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that
+he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, &ldquo;L&rsquo;homme
+de g&eacute;nie n&rsquo;a jamais d&rsquo;esprit,&rdquo; is determined
+to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.&nbsp;
+And how well he succeeds!&nbsp; He is not without power.&nbsp; Indeed
+at times, as in <i>Germinal</i>, there is something almost epic in his
+work.&nbsp; But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and
+wrong not on the ground of morals, but on the ground of art.&nbsp; From
+any ethical standpoint it is just what it should be.&nbsp; The author
+is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen.&nbsp;
+What more can any moralist desire?&nbsp; We have no sympathy at all
+with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola.&nbsp; It is
+simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed.&nbsp; But from
+the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of the author of <i>L&rsquo;Assommoir</i>,
+<i>Nana</i> and <i>Pot-Bouille</i>?&nbsp; Nothing.&nbsp; Mr. Ruskin
+once described the characters in George Eliot&rsquo;s novels as being
+like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola&rsquo;s characters
+are much worse.&nbsp; They have their dreary vices, and their drearier
+virtues.&nbsp; The record of their lives is absolutely without interest.&nbsp;
+Who cares what happens to them?&nbsp; In literature we require distinction,
+charm, beauty and imaginative power.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t want to be
+harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.&nbsp;
+M. Daudet is better.&nbsp; He has wit, a light touch and an amusing
+style.&nbsp; But he has lately committed literary suicide.&nbsp; Nobody
+can possibly care for Delobelle with his &ldquo;Il faut lutter pour
+l&rsquo;art,&rdquo; or for Valmajour with his eternal refrain about
+the nightingale, or for the poet in <i>Jack</i> with his &ldquo;mots
+cruels,&rdquo; now that we have learned from <i>Vingt Ans de ma Vie
+litt&eacute;raire</i> that these characters were taken directly from
+life.&nbsp; To us they seem to have suddenly lost all their vitality,
+all the few qualities they ever possessed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Otherwise the novel is not
+a work of art.&nbsp; As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the <i>roman</i>
+<i>psychologique</i>, 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.&nbsp; In point of fact what is interesting
+about people in good society&mdash;and M. Bourget rarely moves out of
+the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,&mdash;is the mask
+that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.&nbsp;
+It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the
+same stuff.&nbsp; In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet
+there is not a little of Falstaff.&nbsp; The fat knight has his moods
+of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; The more one analyses people, the more
+all reasons for analysis disappear.&nbsp; Sooner or later one comes
+to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.&nbsp; Indeed,
+as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the
+brotherhood of man is no mere poet&rsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain you
+any further just here.&nbsp; I quite admit that modern novels have many
+good points.&nbsp; All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite
+unreadable.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I
+must say that I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures.&nbsp;
+I like <i>The Deemster</i>, and <i>The Daughter of Heth</i>, and <i>Le
+Disciple</i>, and <i>Mr. Isaacs</i>, and as for <i>Robert</i> <i>Elsmere</i>,
+I am quite devoted to it.&nbsp; Not that I can look upon it as a serious
+work.&nbsp; As a statement of the problems that confront the earnest
+Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated.&nbsp; It is simply Arnold&rsquo;s
+<i>Literature and Dogma</i> with the literature left out.&nbsp; It is
+as much behind the age as Paley&rsquo;s <i>Evidences</i>, or Colenso&rsquo;s
+method of Biblical exegesis.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; On the
+other hand, it contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful
+quotations, and Green&rsquo;s philosophy very pleasantly sugars the
+somewhat bitter pill of the author&rsquo;s fiction.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Surely they are realists, both of them?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Ah!&nbsp; Meredith!&nbsp; Who can define him?&nbsp;
+His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Somebody in Shakespeare&mdash;Touchstone, I think&mdash;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&rsquo;s
+method.&nbsp; But whatever he is, he is not a realist.&nbsp; Or rather
+I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms
+with his father.&nbsp; By deliberate choice he has made himself a romanticist.&nbsp;
+He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and after all, even if the man&rsquo;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.&nbsp; By its means he has planted round his garden a hedge
+full of thorns, and red with wonderful roses.&nbsp; As for Balzac, he
+was a most remarkable combination of the artistic temperament with the
+scientific spirit.&nbsp; The latter he bequeathed to his disciples.&nbsp;
+The former was entirely his own.&nbsp; The difference between such a
+book as M. Zola&rsquo;s <i>L&rsquo;Assommoir</i> and Balzac&rsquo;s
+<i>Illusions Perdues</i> is the difference between unimaginative realism
+and imaginative reality.&nbsp; &lsquo;All Balzac&rsquo;s characters;&rsquo;
+said Baudelaire, &lsquo;are gifted with the same ardour of life that
+animated himself.&nbsp; All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams.&nbsp;
+Each mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will.&nbsp; The very
+scullions have genius.&rsquo;&nbsp; A steady course of Balzac reduces
+our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows
+of shades.&nbsp; His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured
+existence.&nbsp; They dominate us, and defy scepticism.&nbsp; One of
+the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempr&eacute;.&nbsp;
+It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself.&nbsp;
+It haunts me in my moments of pleasure.&nbsp; I remember it when I laugh.&nbsp;
+But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was.&nbsp; He created life,
+he did not copy it.&nbsp; 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 <i>Salammb&ocirc;</i>
+or <i>Esmond</i>, or <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, or the <i>Vicomte
+de Bragelonne.</i></p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Do you object to modernity of form, then?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; It is a huge price to pay for a very poor
+result.&nbsp; Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising.&nbsp;
+It cannot help being so.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But
+the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable
+subjects for Art.&nbsp; The only beautiful things, as somebody once
+said, are the things that do not concern us.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; To art&rsquo;s subject-matter we should be more or less
+indifferent.&nbsp; We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices,
+no partisan feeling of any kind.&nbsp; It is exactly because Hecuba
+is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an admirable motive for a
+tragedy.&nbsp; I do not know anything in the whole history of literature
+sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade.&nbsp; He wrote one
+beautiful book, <i>The Cloister</i> <i>and the Hearth</i>, a book as
+much above <i>Romola</i> as <i>Romola</i> is above <i>Daniel Deronda</i>,
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Believe
+me, my dear Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter
+are entirely and absolutely wrong.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Certainly we are a degraded
+race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+And this is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what
+is not.&nbsp; If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again,
+there is no use reading it at all.&nbsp; But what do you say about the
+return to Life and Nature?&nbsp; This is the panacea that is always
+being recommended to us.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; I will read you what I say on that subject.&nbsp; The
+passage comes later on in the article, but I may as well give it to
+you now:-</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The popular cry of our time is &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp; But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable
+and well-meaning efforts.&nbsp; Nature is always behind the age.&nbsp;
+And as for Life, she is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that
+lays waste her house.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind
+the age?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic.&nbsp; What I
+mean is this.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One touch
+of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will
+destroy any work of Art.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She has no suggestions of her own.&nbsp;
+Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet.&nbsp; He
+found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.&nbsp; He went
+moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when he
+returned, not to Nature but to poetry.&nbsp; Poetry gave him &lsquo;Laodamia,&rsquo;
+and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is.&nbsp; Nature
+gave him &lsquo;Martha Ray&rsquo; and &lsquo;Peter Bell,&rsquo; and
+the address to Mr. Wilkinson&rsquo;s spade.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; I think that view might be questioned.&nbsp; I am rather
+inclined to believe in &lsquo;the impulse from a vernal wood,&rsquo;
+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.&nbsp;
+You would agree with that, I fancy.&nbsp; However, proceed with your
+article.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN <i>(reading</i>).&nbsp; &lsquo;Art begins with abstract decoration,
+with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal
+and non-existent.&nbsp; This is the first stage.&nbsp; Then Life becomes
+fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed
+circle.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out
+into the wilderness.&nbsp; That is the true decadence, and it is from
+this that we are now suffering.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Take the case of the English drama.&nbsp; At first in the
+hands of the monks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological.&nbsp;
+Then she enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+She clothed her children in strange raiment and gave them masks, and
+at her bidding the antique world rose from its marble tomb.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In this they were perfectly right.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form.&nbsp;
+Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The passages in Shakespeare&mdash;and they
+are many&mdash;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.&nbsp; Shakespeare
+is not by any means a flawless artist.&nbsp; He is too fond of going
+directly to life, and borrowing life&rsquo;s natural utterance.&nbsp;
+He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders
+everything.&nbsp; Goethe says, somewhere -</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>In der Beschr&auml;nkung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,&rdquo;
+and the limitation, the very condition of any art is style.&nbsp; However,
+we need not linger any longer over Shakespeare&rsquo;s realism.&nbsp;
+<i>The Tempest</i> is the most perfect of palinodes.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And yet how wearisome the plays are!&nbsp; They
+do not succeed in producing even that impression of reality at which
+they aim, and which is their only reason for existing.&nbsp; As a method,
+realism is a complete failure.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true
+about those arts that we call the decorative arts.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But wherever we have returned to
+Life and Nature, our work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting.&nbsp;
+Modern tapestry, with its a&euml;rial effects, its elaborate perspective,
+its broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism,
+has no beauty whatsoever.&nbsp; The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely
+detestable.&nbsp; We are beginning to weave possible carpets in England,
+but only because we have returned to the method and spirit of the East.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+A cultured Mahomedan once remarked to us, &ldquo;You Christians are
+so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have
+never thought of making an artistic application of the second.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the
+question very completely.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;It was not always thus.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;Father
+of Lies&rdquo;; in the published speeches of Cicero and the biographies
+of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny&rsquo;s <i>Natural History</i>;
+in Hanno&rsquo;s <i>Periplus</i>; 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 <i>Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chronicon</i>; in
+the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of Casanova;
+in Defoe&rsquo;s <i>History of the Plague</i>; in Boswell&rsquo;s <i>Life
+of Johnson</i>; in Napoleon&rsquo;s despatches, and in the works of
+our own Carlyle, whose <i>French Revolution</i> 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.&nbsp; Now, everything is changed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Their chilling
+touch is over everything.&nbsp; They are vulgarising mankind.&nbsp;
+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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; My dear boy!</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; However, you must not think that I am too despondent about
+the artistic future either of America or of our own country.&nbsp; Listen
+to this:-</p>
+<p>&lsquo;That some change will take place before this century has drawn
+to its close we have no doubt whatsoever.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Whatever was his name
+or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse.&nbsp;
+For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s
+farcical comedies.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Nor will he be welcomed by society alone.&nbsp; 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&mdash;poor, probable,
+uninteresting human life&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain
+writer in the <i>Saturday Review</i>, 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They will call upon
+Shakespeare&mdash;they always do&mdash;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.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Ahem!&nbsp; Another cigarette, please.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely
+a dramatic utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare&rsquo;s real
+views upon art than the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon
+morals.&nbsp; But let me get to the end of the passage:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.&nbsp;
+She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.&nbsp;
+She is a veil, rather than a mirror.&nbsp; She has flowers that no forests
+know of, birds that no woodland possesses.&nbsp; She makes and unmakes
+many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.&nbsp;
+Hers are the &ldquo;forms more real than living man,&rdquo; and hers
+the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished
+copies.&nbsp; Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity.&nbsp;
+She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from
+the deep they come.&nbsp; She can bid the almond-tree blossom in winter,
+and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The dryads
+peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile strangely
+at her when she comes near them.&nbsp; She has hawk-faced gods that
+worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; I like that.&nbsp; I can see it.&nbsp; Is that the end?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; There is one more passage, but it is purely
+practical.&nbsp; It simply suggests some methods by which we could revive
+this lost art of Lying.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask
+you a question.&nbsp; What do you mean by saying that life, &lsquo;poor,
+probable, uninteresting human life,&rsquo; will try to reproduce the
+marvels of art?&nbsp; I can quite understand your objection to art being
+treated as a mirror.&nbsp; You think it would reduce genius to the position
+of a cracked looking-glass.&nbsp; But you don&rsquo;t mean to say that
+you seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the
+mirror, and Art the reality?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Certainly I do.&nbsp; Paradox though it may seem&mdash;and
+paradoxes are always dangerous things&mdash;it is none the less true
+that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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
+&lsquo;The Golden Stair,&rsquo; the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness
+of the &lsquo;Laus Amoris,&rsquo; the passion-pale face of Andromeda,
+the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in &lsquo;Merlin&rsquo;s
+Dream.&rsquo;&nbsp; And it has always been so.&nbsp; A great artist
+invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular
+form, like an enterprising publisher.&nbsp; Neither Holbein nor Vandyck
+found in England what they have given us.&nbsp; They brought their types
+with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty set herself to supply
+the master with models.&nbsp; The Greeks, with their quick artistic
+instinct, understood this, and set in the bride&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Hence
+came their objection to realism.&nbsp; They disliked it on purely social
+grounds.&nbsp; They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they
+were perfectly right.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But
+these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s best, Art&rsquo;s only pupil.</p>
+<p>As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But this is a mistake.&nbsp; The imagination
+is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form.&nbsp; The
+boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life&rsquo;s imitative
+instinct.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Schopenhauer has analysed
+the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented
+it.&nbsp; The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; He was invented by Tourg&eacute;nieff,
+and completed by Dostoieffski.&nbsp; Robespierre came out of the pages
+of Rousseau as surely as the People&rsquo;s Palace rose out of the <i>d&eacute;bris</i>
+of a novel.&nbsp; Literature always anticipates life.&nbsp; It does
+not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.&nbsp; The nineteenth century,
+as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.&nbsp; Our Luciens
+de Rubempr&eacute;, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first
+appearance on the stage of the <i>Com&eacute;die Humaine</i>.&nbsp;
+We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions,
+the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.&nbsp; I once
+asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had had any
+model for Becky Sharp.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I inquired what became of
+the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after
+the appearance of <i>Vanity Fair</i>, 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&rsquo;s style, and entirely
+by Mrs. Rawdon Crawley&rsquo;s methods.&nbsp; Ultimately she came to
+grief, disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen
+at Monte Carlo and other gambling places.&nbsp; The noble gentleman
+from whom the same great sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a
+few months after <i>The Newcomer</i> had reached a fourth edition, with
+the word &lsquo;Adsum&rsquo; on his lips.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Feeling rather nervous he began to walk extremely fast, when suddenly
+out of an archway ran a child right between his legs.&nbsp; It fell
+on the pavement, he tripped over it, and trampled upon it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; They surrounded him, and
+asked him his name.&nbsp; He was just about to give it when he suddenly
+remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson&rsquo;s story.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; As he passed out,
+the name on the brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye.&nbsp;
+It was &lsquo;Jekyll.&rsquo;&nbsp; At least it should have been.</p>
+<p>Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course accidental.&nbsp;
+In the following case the imitation was self-conscious.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We became great friends, and were constantly together.&nbsp;
+And yet what interested me most in her was not her beauty, but her character,
+her entire vagueness of character.&nbsp; She seemed to have no personality
+at all, but simply the possibility of many types.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Then she would take to attending race-meetings, wear the most horsey
+clothes, and talk about nothing but betting.&nbsp; She abandoned religion
+for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics, and politics for the melodramatic
+excitements of philanthropy.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One day a serial began
+in one of the French magazines.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I wrote to my friend that evening about my views
+on John Bellini, and the admirable ices at Florian&rsquo;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.&nbsp; I
+don&rsquo;t know why I added that, but I remember I had a sort of dread
+over me that she might do the same thing.&nbsp; Before my letter had
+reached her, she had run away with a man who deserted her in six months.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; When they appeared, it
+seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them in life, and
+she did so.&nbsp; It was a most clear example of this imitative instinct
+of which I was speaking, and an extremely tragic one.</p>
+<p>However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual instances.&nbsp;
+Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Scientifically speaking, the basis of life&mdash;the energy of life,
+as Aristotle would call it&mdash;is simply the desire for expression,
+and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression
+can be attained.&nbsp; Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they
+be to her own hurt.&nbsp; Young men have committed suicide because Rolla
+did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther
+died.&nbsp; Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what
+we owe to the imitation of Caesar.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Are you prepared to prove that?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes
+her effects from him?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Certainly.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp;
+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?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; You smile.&nbsp; Consider
+the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you
+will find that I am right.&nbsp; For what is Nature?&nbsp; Nature is
+no great mother who has borne us.&nbsp; She is our creation.&nbsp; It
+is in our brain that she quickens to life.&nbsp; Things are because
+we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts
+that have influenced us.&nbsp; To look at a thing is very different
+from seeing a thing.&nbsp; One does not see anything until one sees
+its beauty.&nbsp; Then, and then only, does it come into existence.&nbsp;
+At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because
+poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such
+effects.&nbsp; There may have been fogs for centuries in London.&nbsp;
+I dare say there were.&nbsp; But no one saw them, and so we do not know
+anything about them.&nbsp; They did not exist till Art had invented
+them.&nbsp; Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess.&nbsp;
+They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated
+realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis.&nbsp; Where the
+cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.&nbsp; And so, let
+us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.&nbsp;
+She has done so already, indeed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Where she used to give us
+Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing
+Pissaros.&nbsp; Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still
+to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern.&nbsp;
+Of course she is not always to be relied upon.&nbsp; The fact is that
+she is in this unfortunate position.&nbsp; Art creates an incomparable
+and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Nobody of any real culture, for
+instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.&nbsp; Sunsets
+are quite old-fashioned.&nbsp; They belong to the time when Turner was
+the last note in art.&nbsp; To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism
+of temperament.&nbsp; Upon the other hand they go on.&nbsp; Yesterday
+evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking
+at the glorious sky, as she called it.&nbsp; Of course I had to look
+at it.&nbsp; She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom
+one can deny nothing.&nbsp; And what was it?&nbsp; It was simply a very
+second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter&rsquo;s
+worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised.&nbsp; Of course, I am
+quite ready to admit that Life very often commits the same error.&nbsp;
+She produces her false Ren&eacute;s and her sham Vautrins, just as Nature
+gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on another a more than questionable
+Rousseau.&nbsp; Still, Nature irritates one more when she does things
+of that kind.&nbsp; It seems so stupid, so obvious, so unnecessary.&nbsp;
+A false Vautrin might be delightful.&nbsp; A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable.&nbsp;
+However, I don&rsquo;t want to be too hard on Nature.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That she imitates
+Art, I don&rsquo;t think even her worst enemy would deny now.&nbsp;
+It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilised man.&nbsp;
+But have I proved my theory to your satisfaction?</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Certainly not!&nbsp; Art never expresses anything but
+itself.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; But it is not so.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; She develops purely on her own lines.&nbsp;
+She is not symbolic of any age.&nbsp; It is the ages that are her symbols.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But it was not so.&nbsp;
+The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supreme civilisation, any
+more than the virtues of the Antonines could save it.&nbsp; It fell
+for other, for less interesting reasons.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; The more abstract, the more ideal an art
+is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age.&nbsp; If we wish
+to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture
+or its music.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; I quite agree with you there.&nbsp; The spirit of an
+age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit
+itself is abstract and ideal.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think so.&nbsp; After all, what the imitative
+arts really give us are merely the various styles of particular artists,
+or of certain schools of artists.&nbsp; Surely you don&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque,
+or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; No great artist ever sees things as
+they really are.&nbsp; If he did, he would cease to be an artist.&nbsp;
+Take an example from our own day.&nbsp; I know that you are fond of
+Japanese things.&nbsp; Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese
+people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence?&nbsp;
+If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all.&nbsp; The
+Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain
+individual artists.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In fact
+the whole of Japan is a pure invention.&nbsp; There is no such country,
+there are no such people.&nbsp; One of our most charming painters went
+recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing
+the Japanese.&nbsp; All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were
+a few lanterns and some fans.&nbsp; He was quite unable to discover
+the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell&rsquo;s
+Gallery showed only too well.&nbsp; He did not know that the Japanese
+people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy
+of art.&nbsp; And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will
+not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the ancient
+Greeks.&nbsp; Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek
+people were like?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; If you judge from the art, they certainly were
+so.&nbsp; But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; But modern portraits by English painters, what of them?&nbsp;
+Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent?</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Quite so.&nbsp; They are so like them that a hundred
+years from now no one will believe in them.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Holbein&rsquo;s drawings
+of the men and women of his time impress us with a sense of their absolute
+reality.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It
+is style that makes us believe in a thing&mdash;nothing but style.&nbsp;
+Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion.&nbsp;
+They never paint what they see.&nbsp; They paint what the public sees,
+and the public never sees anything.</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end
+of your article.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; With pleasure.&nbsp; Whether it will do any good I
+really cannot say.&nbsp; Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic
+century possible.&nbsp; Why, even Sleep has played us false, and has
+closed up the gates of ivory, and opened the gates of horn.&nbsp; The
+dreams of the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr.
+Myers&rsquo;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.&nbsp; There is not even a fine nightmare among them.&nbsp;
+They are commonplace, sordid and tedious.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But in the English
+Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but through
+his capacity for disbelief.&nbsp; Ours is the only Church where the
+sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the
+ideal apostle.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+ark, or Balaam&rsquo;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.&nbsp; The growth of common sense in the English
+Church is a thing very much to be regretted.&nbsp; It is really a degrading
+concession to a low form of realism.&nbsp; It is silly, too.&nbsp; It
+springs from an entire ignorance of psychology.&nbsp; Man can believe
+the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.&nbsp; However,
+I must read the end of my article:-</p>
+<p>&lsquo;What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do,
+is to revive this old art of Lying.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But this is merely
+the light and graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard at
+Cretan dinner-parties.&nbsp; There are many other forms.&nbsp; Lying
+for the sake of gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance&mdash;lying
+with a moral purpose, as it is usually called&mdash;though of late it
+has been rather looked down upon, was extremely popular with the antique
+world.&nbsp; Athena laughs when Odysseus tells her &ldquo;his words
+of sly devising,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s most exquisite odes.&nbsp; Later on, what at
+first had been merely a natural instinct was elevated into a self-conscious
+science.&nbsp; Elaborate rules were laid down for the guidance of mankind,
+and an important school of literature grew up round the subject.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; A short primer, &ldquo;When to Lie and How,&rdquo;
+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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s <i>Republic</i> that it is unnecessary
+to dwell upon them here.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation,
+and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious
+obscurity.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The solid stolid British intellect lies
+in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert&rsquo;s marvellous tale,
+and fantasy, <i>La Chim&egrave;re</i>, dances round it, and calls to
+it with her false, flute-toned voice.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we
+shall all be!&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The very aspect of the world
+will change to our startled eyes.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the
+phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air.&nbsp; We shall
+lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad&rsquo;s
+head.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But before this comes
+to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>CYRIL.&nbsp; Then we must entirely cultivate it at once.&nbsp; But
+in order to avoid making any error I want you to tell me briefly the
+doctrines of the new aesthetics.</p>
+<p>VIVIAN.&nbsp; Briefly, then, they are these.&nbsp; Art never expresses
+anything but itself.&nbsp; It has an independent life, just as Thought
+has, and develops purely on its own lines.&nbsp; It is not necessarily
+realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; In no case does it reproduce its age.&nbsp; To pass
+from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake that
+all historians commit.</p>
+<p>The second doctrine is this.&nbsp; All bad art comes from returning
+to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.&nbsp; Life and Nature
+may sometimes be used as part of Art&rsquo;s rough material, but before
+they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic
+conventions.&nbsp; The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium
+it surrenders everything.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; To us, who live in the nineteenth
+century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own.&nbsp;
+The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+Besides, it is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.&nbsp;
+M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire.&nbsp; Who
+cares for the Second Empire now?&nbsp; It is out of date.&nbsp; Life
+goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.</p>
+<p>The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates
+Life.&nbsp; This results not merely from Life&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates
+Art.&nbsp; The only effects that she can show us are effects that we
+have already seen through poetry, or in paintings.&nbsp; This is the
+secret of Nature&rsquo;s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature&rsquo;s
+weakness.</p>
+<p>The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
+things, is the proper aim of Art.&nbsp; But of this I think I have spoken
+at sufficient length.&nbsp; And now let us go out on the terrace, where
+&lsquo;droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,&rsquo; while the
+evening star &lsquo;washes the dusk with silver.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Come!&nbsp; We have talked long enough.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PEN, PENCIL AND POISON&mdash;A STUDY IN GREEN</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>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.&nbsp; As a rule this must necessarily be so.&nbsp; That very
+concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic
+of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation.&nbsp;
+To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems
+of much importance.&nbsp; Yet there are many exceptions to this rule.&nbsp;
+Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton
+as Latin secretary to Cromwell.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>This remarkable man, so powerful with &lsquo;pen, pencil and poison,&rsquo;
+as a great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick,
+in 1794.&nbsp; His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of
+Gray&rsquo;s Inn and Hatton Garden.&nbsp; His mother was the daughter
+of the celebrated Dr. Griffiths, the editor and founder of the <i>Monthly
+Review</i>, the partner in another literary speculation of Thomas Davis,
+that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller,
+but &lsquo;a gentleman who dealt in books,&rsquo; the friend of Goldsmith
+and Wedgwood, and one of the most well-known men of his day.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Wainewright died, in giving him birth, at the early age of twenty-one,
+and an obituary notice in the <i>Gentleman&rsquo;s Magazine</i> tells
+us of her &lsquo;amiable disposition and numerous accomplishments,&rsquo;
+and adds somewhat quaintly that &lsquo;she is supposed to have understood
+the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person of either sex
+now living.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s poetry.&nbsp; He went to school at
+Charles Burney&rsquo;s academy at Hammersmith.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Indeed, painting was the first art that fascinated
+him.&nbsp; It was not till much later that he sought to find expression
+by pen or poison.</p>
+<p>Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish
+dreams of the romance and chivalry of a soldier&rsquo;s life, and to
+have become a young guardsman.&nbsp; But the reckless dissipated life
+of his companions failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament
+of one who was made for other things.&nbsp; In a short time he wearied
+of the service.&nbsp; &lsquo;Art,&rsquo; he tells us, in words that
+still move many by their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+But Art was not the only cause of the change.&nbsp; &lsquo;The writings
+of Wordsworth,&rsquo; he goes on to say, &lsquo;did much towards calming
+the confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations.&nbsp;
+I wept over them tears of happiness and gratitude.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was &lsquo;broken
+like a vessel of clay,&rsquo; prostrated him for a time.&nbsp; His delicately
+strung organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting
+pain on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But
+he was young&mdash;only twenty-five years of age&mdash;and he soon passed
+out of the &lsquo;dead black waters,&rsquo; as he called them, into
+the larger air of humanistic culture.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &lsquo;I said with
+John Woodvil,&rsquo; he cries, &lsquo;it were a life of gods to dwell
+in such an element,&rsquo; to see and hear and write brave things:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&lsquo;These high and gusty relishes of life<br />Have no allayings
+of mortality.&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance
+of a man who had a true passion for letters.&nbsp; &lsquo;To see and
+hear and write brave things,&rsquo; this was his aim.</p>
+<p>Scott, the editor of the <i>London Magazine</i>, struck by the young
+man&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+<i>Janus Weathercock</i>, <i>Egomet Bonmot</i>, and <i>Van Vinkvooms</i>,
+were some of the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness
+or to reveal his levity.&nbsp; A mask tells us more than a face.&nbsp;
+These disguises intensified his personality.&nbsp; In an incredibly
+short time he seems to have made his mark.&nbsp; Charles Lamb speaks
+of &lsquo;kind, light-hearted Wainewright,&rsquo; whose prose is &lsquo;capital.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+We hear of him entertaining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd,
+Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and others, at <i>a petit-d&icirc;ner</i>.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; There was
+something in him of Balzac&rsquo;s Lucien de Rubempr&eacute;.&nbsp;
+At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel.&nbsp; De Quincey saw him once.&nbsp;
+It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb&rsquo;s.&nbsp; &lsquo;Amongst the
+company, all literary men, sat a murderer,&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;what sudden growth of another interest&rsquo;
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality
+by the vulgar test of production.&nbsp; This young dandy sought to be
+somebody, rather than to do something.&nbsp; He recognised that Life
+itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that
+seek to express it.&nbsp; Nor is his work without interest.&nbsp; We
+hear of William Blake stopping in the Royal Academy before one of his
+pictures and pronouncing it to be &lsquo;very fine.&rsquo;&nbsp; His
+essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised.&nbsp; He
+seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern culture
+that are regarded by many as true essentials.&nbsp; He writes about
+La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance.&nbsp;
+He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations
+of <i>Cupid and Psyche</i>, and the <i>Hypnerotomachia</i>, and book-binding
+and early editions, and wide-margined proofs.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Like Baudelaire he was
+extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that
+&lsquo;sweet marble monster&rsquo; of both sexes that we can still see
+at Florence and in the Louvre.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In this artistic perception he was perfectly right.&nbsp;
+All beautiful things belong to the same age.</p>
+<p>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 &Kappa;&Alpha;&Lambda;&Omicron;&Sigma; finely traced upon
+its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of the &lsquo;Delphic Sibyl&rsquo;
+of Michael Angelo, or of the &lsquo;Pastoral&rsquo; of Giorgione.&nbsp;
+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, &lsquo;cased in a
+cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded
+with small brilliants and rubies,&rsquo; and close by it &lsquo;squats
+a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of
+corn-bearing Sicily.&rsquo;&nbsp; Some dark antique bronzes contrast
+with the pale gleam of two noble <i>Christi Crucifixi</i>, one carved
+in ivory, the other moulded in wax.&rsquo;&nbsp; He has his trays of
+Tassie&rsquo;s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze <i>bonbonni&egrave;re</i>
+with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized &lsquo;brown-biscuit
+teapots, filagree-worked,&rsquo; his citron morocco letter-case, and
+his &lsquo;pomona-green&rsquo; chair.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s &lsquo;Liber
+Studiorum,&rsquo; of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with
+a magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, &lsquo;the head of
+Alexander on an onyx of two strata,&rsquo; or &lsquo;that superb <i>altissimo
+relievo</i> on cornelian, Jupiter AEgiochus.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was always
+a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful suggestions
+as to the best means of forming a collection.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s own impressions.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;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 &lsquo;taste,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; He certainly could not,
+and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to form any fair estimate
+of contemporary work.&nbsp; But, on the whole, his taste was good and
+sound.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;mere industry and accurate
+transcription.&rsquo;&nbsp; Of Crome&rsquo;s &lsquo;Heath Scene near
+Norwich&rsquo; he remarks that it shows &lsquo;how much a subtle observation
+of the elements, in their wild moods, does for a most uninteresting
+flat,&rsquo; and of the popular type of landscape of his day he says
+that it is &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s pictures as he did for Mr. Crabbe&rsquo;s
+poems.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty
+and dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power.&nbsp;
+Upon the other hand, he was not a doctrinaire.&nbsp; &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+This is one of his excellent aphorisms.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;to see the object
+as in itself it really is.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease
+in his criticisms of contemporary work.&nbsp; &lsquo;The present,&rsquo;
+he says, &lsquo;is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on
+the first perusal. . . . Modern things dazzle me.&nbsp; I must look
+at them through Time&rsquo;s telescope.&nbsp; Elia complains that to
+him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain; &ldquo;print,&rdquo; as he
+excellently says, &ldquo;settles it.&rdquo;&nbsp; Fifty years&rsquo;
+toning does the same thing to a picture.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; What is Gothic touched him very
+little, but classical art and the art of the Renaissance were always
+dear to him.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In his judgments on the great Italian
+Masters, says De Quincey, &lsquo;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.&rsquo;&nbsp; The highest praise that we
+can give to him is that he tried to revive style as a conscious tradition.&nbsp;
+But he saw that no amount of art lectures or art congresses, or &lsquo;plans
+for advancing the fine arts,&rsquo; will ever produce this result.&nbsp;
+The people, he says very wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall,
+must always have &lsquo;the best models constantly before their eyes.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely
+technical in his art criticisms.&nbsp; Of Tintoret&rsquo;s &lsquo;St.
+George delivering the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,&rsquo; he remarks:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>And elsewhere he talks learnedly of &lsquo;a delicate Schiavone,
+various as a tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,&rsquo; of &lsquo;a glowing
+portrait, remarkable for <i>morbidezza</i>, by the scarce Moroni,&rsquo;
+and of another picture being &lsquo;pulpy in the carnations.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; His
+description of Lancret&rsquo;s <i>Repas Italien</i>, in which &lsquo;a
+dark-haired girl, &ldquo;amorous of mischief,&rdquo; lies on the daisy-powdered
+grass,&rsquo; is in some respects very charming.&nbsp; Here is his account
+of &lsquo;The Crucifixion,&rsquo; by Rembrandt.&nbsp; It is extremely
+characteristic of his style:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Darkness&mdash;sooty, portentous darkness&mdash;shrouds the whole
+scene: only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in
+the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge&mdash;&lsquo;sleety-flaw, discoloured
+water&rsquo;&mdash;streams down amain, spreading a grisly spectral light,
+even more horrible than that palpable night.&nbsp; Already the Earth
+pants thick and fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt&mdash;the
+air is stagnant&mdash;a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet,
+and some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill.&nbsp; The
+horses snuff the coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear.&nbsp;
+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, &lsquo;I thirst.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.</p>
+<p>His head sinks, and the sacred corpse &lsquo;swings senseless of
+the cross.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Earth yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers.&nbsp; The dead and
+the living are mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through
+the holy city.&nbsp; New prodigies await them there.&nbsp; The veil
+of the temple&mdash;the unpierceable veil&mdash;is rent asunder from
+top to bottom, and that dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries&mdash;the
+fatal ark with the tables and seven-branched candelabrum&mdash;is disclosed
+by the light of unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude.</p>
+<p>Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; At present it is like a thing in another
+world.&nbsp; A dark gulf is betwixt us.&nbsp; It is not tangible by
+the body.&nbsp; We can only approach it in the spirit.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>In this passage, written, the author tells us, &lsquo;in awe and
+reverence,&rsquo; 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.&nbsp;
+It is pleasanter, however, to pass to this description of Giulio Romano&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Cephalus and Procris&rsquo;:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>We should read Moschus&rsquo;s lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd,
+before looking at this picture, or study the picture as a preparation
+for the lament.&nbsp; We have nearly the same images in both.&nbsp;
+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; &lsquo;the satyrs,
+too, and fauns dark-veiled groan,&rsquo; and the fountain nymphs within
+the wood melt into tearful waters.&nbsp; The sheep and goats leave their
+pasture; and oreads, &lsquo;who love to scale the most inaccessible
+tops of all uprightest rocks,&rsquo; 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, &lsquo;with many-sobbing
+streams,&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling
+horn of Aurora&rsquo;s love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight
+on the top of Hymettus.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;now helpless, heavy, void
+of all motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.</p>
+<p>From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
+forward with loud cries -</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;<br />And
+put strange pity in their horned countenance.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
+death.&nbsp; On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with &lsquo;vans
+dejected&rsquo; 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.&nbsp;
+Above and more remote than the Ephidryad, another female, rending her
+locks, appears among the vine-festooned pillars of an unshorn grove.&nbsp;
+The centre of the picture is filled by shady meadows, sinking down to
+a river-mouth; beyond is &lsquo;the vast strength of the ocean stream,&rsquo;
+from whose floor the extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously
+up her brine-washed steeds to behold the death-pangs of her rival.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable.&nbsp;
+The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent.&nbsp;
+Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim.&nbsp;
+In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but
+from each other.</p>
+<p>His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &lsquo;In art,&rsquo; he says in one of his
+essays, &lsquo;whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well&rsquo;;
+and he points out that once we allow the intrusion of anachronisms,
+it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be drawn.&nbsp; In
+literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous occasion, he was
+&lsquo;on the side of the angels.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was one of the first
+to admire Keats and Shelley&mdash;&lsquo;the tremulously-sensitive and
+poetical Shelley,&rsquo; as he calls him.&nbsp; His admiration for Wordsworth
+was sincere and profound.&nbsp; He thoroughly appreciated William Blake.&nbsp;
+One of the best copies of the &lsquo;Songs of Innocence and Experience&rsquo;
+that is now in existence was wrought specially for him.&nbsp; He loved
+Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer
+and Chapman, and Petrarch.&nbsp; And to him all the arts were one.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Our critics,&rsquo; he remarks with much wisdom, &lsquo;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&rsquo;; 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.&nbsp; To his
+fellow-contributors in the <i>London Magazine</i> he was always most
+generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham, Hazlitt, Elton,
+and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a friend.&nbsp; 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:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most
+seasonably out of season.&nbsp; His talk without affectation was compressed,
+like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity.&nbsp; Like grains
+of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets.&nbsp;
+He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the
+<i>fashion for men of genius</i> was a standing dish.&nbsp; Sir Thomas
+Browne was a &lsquo;bosom cronie&rsquo; of his; so was Burton, and old
+Fuller.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One night at C-&rsquo;s, the above
+dramatic partners were the temporary subject of chat.&nbsp; Mr. X. commended
+the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don&rsquo;t know which
+of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who told him &lsquo;<i>That</i>
+was nothing; the lyrics were the high things&mdash;the lyrics!&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>One side of his literary career deserves especial notice.&nbsp; Modern
+journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of
+the early part of this century.&nbsp; He was the pioneer of Asiatic
+prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations.&nbsp;
+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 <i>Janus</i> <i>Weathercock</i>
+may be said to have invented.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+This being the least valuable side of his work, is the one that has
+had the most obvious influence.&nbsp; A publicist, nowadays, is a man
+who bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his
+private life.</p>
+<p>Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I hold three things in high estimation,&rsquo; he says somewhere:
+&lsquo;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.&nbsp; The country
+gives them all to me.&rsquo;&nbsp; He writes about his wandering over
+fragrant furze and heath repeating Collins&rsquo;s &lsquo;Ode to Evening,&rsquo;
+just to catch the fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face
+&lsquo;in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May dews&rsquo;; and about
+the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine &lsquo;pass slowly homeward
+through the twilight,&rsquo; and hearing &lsquo;the distant clank of
+the sheep-bell.&rsquo;&nbsp; One phrase of his, &lsquo;the polyanthus
+glowed in its cold bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione
+on a dark oaken panel,&rsquo; is curiously characteristic of his temperament,
+and this passage is rather pretty in its way:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>The short tender grass was covered with marguerites&mdash;&lsquo;such
+that men called <i>daisies</i> in our town&rsquo;&mdash;thick as stars
+on a summer&rsquo;s night.&nbsp; The harsh caw of the busy rooks came
+pleasantly mellowed from a high dusky grove of elms at some distance
+off, and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring away the
+birds from the newly-sown seeds.&nbsp; The blue depths were the colour
+of the darkest ultramarine; not a cloud streaked the calm aether; only
+round the horizon&rsquo;s edge streamed a light, warm film of misty
+vapour, against which the near village with its ancient stone church
+showed sharply out with blinding whiteness.&nbsp; I thought of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Lines written in March.&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned
+these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences,
+was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most
+subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age.&nbsp; How he first became
+fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in
+which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and
+the methods that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.&nbsp;
+Even in later days, too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred
+to speak about &lsquo;The Excursion,&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Poems founded
+on the Affections.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is no doubt, however, that the
+poison that he used was strychnine.&nbsp; In one of the beautiful rings
+of which he was so proud, and which served to show off the fine modelling
+of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry crystals of the Indian
+<i>nux vomica</i>, a poison, one of his biographers tells us, &lsquo;nearly
+tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of almost infinite dilution.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+His murders, says De Quincey, were more than were ever made known judicially.&nbsp;
+This is no doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention.&nbsp; His
+first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths.&nbsp; He poisoned
+him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he
+had always been very much attached.&nbsp; In the August of the next
+year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife&rsquo;s mother, and in the
+following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his sister-in-law.&nbsp;
+Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained.&nbsp; It may have
+been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power that was
+in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.&nbsp;
+But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his
+wife for the sake of a sum of about &pound;18,000, for which they had
+insured her life in various offices.&nbsp; The circumstances were as
+follows.&nbsp; On the 12th of December, he and his wife and child came
+up to London from Linden House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit
+Street, Regent Street.&nbsp; With them were the two sisters, Helen and
+Madeleine Abercrombie.&nbsp; On the evening of the 14th they all went
+to the play, and at supper that night Helen sickened.&nbsp; The next
+day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called
+in to attend her.&nbsp; She lived till Monday, the 20th, when, after
+the doctor&rsquo;s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright brought her
+some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk.&nbsp; When they returned
+Helen Abercrombie was dead.&nbsp; She was about twenty years of age,
+a tall graceful girl with fair hair.&nbsp; A very charming red-chalk
+drawing of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows
+how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence,
+a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration.&nbsp;
+De Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder.&nbsp;
+Let us hope that she was not.&nbsp; Sin should be solitary, and have
+no accomplices.</p>
+<p>The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined
+to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want
+of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action
+in the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that
+one decision should govern all the cases.&nbsp; The trial, however,
+did not come on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict
+was ultimately given in the companies&rsquo; favour.&nbsp; The judge
+on the occasion was Lord Abinger.&nbsp; <i>Egomet Bonmot</i> was represented
+by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir
+Frederick Pollock appeared for the other side.&nbsp; The plaintiff,
+unfortunately, was unable to be present at either of the trials.&nbsp;
+The refusal of the companies to give him the &pound;18,000 had placed
+him in a position of most painful pecuniary embarrassment.&nbsp; Indeed,
+a few months after the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he had been actually
+arrested for debt in the streets of London while he was serenading the
+pretty daughter of one of his friends.&nbsp; This difficulty was got
+over at the time, but shortly afterwards he thought it better to go
+abroad till he could come to some practical arrangement with his creditors.&nbsp;
+He accordingly went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of the young
+lady in question, and while he was there induced him to insure his life
+with the Pelican Company for &pound;3000.&nbsp; As soon as the necessary
+formalities had been gone through and the policy executed, he dropped
+some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they sat together one
+evening after dinner.&nbsp; He himself did not gain any monetary advantage
+by doing this.&nbsp; His aim was simply to revenge himself on the first
+office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin.&nbsp; His friend
+died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at once for
+a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany, and
+was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a beautiful
+country house at St. Omer.&nbsp; From this he moved to Paris, where
+he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others
+talk of his &lsquo;skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded
+by all who knew him.&rsquo;&nbsp; In 1837 he returned to England privately.&nbsp;
+Some strange mad fascination brought him back.&nbsp; He followed a woman
+whom he loved.</p>
+<p>It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels
+in Covent Garden.&nbsp; His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and
+he prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen.&nbsp; Thirteen
+years before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica and
+Marc Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a power of
+attorney, which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which
+he had inherited from his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement.&nbsp;
+He knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning
+to England he was imperilling his life.&nbsp; Yet he returned.&nbsp;
+Should one wonder?&nbsp; It was said that the woman was very beautiful.&nbsp;
+Besides, she did not love him.</p>
+<p>It was by a mere accident that he was discovered.&nbsp; A noise in
+the street attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in
+modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment.&nbsp; Some one
+outside called out, &lsquo;That&rsquo;s Wainewright, the Bank-forger.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+It was Forrester, the Bow Street runner.</p>
+<p>On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey.&nbsp; The
+following report of the proceedings appeared in the <i>Times</i>:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
+Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing
+mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of
+attorney for &pound;2259, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company
+of the Bank of England.</p>
+<p>There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which
+he pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin
+in the course of the morning.&nbsp; On being brought before the judges,
+however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and then
+pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a capital
+nature.</p>
+<p>The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other
+indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea
+of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at
+the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation
+for life.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.&nbsp;
+In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself
+&lsquo;lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death&rsquo; for
+having been unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios
+from the British Museum in order to complete his collection.&nbsp; The
+sentence now passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death.&nbsp;
+He complained bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a
+good deal of reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically
+his own, having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such
+as it was, had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his
+own phrase, was at least a <i>circonstance attenuante</i>.&nbsp; The
+permanence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and
+certainly the English law solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready
+manner.&nbsp; There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that
+this heavy punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember
+his fatal influence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly
+not the worst of all his sins.</p>
+<p>While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across
+him by chance.&nbsp; They had been going over the prisons of London,
+searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught
+sight of Wainewright.&nbsp; He met them with a defiant stare, Forster
+tells us, but Macready was &lsquo;horrified to recognise a man familiarly
+known to him in former years, and at whose table he had dined.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind
+of fashionable lounge.&nbsp; Many men of letters went down to visit
+their old literary comrade.&nbsp; But he was no longer the kind light-hearted
+Janus whom Charles Lamb admired.&nbsp; He seems to have grown quite
+cynical.</p>
+<p>To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
+and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
+all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: &lsquo;Sir, you City men
+enter on your speculations, and take the chances of them.&nbsp; Some
+of your speculations succeed, some fail.&nbsp; Mine happen to have failed,
+yours happen to have succeeded.&nbsp; That is the only difference, sir,
+between my visitor and me.&nbsp; But, sir, I will tell you one thing
+in which I have succeeded to the last.&nbsp; I have been determined
+through life to hold the position of a gentleman.&nbsp; I have always
+done so.&nbsp; I do so still.&nbsp; It is the custom of this place that
+each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning&rsquo;s turn of
+sweeping it out.&nbsp; I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep,
+but they never offer me the broom!&rsquo;&nbsp; When a friend reproached
+him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and
+said, &lsquo;Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick
+ankles.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent
+from there in the <i>Susan</i> to Van Diemen&rsquo;s Land along with
+three hundred other convicts.&nbsp; The voyage seems to have been most
+distasteful to him, and in a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly
+about the ignominy of &lsquo;the companion of poets and artists&rsquo;
+being compelled to associate with &lsquo;country bumpkins.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The phrase that he applies to his companions need not surprise us.&nbsp;
+Crime in England is rarely the result of sin.&nbsp; It is nearly always
+the result of starvation.&nbsp; There was probably no one on board in
+whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a psychologically
+interesting nature.</p>
+<p>His love of art, however, never deserted him.&nbsp; At Hobart Town
+he started a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting,
+and his conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm.&nbsp;
+Nor did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on
+record in which he tried to make away with people who had offended him.&nbsp;
+But his hand seems to have lost its cunning.&nbsp; Both of his attempts
+were complete failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with
+Tasmanian society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement,
+Sir John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave.&nbsp; In it
+he speaks of himself as being &lsquo;tormented by ideas struggling for
+outward form and realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge,
+and deprived of the exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+His request, however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled
+himself by making those marvellous <i>Paradis Artificiels</i> whose
+secret is only known to the eaters of opium.&nbsp; In 1852 he died of
+apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for which he had evinced
+at extraordinary affection.</p>
+<p>His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art.&nbsp;
+They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early
+work certainly lacked.&nbsp; In a note to the <i>Life of</i> <i>Dickens</i>,
+Forster mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother,
+Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil
+portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that
+&lsquo;he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness
+into the portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl.&rsquo;&nbsp; M. Zola,
+in one of his novels, tells us of a young man who, having committed
+a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits
+of perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance
+to his victim.&nbsp; The development of Mr. Wainewright&rsquo;s style
+seems to me far more subtle and suggestive.&nbsp; One can fancy an intense
+personality being created out of sin.</p>
+<p>This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled
+literary London, and made so brilliant a <i>d&eacute;but</i> in life
+and letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study.&nbsp; Mr. W. Carew
+Hazlitt, his latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the
+facts contained in this memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite
+invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art and nature
+was a mere pretence and assumption, and others have denied to him all
+literary power.&nbsp; This seems to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken,
+view.&nbsp; The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his
+prose.&nbsp; The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though
+they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.&nbsp;
+It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his critical powers, and
+I cannot help saying again that there is much in his published works
+that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in the bad sense
+of that bad word.&nbsp; Here and there he is distinctly vulgar in expression,
+and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the true artist.&nbsp;
+But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he lived,
+and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought &lsquo;capital&rsquo;
+has no small historic interest.&nbsp; That he had a sincere love of
+art and nature seems to me quite certain.&nbsp; There is no essential
+incongruity between crime and culture.&nbsp; We cannot re-write the
+whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what
+should be.</p>
+<p>Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able
+to form any purely artistic judgment about him.&nbsp; It is impossible
+not to feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned
+Lord Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol.&nbsp; But
+had the man worn a costume and spoken a language different from our
+own, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance,
+or in Spain in the seventeenth century, or in any land or any century
+but this century and this land, we would be quite able to arrive at
+a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position and value.&nbsp; I
+know that there are many historians, or at least writers on historical
+subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history,
+and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency
+of a successful schoolmaster.&nbsp; This, however, is a foolish habit,
+and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch
+of perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required.&nbsp;
+Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or
+scolding Tiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia.&nbsp; These personages
+have become like the puppets of a play.&nbsp; They may fill us with
+terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us.&nbsp; They are
+not in immediate relation to us.&nbsp; We have nothing to fear from
+them.&nbsp; They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and
+neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.&nbsp;
+And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb&rsquo;s friend.&nbsp; At
+present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be treated in
+that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many
+charming studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from
+the pens of Mr. John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss
+Vernon Lee, and other distinguished writers.&nbsp; However, Art has
+not forgotten him.&nbsp; He is the hero of Dickens&rsquo;s <i>Hunted
+Down</i>, the Varney of Bulwer&rsquo;s <i>Lucretia</i>; and it is gratifying
+to note that fiction has paid some homage to one who was so powerful
+with &lsquo;pen, pencil and poison.&rsquo;&nbsp; To be suggestive for
+fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING
+NOTHING</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>A DIALOGUE.&nbsp; Part I.&nbsp; Persons: Gilbert and Ernest.&nbsp;
+Scene: the library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.</p>
+<p>GILBERT (at the Piano).&nbsp; My dear Ernest, what are you laughing
+at?</p>
+<p>ERNEST (looking up).&nbsp; At a capital story that I have just come
+across in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; What is the book?&nbsp; Ah! I see.&nbsp; I have not
+read it yet.&nbsp; Is it good?</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning
+over the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern
+memoirs.&nbsp; They are generally written by people who have either
+entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering;
+which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity,
+as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity
+is talking to it.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.&nbsp; It
+forgives everything except genius.&nbsp; But I must confess that I like
+all memoirs.&nbsp; I like them for their form, just as much as for their
+matter.&nbsp; In literature mere egotism is delightful.&nbsp; It is
+what fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as Cicero
+and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;.&nbsp;
+Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather rare,
+we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it.&nbsp; Humanity
+will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest,
+but to the world, and the couchant nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze
+for the castle of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, that
+in the open Loggia at Florence shows the moon the dead terror that once
+turned life to stone, have not given it more pleasure than has that
+autobiography in which the supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates
+the story of his splendour and his shame.&nbsp; The opinions, the character,
+the achievements of the man, matter very little.&nbsp; He may be a sceptic
+like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son of
+Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm our
+ears to listening and our lips to silence.&nbsp; The mode of thought
+that Cardinal Newman represented&mdash;if that can be called a mode
+of thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of
+the supremacy of the intellect&mdash;may not, cannot, I think, survive.&nbsp;
+But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its
+progress from darkness to darkness.&nbsp; The lonely church at Littlemore,
+where &lsquo;the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are
+few,&rsquo; will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow
+snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that
+gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower&rsquo;s sure recurrence
+a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his
+days&mdash;a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered
+not to be fulfilled.&nbsp; Yes; autobiography is irresistible.&nbsp;
+Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into
+the circle of the Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the
+better part of valour, bustles about among them in that &lsquo;shaggy
+purple gown with gold buttons and looped lace&rsquo; which he is so
+fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, and prattling, to his
+own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue petticoat that he
+bought for his wife, of the &lsquo;good hog&rsquo;s hars-let,&rsquo;
+and the &lsquo;pleasant French fricassee of veal&rsquo; that he loved
+to eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his &lsquo;gadding
+after beauties,&rsquo; and his reciting of <i>Hamlet</i> on a Sunday,
+and his playing of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial
+things.&nbsp; Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions.&nbsp;
+When people talk to us about others they are usually dull.&nbsp; When
+they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting,
+and if one could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily
+as one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would
+be perfect absolutely.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would
+say.&nbsp; But do you seriously propose that every man should become
+his own Boswell?&nbsp; What would become of our industrious compilers
+of Lives and Recollections in that case?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; What has become of them?&nbsp; They are the pest of
+the age, nothing more and nothing less.&nbsp; Every great man nowadays
+has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; My dear fellow!</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; I am afraid it is true.&nbsp; Formerly we used to
+canonise our heroes.&nbsp; The modern method is to vulgarise them.&nbsp;
+Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions
+of great men are absolutely detestable.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Oh! to all our second-rate <i>litt&eacute;rateurs</i>.&nbsp;
+We are overrun by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away,
+arrive at the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their
+one duty is to behave as mutes.&nbsp; But we won&rsquo;t talk about
+them.&nbsp; They are the mere body-snatchers of literature.&nbsp; The
+dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul is out
+of their reach.&nbsp; And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvor&aacute;k?&nbsp;
+Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvor&aacute;k?&nbsp; He writes passionate,
+curiously-coloured things.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; No; I don&rsquo;t want music just at present.&nbsp;
+It is far too indefinite.&nbsp; Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein
+down to dinner last night, and, though absolutely charming in every
+other respect, she insisted on discussing music as if it were actually
+written in the German language.&nbsp; Now, whatever music sounds like
+I am glad to say that it does not sound in the smallest degree like
+German.&nbsp; There are forms of patriotism that are really quite degrading.&nbsp;
+No; Gilbert, don&rsquo;t play any more.&nbsp; Turn round and talk to
+me.&nbsp; Talk to me till the white-horned day comes into the room.&nbsp;
+There is something in your voice that is wonderful.</p>
+<p>GILBERT (rising from the piano).&nbsp; I am not in a mood for talking
+to-night.&nbsp; I really am not.&nbsp; How horrid of you to smile!&nbsp;
+Where are the cigarettes?&nbsp; Thanks.&nbsp; How exquisite these single
+daffodils are!&nbsp; They seem to be made of amber and cool ivory.&nbsp;
+They are like Greek things of the best period.&nbsp; What was the story
+in the confessions of the remorseful Academician that made you laugh?&nbsp;
+Tell it to me.&nbsp; After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping
+over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that
+were not my own.&nbsp; Music always seems to me to produce that effect.&nbsp;
+It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills
+one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one&rsquo;s tears.&nbsp;
+I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing
+by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that
+his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible
+experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great
+renunciations.&nbsp; And so tell me this story, Ernest.&nbsp; I want
+to be amused.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Oh!&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know that it is of any importance.&nbsp;
+But I thought it a really admirable illustration of the true value of
+ordinary art-criticism.&nbsp; It seems that a lady once gravely asked
+the remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated picture
+of &lsquo;A Spring-Day at Whiteley&rsquo;s,&rsquo; or, &lsquo;Waiting
+for the Last Omnibus,&rsquo; or some subject of that kind, was all painted
+by hand?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; And was it?</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; You are quite incorrigible.&nbsp; But, seriously speaking,
+what is the use of art-criticism?&nbsp; Why cannot the artist be left
+alone, to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow
+forth the world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would
+each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice and
+delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us,
+and give to it a momentary perfection.&nbsp; It seems to me that the
+imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it, and works
+best in silence and in isolation.&nbsp; Why should the artist be troubled
+by the shrill clamour of criticism?&nbsp; Why should those who cannot
+create take upon themselves to estimate the value of creative work?&nbsp;
+What can they know about it?&nbsp; If a man&rsquo;s work is easy to
+understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation
+is wicked.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; I did not say that.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Ah! but you should have.&nbsp; Nowadays, we have so
+few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.&nbsp;
+The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad
+Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott&rsquo;s Great Writers
+Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain their divinity
+away.&nbsp; Where one had hoped that Browning was a mystic they have
+sought to show that he was simply inarticulate.&nbsp; Where one had
+fancied that he had something to conceal, they have proved that he had
+but little to reveal.&nbsp; But I speak merely of his incoherent work.&nbsp;
+Taken as a whole the man was great.&nbsp; He did not belong to the Olympians,
+and had all the incompleteness of the Titan.&nbsp; He did not survey,
+and it was but rarely that he could sing.&nbsp; His work is marred by
+struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form,
+but from thought to chaos.&nbsp; Still, he was great.&nbsp; He has been
+called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and
+always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but
+rather the processes by which thought moves.&nbsp; It was the machine
+he loved, not what the machine makes.&nbsp; The method by which the
+fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom
+of the wise.&nbsp; So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind
+fascinate him that he despised language, or looked upon it as an incomplete
+instrument of expression.&nbsp; Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in
+the Muse&rsquo;s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme,
+which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material
+element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion
+also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas,
+or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door
+at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can
+turn man&rsquo;s utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord
+we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning&rsquo;s hands
+a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in
+poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue
+in his cheek.&nbsp; There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous
+music.&nbsp; Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the strings
+of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no Athenian
+tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory horn
+to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh.&nbsp; Yet,
+he was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made
+from it men and women that live.&nbsp; He is the most Shakespearian
+creature since Shakespeare.&nbsp; If Shakespeare could sing with myriad
+lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths.&nbsp; Even now,
+as I am speaking, and speaking not against him but for him, there glides
+through the room the pageant of his persons.&nbsp; There, creeps Fra
+Lippo Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some girl&rsquo;s hot
+kiss.&nbsp; There, stands dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires
+gleaming in his turban.&nbsp; Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish
+monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop
+of St. Praxed&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner,
+and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima&rsquo;s haggard face,
+and loathes her and his own sin, and himself.&nbsp; Pale as the white
+satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous
+eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders
+as he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect
+wife go down.&nbsp; Yes, Browning was great.&nbsp; And as what will
+he be remembered?&nbsp; As a poet?&nbsp; Ah, not as a poet!&nbsp; He
+will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme writer
+of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.&nbsp; His sense of dramatic
+situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not answer his own problems,
+he could at least put problems forth, and what more should an artist
+do?&nbsp; Considered from the point of view of a creator of character
+he ranks next to him who made Hamlet.&nbsp; Had he been articulate,
+he might have sat beside him.&nbsp; The only man who can touch the hem
+of his garment is George Meredith.&nbsp; Meredith is a prose Browning,
+and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; There is something in what you say, but there is not
+everything in what you say.&nbsp; In many points you are unjust.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.&nbsp;
+But let us return to the particular point at issue.&nbsp; What was it
+that you said?</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Simply this: that in the best days of art there were
+no art-critics.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest.&nbsp;
+It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; It is true.&nbsp; Yes: there is no use your tossing
+your head in that petulant manner.&nbsp; It is quite true.&nbsp; In
+the best days of art there were no art-critics.&nbsp; The sculptor hewed
+from the marble block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within
+it.&nbsp; The waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to
+the statue, and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb.&nbsp;
+He poured the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the river of
+red metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body
+of a god.&nbsp; With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the
+sightless eyes.&nbsp; The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his
+graver.&nbsp; And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit
+portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who passed
+by, &delta;&iota;&alpha; &lambda;&alpha;&mu;&pi;&rho;&omicron;&tau;&alpha;&tau;&omicron;&upsilon;
+&beta;&alpha;&iota;&nu;&omicron;&nu;&tau;&epsilon;&sigmaf; &alpha;&beta;&rho;&omega;&sigmaf;
+&alpha;&iota;&theta;&epsilon;&rho;&omicron;&sigmaf;, became conscious
+of a new influence that had come across their lives, and dreamily, or
+with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went to their homes or daily
+labour, or wandered, it may be, through the city gates to that nymph-haunted
+meadow where young Phaedrus bathed his feet, and, lying there on the
+soft grass, beneath the tall wind&mdash;whispering planes and flowering
+<i>agnus castus</i>, began to think of the wonder of beauty, and grew
+silent with unaccustomed awe.&nbsp; In those days the artist was free.&nbsp;
+From the river valley he took the fine clay in his fingers, and with
+a little tool of wood or bone, fashioned it into forms so exquisite
+that the people gave them to the dead as their playthings, and we find
+them still in the dusty tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with
+the faint gold and the fading crimson still lingering about hair and
+lips and raiment.&nbsp; On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright
+sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with
+tired feet the purple white-starred fields of asphodel, one &lsquo;in
+whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan War,&rsquo; Polyxena, the
+daughter of Priam; or figured Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound
+by tight cords to the mast-step, that he might listen without hurt to
+the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron,
+where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the
+Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the
+galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay.&nbsp;
+He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared cedar.&nbsp;
+Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted with wax, making
+the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated irons making it
+firm.&nbsp; Panel and marble and linen canvas became wonderful as his
+brush swept across them; and life seeing her own image, was still, and
+dared not speak.&nbsp; All life, indeed, was his, from the merchants
+seated in the market-place to the cloaked shepherd lying on the hill;
+from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon,
+to the king whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon oil-bright
+shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans.&nbsp; Men and women, with pleasure
+or sorrow in their faces, passed before him.&nbsp; He watched them,
+and their secret became his.&nbsp; Through form and colour he re-created
+a world.</p>
+<p>All subtle arts belonged to him also.&nbsp; He held the gem against
+the revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for Adonis,
+and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds.&nbsp; He
+beat out the gold into roses, and strung them together for necklace
+or armlet.&nbsp; He beat out the gold into wreaths for the conqueror&rsquo;s
+helmet, or into palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the
+royal dead.&nbsp; On the back of the silver mirror he graved Thetis
+borne by her Nereids, or love-sick Phaedra with her nurse, or Persephone,
+weary of memory, putting poppies in her hair.&nbsp; The potter sat in
+his shed, and, flower-like from the silent wheel, the vase rose up beneath
+his hands.&nbsp; He decorated the base and stem and ears with pattern
+of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated acanthus, or curved and crested wave.&nbsp;
+Then in black or red he painted lads wrestling, or in the race: knights
+in full armour, with strange heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning
+from shell-shaped chariot over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the
+feast or working their miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their
+pain.&nbsp; Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground
+of white the languid bridegroom and his bride, with Eros hovering round
+them&mdash;an Eros like one of Donatello&rsquo;s angels, a little laughing
+thing with gilded or with azure wings.&nbsp; On the curved side he would
+write the name of his friend.&nbsp; &Kappa;&Alpha;&Lambda;&Omicron;&Sigma;
+&Alpha;&Lambda;&Kappa;&Iota;&Beta;&Iota;&Alpha;&Delta;&Eta;&Sigma; or
+&Kappa;&Alpha;&Lambda;&Omicron;&Sigma; &Chi;&Alpha;&Rho;&Mu;&Iota;&Delta;&Eta;&Sigma;
+tells us the story of his days.&nbsp; Again, on the rim of the wide
+flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at rest, as his
+fancy willed it.&nbsp; From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed Aphrodite
+at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Maenads in his train, Dionysus
+danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained feet, while, satyr-like,
+the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated skins, or shook that magic
+spear which was tipped with a fretted fir-cone, and wreathed with dark
+ivy.&nbsp; And no one came to trouble the artist at his work.&nbsp;
+No irresponsible chatter disturbed him.&nbsp; He was not worried by
+opinions.&nbsp; By the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no
+Higginbotham.&nbsp; By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly
+art congresses bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching
+the mediocrity how to mouth.&nbsp; By the Ilyssus there were no tedious
+magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do
+not understand.&nbsp; On the reed-grown banks of that little stream
+strutted no ridiculous journalism monopolising the seat of judgment
+when it should be apologising in the dock.&nbsp; The Greeks had no art-critics.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are
+terribly unsound.&nbsp; I am afraid that you have been listening to
+the conversation of some one older than yourself.&nbsp; That is always
+a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit
+you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.&nbsp;
+As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it.&nbsp;
+It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the
+survival of the vulgarest.&nbsp; I have merely to do with literature.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But what is the difference between literature and journalism?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not
+read.&nbsp; That is all.&nbsp; But with regard to your statement that
+the Greeks had no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd.&nbsp;
+It would be more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Really?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes, a nation of art-critics.&nbsp; But I don&rsquo;t
+wish to destroy the delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn
+of the relation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of
+his age.&nbsp; To give an accurate description of what has never occurred
+is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable
+privilege of any man of parts and culture.&nbsp; Still less do I desire
+to talk learnedly.&nbsp; Learned conversation is either the affectation
+of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.&nbsp;
+And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the
+foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly
+tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes.&nbsp; No:
+let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by Dvor&aacute;k.&nbsp; The
+pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, and the heavy eyelids
+of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t let us
+discuss anything solemnly.&nbsp; I am but too conscious of the fact
+that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously,
+and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t degrade
+me into the position of giving you useful information.&nbsp; Education
+is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time
+that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.&nbsp; Through the
+parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of
+silver.&nbsp; Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.&nbsp; The
+sky is a hard hollow sapphire.&nbsp; Let us go out into the night.&nbsp;
+Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful still.&nbsp; Who
+knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear the fair
+Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; You are horribly wilful.&nbsp; I insist on your discussing
+this matter with me.&nbsp; You have said that the Greeks were a nation
+of art-critics.&nbsp; What art-criticism have they left us?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism
+had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none
+the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that
+they invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism
+of everything else.&nbsp; For, after all, what is our primary debt to
+the Greeks?&nbsp; Simply the critical spirit.&nbsp; And, this spirit,
+which they exercised on questions of religion and science, of ethics
+and metaphysics, of politics and education, they exercised on questions
+of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme and highest arts, they
+have left us the most flawless system of criticism that the world has
+ever seen.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But what are the two supreme and highest arts?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression
+of life.&nbsp; The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks,
+we may not realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.&nbsp;
+The principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases,
+so subtle that we can hardly understand them.&nbsp; Recognising that
+the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his
+infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism of language, considered
+in the light of the mere material of that art, to a point to which we,
+with our accentual system of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely
+if at all attain; studying, for instance, the metrical movements of
+a prose as scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint,
+and, I need hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct.&nbsp; In
+this they were right, as they were right in all things.&nbsp; Since
+the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit
+of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country, there
+has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye,
+and less and less to the ear which is really the sense which, from the
+standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons
+of pleasure it should abide always.&nbsp; Even the work of Mr. Pater,
+who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English prose now creating
+amongst us, is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage
+in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life
+of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical
+life produces.&nbsp; We, in fact, have made writing a definite mode
+of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate design.&nbsp;
+The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a method
+of chronicling.&nbsp; Their test was always the spoken word in its musical
+and metrical relations.&nbsp; The voice was the medium, and the ear
+the critic.&nbsp; I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer&rsquo;s
+blindness might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days,
+and serving to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a
+seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes
+of the soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his song out
+of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself till he
+has caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words
+that are winged with light.&nbsp; Certainly, whether this be so or not,
+it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England&rsquo;s
+great poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour
+of his later verse.&nbsp; When Milton could no longer write he began
+to sing.&nbsp; Who would match the measures of <i>Comus</i> with the
+measures of <i>Samson Agonistes</i>, or of <i>Paradise Lost</i> or <i>Regained</i>?&nbsp;
+When Milton became blind he composed, as every one should compose, with
+the voice purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days became that
+mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all the stateliness
+of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have its swiftness, and is the
+one imperishable inheritance of English literature sweeping through
+all the ages, because above them, and abiding with us ever, being immortal
+in its form.&nbsp; Yes: writing has done much harm to writers.&nbsp;
+We must return to the voice.&nbsp; That must be our test, and perhaps
+then we shall be able to appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek
+art-criticism.</p>
+<p>As it now is, we cannot do so.&nbsp; Sometimes, when I have written
+a piece of prose that I have been modest enough to consider absolutely
+free from fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I may have been
+guilty of the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachic movements,
+a crime for which a learned critic of the Augustan age censures with
+most just severity the brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias.&nbsp;
+I grow cold when I think of it, and wonder to myself if the admirable
+ethical effect of the prose of that charming writer, who once in a spirit
+of reckless generosity towards the uncultivated portion of our community
+proclaimed the monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life,
+will not some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the
+paeons have been wrongly placed.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Ah! now you are flippant.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told
+that the Greeks had no art-critics?&nbsp; I can understand it being
+said that the constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism,
+but not that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not criticise.&nbsp;
+You will not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art criticism from
+Plato to Plotinus.&nbsp; The night is too lovely for that, and the moon,
+if she heard us, would put more ashes on her face than are there already.&nbsp;
+But think merely of one perfect little work of aesthetic criticism,
+Aristotle&rsquo;s <i>Treatise on Poetry</i>.&nbsp; It is not perfect
+in form, for it is badly written, consisting perhaps of notes dotted
+down for an art lecture, or of isolated fragments destined for some
+larger book, but in temper and treatment it is perfect, absolutely.&nbsp;
+The ethical effect of art, its importance to culture, and its place
+in the formation of character, had been done once for all by Plato;
+but here we have art treated, not from the moral, but from the purely
+aesthetic point of view.&nbsp; Plato had, of course, dealt with many
+definitely artistic subjects, such as the importance of unity in a work
+of art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic value of appearances,
+the relation of the visible arts to the external world, and the relation
+of fiction to fact.&nbsp; He first perhaps stirred in the soul of man
+that desire that we have not yet satisfied, the desire to know the connection
+between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual
+order of the Kosmos.&nbsp; The problems of idealism and realism, as
+he sets them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result
+in the metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them,
+but transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they
+are still vital and full of meaning.&nbsp; It may be that it is as a
+critic of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering
+the name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a new philosophy.&nbsp;
+But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily in its concrete
+manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and investigating the
+material it uses, which is language, its subject-matter, which is life,
+the method by which it works, which is action, the conditions under
+which it reveals itself, which are those of theatric presentation, its
+logical structure, which is plot, and its final aesthetic appeal, which
+is to the sense of beauty realised through the passions of pity and
+awe.&nbsp; That purification and spiritualising of the nature which
+he calls &kappa;&alpha;&theta;&alpha;&rho;&sigma;&iota;&sigmaf; is,
+as Goethe saw, essentially aesthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied.&nbsp;
+Concerning himself primarily with the impression that the work of art
+produces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, to investigate
+its source, to see how it is engendered.&nbsp; As a physiologist and
+psychologist, he knows that the health of a function resides in energy.&nbsp;
+To have a capacity for a passion and not to realise it, is to make oneself
+incomplete and limited.&nbsp; The mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy
+affords cleanses the bosom of much &lsquo;perilous stuff,&rsquo; and
+by presenting high and worthy objects for the exercise of the emotions
+purifies and spiritualises the man; nay, not merely does it spiritualise
+him, but it initiates him also into noble feelings of which he might
+else have known nothing, the word &kappa;&alpha;&theta;&alpha;&rho;&sigma;&iota;&sigmaf;
+having, it has sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite
+of initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to
+fancy, its true and only meaning here.&nbsp; This is of course a mere
+outline of the book.&nbsp; But you see what a perfect piece of aesthetic
+criticism it is.&nbsp; Who indeed but a Greek could have analysed art
+so well?&nbsp; After reading it, one does not wonder any longer that
+Alexandria devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and that we find
+the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every question of
+style and manner, discussing the great Academic schools of painting,
+for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve
+the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or the realistic and impressionist
+schools, that aimed at reproducing actual life, or the elements of ideality
+in portraiture, or the artistic value of the epic form in an age so
+modern as theirs, or the proper subject-matter for the artist.&nbsp;
+Indeed, I fear that the inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves
+also in matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism
+were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin colourless
+lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing
+nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth
+by crying out that they have been robbed.&nbsp; And I assure you, my
+dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much
+as people do nowadays, and had their private views, and shilling exhibitions,
+and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements
+towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and
+produced their art-historians, and their archaeologists, and all the
+rest of it.&nbsp; Why, even the theatrical managers of travelling companies
+brought their dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and
+paid them very handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices.&nbsp;
+Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks.&nbsp;
+Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.&nbsp; It is the Greeks
+who have given us the whole system of art-criticism, and how fine their
+critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that the material they
+criticised with most care was, as I have already said, language.&nbsp;
+For the material that painter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparison
+with that of words.&nbsp; Words have not merely music as sweet as that
+of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely
+for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form
+no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or
+in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also,
+are theirs indeed alone.&nbsp; If the Greeks had criticised nothing
+but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the
+world.&nbsp; To know the principles of the highest art is to know the
+principles of all the arts.</p>
+<p>But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud.&nbsp;
+Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion&rsquo;s eye.&nbsp;
+She is afraid that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, of Quinctilian
+and Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of all those who in
+the antique world wrote or lectured upon art matters.&nbsp; She need
+not be afraid.&nbsp; I am tired of my expedition into the dim, dull
+abyss of facts.&nbsp; There is nothing left for me now but the divine
+&mu;&omicron;&nu;&omicron;&chi;&rho;&omicron;&nu;&omicron;&sigmaf; &eta;&delta;&omicron;&nu;&eta;
+of another cigarette.&nbsp; Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving
+one unsatisfied.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Try one of mine.&nbsp; They are rather good.&nbsp;
+I get them direct from Cairo.&nbsp; The only use of our <i>attach&eacute;s</i>
+is that they supply their friends with excellent tobacco.&nbsp; And
+as the moon has hidden herself, let us talk a little longer.&nbsp; I
+am quite ready to admit that I was wrong in what I said about the Greeks.&nbsp;
+They were, as you have pointed out, a nation of art-critics.&nbsp; I
+acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them.&nbsp; For the creative
+faculty is higher than the critical.&nbsp; There is really no comparison
+between them.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary.&nbsp;
+Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all,
+worthy of the name.&nbsp; You spoke a little while ago of that fine
+spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist
+realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary perfection.&nbsp;
+Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really
+the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no
+one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at
+all in art.&nbsp; Arnold&rsquo;s definition of literature as a criticism
+of life was not very felicitous in form, but it showed how keenly he
+recognised the importance of the critical element in all creative work.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; I should have said that great artists work unconsciously,
+that they were &lsquo;wiser than they knew,&rsquo; as, I think, Emerson
+remarks somewhere.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It is really not so, Ernest.&nbsp; All fine imaginative
+work is self-conscious and deliberate.&nbsp; No poet sings because he
+must sing.&nbsp; At least, no great poet does.&nbsp; A great poet sings
+because he chooses to sing.&nbsp; It is so now, and it has always been
+so.&nbsp; We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded
+at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours,
+and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which
+they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost without
+changing could pass into song.&nbsp; The snow lies thick now upon Olympus,
+and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy,
+the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the
+morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the
+vale.&nbsp; But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we
+desire, or think we desire, for our own.&nbsp; Our historical sense
+is at fault.&nbsp; Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an
+artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural
+and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious
+effort.&nbsp; Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness,
+and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; I see what you mean, and there is much in it.&nbsp;
+But surely you would admit that the great poems of the early world,
+the primitive, anonymous collective poems, were the result of the imagination
+of races, rather than of the imagination of individuals?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Not when they became poetry.&nbsp; Not when they received
+a beautiful form.&nbsp; For there is no art where there is no style,
+and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.&nbsp;
+No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare
+had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work, but they were
+merely his rough material.&nbsp; He took them, and shaped them into
+song.&nbsp; They become his, because he made them lovely.&nbsp; They
+were built out of music,</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>And so not built at all,<br />And therefore built for ever.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one
+feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual,
+and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates
+the age.&nbsp; Indeed, I am inclined to think that each myth and legend
+that seems to us to spring out of the wonder, or terror, or fancy of
+tribe and nation, was in its origin the invention of one single mind.&nbsp;
+The curiously limited number of the myths seems to me to point to this
+conclusion.&nbsp; But we must not go off into questions of comparative
+mythology.&nbsp; We must keep to criticism.&nbsp; And what I want to
+point out is this.&nbsp; An age that has no criticism is either an age
+in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction
+of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all.&nbsp; There
+have been critical ages that have not been creative, in the ordinary
+sense of the word, ages in which the spirit of man has sought to set
+in order the treasures of his treasure-house, to separate the gold from
+the silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over the jewels,
+and to give names to the pearls.&nbsp; But there has never been a creative
+age that has not been critical also.&nbsp; For it is the critical faculty
+that invents fresh forms.&nbsp; The tendency of creation is to repeat
+itself.&nbsp; It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school
+that springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.&nbsp;
+There is really not a single form that art now uses that does not come
+to us from the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were
+either stereotyped or invented or made perfect.&nbsp; I say Alexandria,
+not merely because it was there that the Greek spirit became most self-conscious,
+and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and theology, but because
+it was to that city, and not to Athens, that Rome turned for her models,
+and it was through the survival, such as it was, of the Latin language
+that culture lived at all.&nbsp; When, at the Renaissance, Greek literature
+dawned upon Europe, the soil had been in some measure prepared for it.&nbsp;
+But, to get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome
+and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art
+have been due to the Greek critical spirit.&nbsp; To it we owe the epic,
+the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including
+burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the
+essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we
+should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the wide meaning of
+that word.&nbsp; In fact, we owe it everything, except the sonnet, to
+which, however, some curious parallels of thought-movement may be traced
+in the Anthology, American journalism, to which no parallel can be found
+anywhere, and the ballad in sham Scotch dialect, which one of our most
+industrious writers has recently proposed should be made the basis for
+a final and unanimous effort on the part of our second-rate poets to
+make themselves really romantic.&nbsp; Each new school, as it appears,
+cries out against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man
+that it owes its origin.&nbsp; The mere creative instinct does not innovate,
+but reproduces.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; You have been talking of criticism as an essential
+part of the creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory.&nbsp;
+But what of criticism outside creation?&nbsp; I have a foolish habit
+of reading periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism
+is perfectly valueless.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; So is most modern creative work also.&nbsp; Mediocrity
+weighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its
+brother&mdash;that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England
+affords us from time to time.&nbsp; And yet, I feel I am a little unfair
+in this matter.&nbsp; As a rule, the critics&mdash;I speak, of course,
+of the higher class, of those in fact who write for the sixpenny papers&mdash;are
+far more cultured than the people whose work they are called upon to
+review.&nbsp; This is, indeed, only what one would expect, for criticism
+demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Really?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Certainly.&nbsp; Anybody can write a three-volumed
+novel.&nbsp; It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and
+literature.&nbsp; The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels
+is the difficulty of sustaining any standard.&nbsp; Where there is no
+style a standard must be impossible.&nbsp; The poor reviewers are apparently
+reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, the chroniclers
+of the doings of the habitual criminals of art.&nbsp; It is sometimes
+said of them that they do not read all through the works they are called
+upon to criticise.&nbsp; They do not.&nbsp; Or at least they should
+not.&nbsp; If they did so, they would become confirmed misanthropes,
+or if I may borrow a phrase from one of the pretty Newnham graduates,
+confirmed womanthropes for the rest of their lives.&nbsp; Nor is it
+necessary.&nbsp; To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need
+not drink the whole cask.&nbsp; It must be perfectly easy in half an
+hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing.&nbsp;
+Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form.&nbsp;
+Who wants to wade through a dull volume?&nbsp; One tastes it, and that
+is quite enough&mdash;more than enough, I should imagine.&nbsp; I am
+aware that there are many honest workers in painting as well as in literature
+who object to criticism entirely.&nbsp; They are quite right.&nbsp;
+Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age.&nbsp; It
+brings us no new element of pleasure.&nbsp; It suggests no fresh departure
+of thought, or passion, or beauty.&nbsp; It should not be spoken of.&nbsp;
+It should be left to the oblivion that it deserves.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But, my dear fellow&mdash;excuse me for interrupting
+you&mdash;you seem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to
+lead you a great deal too far.&nbsp; For, after all, even you must admit
+that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it?&nbsp;
+Not at all.&nbsp; That is a gross popular error.&nbsp; It is very much
+more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.&nbsp; In the sphere
+of actual life that is of course obvious.&nbsp; Anybody can make history.&nbsp;
+Only a great man can write it.&nbsp; There is no mode of action, no
+form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals.&nbsp;
+It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other&mdash;by
+language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.&nbsp;
+Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its most
+aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be that of
+real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have nothing
+whatsoever to do.&nbsp; No, Ernest, don&rsquo;t talk about action.&nbsp;
+It is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an
+impulse of whose nature it is unconscious.&nbsp; It is a thing incomplete
+in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction,
+being always at variance with its aim.&nbsp; Its basis is the lack of
+imagination.&nbsp; It is the last resource of those who know not how
+to dream.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal
+ball.&nbsp; You hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful
+fancy.&nbsp; You do nothing but re-write history.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.&nbsp;
+That is not the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit.&nbsp;
+When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life,
+we shall realise that the one person who has more illusions than the
+dreamer is the man of action.&nbsp; He, indeed, knows neither the origin
+of his deeds nor their results.&nbsp; From the field in which he thought
+that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our vintage, and the fig-tree
+that he planted for our pleasure is as barren as the thistle, and more
+bitter.&nbsp; It is because Humanity has never known where it was going
+that it has been able to find its way.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious
+aim is a delusion?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It is worse than a delusion.&nbsp; If we lived long
+enough to see the results of our actions it may be that those who call
+themselves good would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom
+the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy.&nbsp; Each little thing
+that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our
+virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into
+elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and more splendid than
+any that has gone before.&nbsp; But men are the slaves of words.&nbsp;
+They rage against Materialism, as they call it, forgetting that there
+has been no material improvement that has not spiritualised the world,
+and that there have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have
+not wasted the world&rsquo;s faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless
+aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds.&nbsp; What is termed Sin
+is an essential element of progress.&nbsp; Without it the world would
+stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.&nbsp; By its curiosity
+Sin increases the experience of the race.&nbsp; Through its intensified
+assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type.&nbsp;
+In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with
+the higher ethics.&nbsp; And as for the virtues!&nbsp; What are the
+virtues?&nbsp; Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little about chastity,
+and it may be that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not to their
+own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom from
+stain.&nbsp; Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal
+part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.&nbsp;
+The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate
+so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect
+development.&nbsp; It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.&nbsp;
+Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and
+self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that
+old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of
+the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has
+its altars in the land.&nbsp; Virtues!&nbsp; Who knows what the virtues
+are?&nbsp; Not you.&nbsp; Not I.&nbsp; Not any one.&nbsp; It is well
+for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to
+live he might show us what we had gained by his crime.&nbsp; It is well
+for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom.&nbsp; He is spared
+the sight of the horror of his harvest.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note.&nbsp; Let us go
+back to the more gracious fields of literature.&nbsp; What was it you
+said?&nbsp; That it was more difficult to talk about a thing than to
+do it?</p>
+<p>GILBERT (after a pause).&nbsp; Yes: I believe I ventured upon that
+simple truth.&nbsp; Surely you see now that I am right?&nbsp; When man
+acts he is a puppet.&nbsp; When he describes he is a poet.&nbsp; The
+whole secret lies in that.&nbsp; It was easy enough on the sandy plains
+by windy Ilion to send the notched arrow from the painted bow, or to
+hurl against the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ash-handled
+spear.&nbsp; It was easy for the adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian
+carpets for her lord, and then, as he lay couched in the marble bath,
+to throw over his head the purple net, and call to her smooth-faced
+lover to stab through the meshes at the heart that should have broken
+at Aulis.&nbsp; For Antigone even, with Death waiting for her as her
+bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the tainted air at noon, and
+climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the wretched naked corse
+that had no tomb.&nbsp; But what of those who wrote about these things?&nbsp;
+What of those who gave them reality, and made them live for ever?&nbsp;
+Are they not greater than the men and women they sing of?&nbsp; &lsquo;Hector
+that sweet knight is dead,&rsquo; and Lucian tells us how in the dim
+under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen, and marvelled
+that it was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships were launched,
+those beautiful mailed men laid low, those towered cities brought to
+dust.&nbsp; Yet, every day the swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on
+the battlements, and looks down at the tide of war.&nbsp; The greybeards
+wonder at her loveliness, and she stands by the side of the king.&nbsp;
+In his chamber of stained ivory lies her leman.&nbsp; He is polishing
+his dainty armour, and combing the scarlet plume.&nbsp; With squire
+and page, her husband passes from tent to tent.&nbsp; She can see his
+bright hair, and hears, or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice.&nbsp;
+In the courtyard below, the son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass.&nbsp;
+The white arms of Andromache are around his neck.&nbsp; He sets his
+helmet on the ground, lest their babe should be frightened.&nbsp; Behind
+the embroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles, in perfumed
+raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his soul
+arrays himself to go forth to the fight.&nbsp; From a curiously carven
+chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lord
+of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that the lip of man had
+never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and with fresh water
+cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black wine its burnished
+hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon the ground in honour of
+Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophets worshipped, and prays to Him,
+and knows not that he prays in vain, and that by the hands of two knights
+from Troy, Panthous&rsquo; son, Euphorbus, whose love-locks were looped
+with gold, and the Priamid, the lion-hearted, Patroklus, the comrade
+of comrades, must meet his doom.&nbsp; Phantoms, are they?&nbsp; Heroes
+of mist and mountain?&nbsp; Shadows in a song?&nbsp; No: they are real.&nbsp;
+Action!&nbsp; What is action?&nbsp; It dies at the moment of its energy.&nbsp;
+It is a base concession to fact.&nbsp; The world is made by the singer
+for the dreamer.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; While you talk it seems to me to be so.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It is so in truth.&nbsp; On the mouldering citadel
+of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze.&nbsp; The owl
+has built her nest in the palace of Priam.&nbsp; Over the empty plain
+wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced,
+oily sea, &omicron;&iota;&nu;&omicron;&psi; &pi;&omicron;&nu;&tau;&omicron;&sigmaf;,
+as Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great
+galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely tunny-fisher
+sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his net.&nbsp;
+Yet, every morning the doors of the city are thrown open, and on foot,
+or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors go forth to battle, and mock
+their enemies from behind their iron masks.&nbsp; All day long the fight
+rages, and when night comes the torches gleam by the tents, and the
+cresset burns in the hall.&nbsp; Those who live in marble or on painted
+panel, know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in
+its beauty, but limited to one note of passion or one mood of calm.&nbsp;
+Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and
+terror, of courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering.&nbsp;
+The seasons come and go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged
+or leaden feet the years pass by before them.&nbsp; They have their
+youth and their manhood, they are children, and they grow old.&nbsp;
+It is always dawn for St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the window.&nbsp;
+Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God&rsquo;s
+pain.&nbsp; The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from
+her brow.&nbsp; On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the
+lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, of
+noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim naked
+girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the
+long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the chords.&nbsp; It
+is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among
+the silver poplars of France.&nbsp; In eternal twilight they move, those
+frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch
+the dew-drenched grass they tread on.&nbsp; But those who walk in epos,
+drama, or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons
+wax and wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and
+from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting day with all its
+gold and shadow.&nbsp; For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither,
+and the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters
+her raiment for their pleasure.&nbsp; The statue is concentrated to
+one moment of perfection.&nbsp; The image stained upon the canvas possesses
+no spiritual element of growth or change.&nbsp; If they know nothing
+of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of
+life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of
+time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future,
+and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame.&nbsp; Movement,
+that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature
+alone.&nbsp; It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness
+and the soul in its unrest.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Yes; I see now what you mean.&nbsp; But, surely, the
+higher you place the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Why so?</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Because the best that he can give us will be but an
+echo of rich music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form.&nbsp; It may,
+indeed, be that life is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms
+are mean and its heroisms ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature
+to create, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world
+that will be more marvellous, more enduring, and more true than the
+world that common eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek
+to realise their perfection.&nbsp; But surely, if this new world has
+been made by the spirit and touch of a great artist, it will be a thing
+so complete and perfect that there will be nothing left for the critic
+to do.&nbsp; I quite understand now, and indeed admit most readily,
+that it is far more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.&nbsp;
+But it seems to me that this sound and sensible maxim, which is really
+extremely soothing to one&rsquo;s feelings, and should be adopted as
+its motto by every Academy of Literature all over the world, applies
+only to the relations that exist between Art and Life, and not to any
+relations that there may be between Art and Criticism.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; But, surely, Criticism is itself an art.&nbsp; And
+just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty,
+and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism
+is really creative in the highest sense of the word.&nbsp; Criticism
+is, in fact, both creative and independent.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Independent?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes; independent.&nbsp; Criticism is no more to be
+judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work
+of poet or sculptor.&nbsp; The critic occupies the same relation to
+the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible
+world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought.&nbsp;
+He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials.&nbsp;
+Anything will serve his purpose.&nbsp; And just as out of the sordid
+and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a small country doctor in
+the squalid village of Yonville-l&rsquo;Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave
+Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style,
+so, from subjects of little or of no importance, such as the pictures
+in this year&rsquo;s Royal Academy, or in any year&rsquo;s Royal Academy
+for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris&rsquo;s poems, M. Ohnet&rsquo;s novels,
+or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be
+his pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of contemplation, produce
+work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct with intellectual
+subtlety.&nbsp; Why not?&nbsp; Dulness is always an irresistible temptation
+for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent <i>Bestia Trionfans</i>
+that calls wisdom from its cave.&nbsp; To an artist so creative as the
+critic, what does subject-matter signify?&nbsp; No more and no less
+than it does to the novelist and the painter.&nbsp; Like them, he can
+find his motives everywhere.&nbsp; Treatment is the test.&nbsp; There
+is nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But is Criticism really a creative art?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Why should it not be?&nbsp; It works with materials,
+and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful.&nbsp;
+What more can one say of poetry?&nbsp; Indeed, I would call criticism
+a creation within a creation.&nbsp; For just as the great artists, from
+Homer and AEschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly
+to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend,
+and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have,
+as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour
+have been already added.&nbsp; Nay, more, I would say that the highest
+Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way
+more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard
+external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and,
+as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.&nbsp;
+Certainly, it is never trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude.&nbsp;
+No ignoble considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to
+the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever.&nbsp;
+One may appeal from fiction unto fact.&nbsp; But from the soul there
+is no appeal.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; From the soul?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes, from the soul.&nbsp; That is what the highest
+criticism really is, the record of one&rsquo;s own soul.&nbsp; It is
+more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself.&nbsp;
+It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and
+not abstract, real and not vague.&nbsp; It is the only civilised form
+of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts
+of one&rsquo;s life; not with life&rsquo;s physical accidents of deed
+or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions
+of the mind.&nbsp; I am always amused by the silly vanity of those writers
+and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the primary function
+of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate work.&nbsp; The
+best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just
+a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine
+sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will
+prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and
+will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence,
+though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn.&nbsp; His sole
+aim is to chronicle his own impressions.&nbsp; It is for him that pictures
+are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory
+we all revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from
+her Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in vain,
+the Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the
+object as in itself it really is.&nbsp; But this is a very serious error,
+and takes no cognisance of Criticism&rsquo;s most perfect form, which
+is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret
+and not the secret of another.&nbsp; For the highest Criticism deals
+with art not as expressive but as impressive purely.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But is that really so?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Of course it is.&nbsp; Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin&rsquo;s
+views on Turner are sound or not?&nbsp; What does it matter?&nbsp; That
+mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in
+its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure
+and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at
+least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that
+bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England&rsquo;s Gallery;
+greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its
+equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety
+of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not
+through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely
+and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with
+lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and
+with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the
+greater art.&nbsp; Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into
+the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of?&nbsp;
+The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some
+have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace
+of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure &lsquo;set in its
+marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light
+under sea,&rsquo; I murmur to myself, &lsquo;She is older than the rocks
+among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times,
+and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas,
+and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange webs
+with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy,
+and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but
+as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with
+which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids
+and the hands.&rsquo;&nbsp; And I say to my friend, &lsquo;The presence
+that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what
+in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire&rsquo;; and he
+answers me, &lsquo;Hers is the head upon which all &ldquo;the ends of
+the world are come,&rdquo; and the eyelids are a little weary.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is,
+and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and
+the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that
+flute-player&rsquo;s music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those
+subtle and poisonous curves.&nbsp; Do you ask me what Lionardo would
+have said had any one told him of this picture that &lsquo;all the thoughts
+and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein that which
+they had of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the
+animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age
+with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the
+Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias?&rsquo;&nbsp; He would probably
+have answered that he had contemplated none of these things, but had
+concerned himself simply with certain arrangements of lines and masses,
+and with new and curious colour-harmonies of blue and green.&nbsp; And
+it is for this very reason that the criticism which I have quoted is
+criticism of the highest kind.&nbsp; It treats the work of art simply
+as a starting-point for a new creation.&nbsp; It does not confine itself&mdash;let
+us at least suppose so for the moment&mdash;to discovering the real
+intention of the artist and accepting that as final.&nbsp; And in this
+it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least,
+as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who
+wrought it.&nbsp; Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful
+thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets
+it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion
+of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what,
+having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.&nbsp; The longer I study,
+Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts is,
+as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may be marred,
+and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention on the
+part of the artist.&nbsp; For when the work is finished it has, as it
+were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far
+other than that which was put into its lips to say.&nbsp; Sometimes,
+when I listen to the overture to <i>Tannh&auml;user</i>, I seem indeed
+to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass,
+and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from the caverned hill.&nbsp;
+But at other times it speaks to me of a thousand different things, of
+myself, it may be, and my own life, or of the lives of others whom one
+has loved and grown weary of loving, or of the passions that man has
+known, or of the passions that man has not known, and so has sought
+for.&nbsp; To-night it may fill one with that &Epsilon;&Rho;&Omega;&Sigma;
+&Tau;&Omega;&Nu; &Alpha;&Delta;&Upsilon;&Nu;&Alpha;&Tau;&Omega;&Nu;,
+that <i>Amour de l&rsquo;Impossible</i>, which falls like a madness
+on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so that
+they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in the
+infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain, grow faint and swoon or
+stumble.&nbsp; To-morrow, like the music of which Aristotle and Plato
+tell us, the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it may perform the office
+of a physician, and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit
+that is wounded, and &lsquo;bring the soul into harmony with all right
+things.&rsquo;&nbsp; And what is true about music is true about all
+the arts.&nbsp; Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.&nbsp;
+Beauty is the symbol of symbols.&nbsp; Beauty reveals everything, because
+it expresses nothing.&nbsp; When it shows us itself, it shows us the
+whole fiery-coloured world.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not
+merely the individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with
+wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood,
+or understood incompletely.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than
+creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as
+in itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes, that is my theory.&nbsp; To the critic the work
+of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not
+necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.&nbsp;
+The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into
+it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and
+the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element,
+makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different
+things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue
+or painted the panel or graved the gem.</p>
+<p>It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of
+the highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures
+that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the
+anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature
+or history.&nbsp; But this is not so.&nbsp; Indeed, pictures of this
+kind are far too intelligible.&nbsp; As a class, they rank with illustrations,
+and, even considered from this point of view are failures, as they do
+not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to it.&nbsp; For the
+domain of the painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from
+that of the poet.&nbsp; To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute
+entirety; not merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that
+men listen to also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient
+gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle
+of thought.&nbsp; The painter is so far limited that it is only through
+the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only
+through conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its
+physical equivalents that he can deal with psychology.&nbsp; And how
+inadequately does he do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban
+of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for
+the wild madness of Lear!&nbsp; Yet it seems as if nothing could stop
+him.&nbsp; Most of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and
+wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets, marring their
+motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by visible form
+or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of what is
+not seen.&nbsp; Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably
+tedious.&nbsp; They have degraded the invisible arts into the obvious
+arts, and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious.&nbsp; I
+do not say that poet and painter may not treat of the same subject.&nbsp;
+They have always done so and will always do so.&nbsp; But while the
+poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must be pictorial
+always.&nbsp; For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in nature,
+but to what upon canvas may be seen.</p>
+<p>And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate
+the critic.&nbsp; He will turn from them to such works as make him brood
+and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion,
+and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider
+world.&nbsp; It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist&rsquo;s
+life is that he cannot realise his ideal.&nbsp; But the true tragedy
+that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal
+too absolutely.&nbsp; For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed
+of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point
+for an ideal that is other than itself.&nbsp; This is the reason why
+music is the perfect type of art.&nbsp; Music can never reveal its ultimate
+secret.&nbsp; This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations
+in art.&nbsp; The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the
+painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations
+they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which
+would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal,
+which would be too purely intellectual.&nbsp; It is through its very
+incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses
+itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason,
+but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason
+and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to
+a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking
+whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very
+complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate
+impression itself.&nbsp; You see, then, how it is that the aesthetic
+critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message
+to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks
+rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative
+beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final.&nbsp;
+Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will have
+to the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance
+as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the painter of landscape
+or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between Nature and
+the work of the decorative artist.&nbsp; Just as on the flowerless carpets
+of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to look on,
+though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the
+pearl and purple of the sea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark
+at Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna
+is made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock&rsquo;s
+tail, though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces
+the work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part
+of whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and
+shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of
+Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for
+all the problem of Art&rsquo;s unity.</p>
+<p>But I see it is time for supper.&nbsp; After we have discussed some
+Chambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of the
+critic considered in the light of the interpreter.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally
+be allowed to see the object as in itself it really is.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; I am not quite sure.&nbsp; Perhaps I may admit it
+after supper.&nbsp; There is a subtle influence in supper.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>THE CRITIC AS ARTIST&mdash;WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE
+OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>A DIALOGUE: Part II.&nbsp; Persons: the same.&nbsp; Scene: the same.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect,
+and now let us return to the point at issue.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Ah! don&rsquo;t let us do that.&nbsp; Conversation
+should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.&nbsp;
+Let us talk about <i>Moral Indignation</i>, <i>its Cause and Cure</i>,
+a subject on which I think of writing: or about <i>The Survival of Thersites</i>,
+as shown by the English comic papers; or about any topic that may turn
+up.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism.&nbsp;
+You have told me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as expressive,
+but as impressive purely, and is consequently both creative and independent,
+is in fact an art by itself, occupying the same relation to creative
+work that creative work does to the visible world of form and colour,
+or the unseen world of passion and of thought.&nbsp; Well, now, tell
+me, will not the critic be sometimes a real interpreter?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses.&nbsp;
+He can pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole,
+to an analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere,
+as I hold it to be, there are many delightful things to be said and
+done.&nbsp; Yet his object will not always be to explain the work of
+art.&nbsp; He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round
+it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods
+and worshippers alike.&nbsp; Ordinary people are &lsquo;terribly at
+ease in Zion.&rsquo;&nbsp; They propose to walk arm in arm with the
+poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, &lsquo;Why should we
+read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton?&nbsp; We can read
+the plays and the poems.&nbsp; That is enough.&rsquo;&nbsp; But an appreciation
+of Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward
+of consummate scholarship.&nbsp; And he who desires to understand Shakespeare
+truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the
+Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age
+of James; he must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy
+between the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between
+the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe
+and Marlowe&rsquo;s greater son; he must know the materials that were
+at Shakespeare&rsquo;s disposal, and the method in which he used them,
+and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and
+the literary criticism of Shakespeare&rsquo;s day, its aims and modes
+and canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and
+blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study the
+Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator of the
+Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must
+be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to
+learn Shakespeare&rsquo;s true position in the history of European drama
+and the drama of the world.&nbsp; The critic will certainly be an interpreter,
+but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret
+may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows
+not his name.&nbsp; Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose
+mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege
+to make more marvellous in the eyes of men.</p>
+<p>And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens.&nbsp; The critic will
+indeed be an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the sense
+of one who simply repeats in another form a message that has been put
+into his lips to say.&nbsp; For, just as it is only by contact with
+the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual
+and separate life that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion,
+it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret
+the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality
+enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes,
+the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; I would have said that personality would have been
+a disturbing element.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; No; it is an element of revelation.&nbsp; If you wish
+to understand others you must intensify your own individualism.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; What, then, is the result?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by
+definite example.&nbsp; It seems to me that, while the literary critic
+stands of course first, as having the wider range, and larger vision,
+and nobler material, each of the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned
+to it.&nbsp; The actor is a critic of the drama.&nbsp; He shows the
+poet&rsquo;s work under new conditions, and by a method special to himself.&nbsp;
+He takes the written word, and action, gesture and voice become the
+media of revelation.&nbsp; The singer or the player on lute and viol
+is the critic of music.&nbsp; The etcher of a picture robs the painting
+of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a new material its true
+colour-quality, its tones and values, and the relations of its masses,
+and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the critic is he who exhibits
+to us a work of art in a form different from that of the work itself,
+and the employment of a new material is a critical as well as a creative
+element.&nbsp; Sculpture, too, has its critic, who may be either the
+carver of a gem, as he was in Greek days, or some painter like Mantegna,
+who sought to reproduce on canvas the beauty of plastic line and the
+symphonic dignity of processional bas-relief.&nbsp; And in the case
+of all these creative critics of art it is evident that personality
+is an absolute essential for any real interpretation.&nbsp; When Rubinstein
+plays to us the <i>Sonata Appassionata</i> of Beethoven, he gives us
+not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely&mdash;Beethoven
+re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and made vivid and wonderful
+to us by a new and intense personality.&nbsp; When a great actor plays
+Shakespeare we have the same experience.&nbsp; His own individuality
+becomes a vital part of the interpretation.&nbsp; People sometimes say
+that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare&rsquo;s;
+and this fallacy&mdash;for it is a fallacy&mdash;is, I regret to say,
+repeated by that charming and graceful writer who has lately deserted
+the turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean
+the author of <i>Obiter Dicta</i>.&nbsp; In point of fact, there is
+no such thing as Shakespeare&rsquo;s Hamlet.&nbsp; If Hamlet has something
+of the definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity
+that belongs to life.&nbsp; There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is
+only to personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of
+the two comes right interpretative criticism.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will
+give no less than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; He will be always showing us the work of art in some
+new relation to our age.&nbsp; He will always be reminding us that great
+works of art are living things&mdash;are, in fact, the only things that
+live.&nbsp; So much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that,
+as civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the
+elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow
+less and less interested in actual life, and <i>will seek to</i> <i>gain
+their impressions almost entirely from what</i> <i>Art has touched</i>.&nbsp;
+For life is terribly deficient in form.&nbsp; Its catastrophes happen
+in the wrong way and to the wrong people.&nbsp; There is a grotesque
+horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.&nbsp;
+One is always wounded when one approaches it.&nbsp; Things last either
+too long, or not long enough.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Poor life!&nbsp; Poor human life!&nbsp; Are you not
+even touched by the tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its
+essence.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Too quickly touched by them, I fear.&nbsp; For when
+one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity,
+and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems
+to be a dream and an illusion.&nbsp; What are the unreal things, but
+the passions that once burned one like fire?&nbsp; What are the incredible
+things, but the things that one has faithfully believed?&nbsp; What
+are the improbable things?&nbsp; The things that one has done oneself.&nbsp;
+No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master.&nbsp;
+We ask it for pleasure.&nbsp; It gives it to us, with bitterness and
+disappointment in its train.&nbsp; We come across some noble grief that
+we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it
+passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some
+grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves
+looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of
+gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly
+kissed.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Life then is a failure?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; From the artistic point of view, certainly.&nbsp;
+And the chief thing that makes life a failure from this artistic point
+of view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security, the fact
+that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion.&nbsp; How different
+it is in the world of Art!&nbsp; On a shelf of the bookcase behind you
+stands the <i>Divine Comedy</i>, and I know that, if I open it at a
+certain place, I shall be filled with a fierce hatred of some one who
+has never wronged me, or stirred by a great love for some one whom I
+shall never see.&nbsp; There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give
+us, and those of us who have discovered her secret can settle beforehand
+what our experiences are going to be.&nbsp; We can choose our day and
+select our hour.&nbsp; We can say to ourselves, &lsquo;To-morrow, at
+dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley of the shadow
+of death,&rsquo; and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood, and
+the Mantuan stands by our side.&nbsp; We pass through the gate of the
+legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the horror of
+another world.&nbsp; The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces
+and their cowls of gilded lead.&nbsp; Out of the ceaseless winds that
+drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending
+his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain.&nbsp; We break the withered
+branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued
+poisonous twig bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with
+bitter cries.&nbsp; Out of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and
+when from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride
+that triumphs over the torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment.&nbsp;
+Through the dim purple air fly those who have stained the world with
+the beauty of their sin, and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken
+and swollen of body into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo
+di Brescia, the coiner of false coin.&nbsp; He bids us listen to his
+misery; we stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams
+day and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channels
+gush down the green Casentine hills.&nbsp; Sinon, the false Greek of
+Troy, mocks at him.&nbsp; He smites him in the face, and they wrangle.&nbsp;
+We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us
+and leads us away to that city turreted by giants where great Nimrod
+blows his horn.&nbsp; Terrible things are in store for us, and we go
+to meet them in Dante&rsquo;s raiment and with Dante&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp;
+We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat through
+the slimy waves.&nbsp; He calls to us, and we reject him.&nbsp; When
+we hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for
+the bitterness of our scorn.&nbsp; We tread upon the cold crystal of
+Cocytus, in which traitors stick like straws in glass.&nbsp; Our foot
+strikes against the head of Bocca.&nbsp; He will not tell us his name,
+and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming skull.&nbsp; Alberigo
+prays us to break the ice upon his face that he may weep a little.&nbsp;
+We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered his dolorous tale
+we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from him; such cruelty
+being courtesy indeed, for who more base than he who has mercy for the
+condemned of God?&nbsp; In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man who sold
+Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew Caesar.&nbsp; We
+tremble, and come forth to re-behold the stars.</p>
+<p>In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holy mountain
+rises into the pure light of day.&nbsp; There is peace for us, and for
+those who for a season abide in it there is some peace also, though,
+pale from the poison of the Maremma, Madonna Pia passes before us, and
+Ismene, with the sorrow of earth still lingering about her, is there.&nbsp;
+Soul after soul makes us share in some repentance or some joy.&nbsp;
+He whom the mourning of his widow taught to drink the sweet wormwood
+of pain, tells us of Nella praying in her lonely bed, and we learn from
+the mouth of Buonconte how a single tear may save a dying sinner from
+the fiend.&nbsp; Sordello, that noble and disdainful Lombard, eyes us
+from afar like a couchant lion.&nbsp; When he learns that Virgil is
+one of Mantua&rsquo;s citizens, he falls upon his neck, and when he
+learns that he is the singer of Rome he falls before his feet.&nbsp;
+In that valley whose grass and flowers are fairer than cleft emerald
+and Indian wood, and brighter than scarlet and silver, they are singing
+who in the world were kings; but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg do
+not move to the music of the others, and Philip of France beats his
+breast and Henry of England sits alone.&nbsp; On and on we go, climbing
+the marvellous stair, and the stars become larger than their wont, and
+the song of the kings grows faint, and at length we reach the seven
+trees of gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise.&nbsp; In a griffin-drawn
+chariot appears one whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiled
+in white, and mantled in green, and robed in a vesture that is coloured
+like live fire.&nbsp; The ancient flame wakes within us.&nbsp; Our blood
+quickens through terrible pulses.&nbsp; We recognise her.&nbsp; It is
+Beatrice, the woman we have worshipped.&nbsp; The ice congealed about
+our heart melts.&nbsp; Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bow
+our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned.&nbsp; When
+we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of the fountain
+of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress of our soul
+raises us to the Paradise of Heaven.&nbsp; Out of that eternal pearl,
+the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us.&nbsp; Her beauty
+troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing that falls through
+water, she passes away, we gaze after her with wistful eyes.&nbsp; The
+sweet planet of Venus is full of lovers.&nbsp; Cunizza, the sister of
+Ezzelin, the lady of Sordello&rsquo;s heart, is there, and Folco, the
+passionate singer of Provence, who in sorrow for Azalais forsook the
+world, and the Canaanitish harlot whose soul was the first that Christ
+redeemed.&nbsp; Joachim of Flora stands in the sun, and, in the sun,
+Aquinas recounts the story of St. Francis and Bonaventure the story
+of St. Dominic.&nbsp; Through the burning rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida
+approaches.&nbsp; He tells us of the arrow that is shot from the bow
+of exile, and how salt tastes the bread of another, and how steep are
+the stairs in the house of a stranger.&nbsp; In Saturn the soul sings
+not, and even she who guides us dare not smile.&nbsp; On a ladder of
+gold the flames rise and fall.&nbsp; At last, we see the pageant of
+the Mystical Rose.&nbsp; Beatrice fixes her eyes upon the face of God
+to turn them not again.&nbsp; The beatific vision is granted to us;
+we know the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.</p>
+<p>Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make ourselves
+one with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altar with him, and
+share his rapture and his scorn.&nbsp; And if we grow tired of an antique
+time, and desire to realise our own age in all its weariness and sin,
+are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than
+life can make us live in a score of shameful years?&nbsp; Close to your
+hand lies a little volume, bound in some Nile-green skin that has been
+powdered with gilded nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory.&nbsp; It
+is the book that Gautier loved, it is Baudelaire&rsquo;s masterpiece.&nbsp;
+Open it at that sad madrigal that begins</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Que m&rsquo;importe que tu sois sage?<br />Sois belle! et sois triste!</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never worshipped
+joy.&nbsp; Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures himself, let
+its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts, and
+you will become for a moment what he was who wrote it; nay, not for
+a moment only, but for many barren moonlit nights and sunless sterile
+days will a despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you,
+and the misery of another gnaw your heart away.&nbsp; Read the whole
+book, suffer it to tell even one of its secrets to your soul, and your
+soul will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey,
+and seek to repent of strange crimes of which it is guiltless, and to
+make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never known.&nbsp;
+And then, when you are tired of these flowers of evil, turn to the flowers
+that grow in the garden of Perdita, and in their dew-drenched chalices
+cool your fevered brow, and let their loveliness heal and restore your
+soul; or wake from his forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and
+bid the lover of Heliodore make you music, for he too has flowers in
+his song, red pomegranate blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh,
+ringed daffodils and dark blue hyacinths, and marjoram and crinkled
+ox-eyes.&nbsp; Dear to him was the perfume of the bean-field at evening,
+and dear to him the odorous eared-spikenard that grew on the Syrian
+hills, and the fresh green thyme, the wine-cup&rsquo;s charm.&nbsp;
+The feet of his love as she walked in the garden were like lilies set
+upon lilies.&nbsp; Softer than sleep-laden poppy petals were her lips,
+softer than violets and as scented.&nbsp; The flame-like crocus sprang
+from the grass to look at her.&nbsp; For her the slim narcissus stored
+the cool rain; and for her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that
+wooed them.&nbsp; And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus was
+as fair as she was.</p>
+<p>It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion.&nbsp; We sicken
+with the same maladies as the poets, and the singer lends us his pain.&nbsp;
+Dead lips have their message for us, and hearts that have fallen to
+dust can communicate their joy.&nbsp; We run to kiss the bleeding mouth
+of Fantine, and we follow Manon Lescaut over the whole world.&nbsp;
+Ours is the love-madness of the Tyrian, and the terror of Orestes is
+ours also.&nbsp; There is no passion that we cannot feel, no pleasure
+that we may not gratify, and we can choose the time of our initiation
+and the time of our freedom also.&nbsp; Life!&nbsp; Life!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience.&nbsp; It is
+a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and
+without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only
+thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.&nbsp;
+It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the
+meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Must we go, then, to Art for everything?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; For everything.&nbsp; Because Art does not hurt us.&nbsp;
+The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile
+emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken.&nbsp; We weep, but
+we are not wounded.&nbsp; We grieve, but our grief is not bitter.&nbsp;
+In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage
+to a lesser perfection.&nbsp; But the sorrow with which Art fills us
+both purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great
+art critic of the Greeks.&nbsp; It is through Art, and through Art only,
+that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only,
+that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.&nbsp;
+This results not merely from the fact that nothing that one can imagine
+is worth doing, and that one can imagine everything, but from the subtle
+law that emotional forces, like the forces of the physical sphere, are
+limited in extent and energy.&nbsp; One can feel so much, and no more.&nbsp;
+And how can it matter with what pleasure life tries to tempt one, or
+with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one&rsquo;s soul, if in the
+spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed one has found
+the true secret of joy, and wept away one&rsquo;s tears over their deaths
+who, like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio, can never die?</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Stop a moment.&nbsp; It seems to me that in everything
+that you have said there is something radically immoral.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; All art is immoral.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; All art?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; For emotion for the sake of emotion is
+the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life,
+and of that practical organisation of life that we call society.&nbsp;
+Society, which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for
+the concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance
+and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, of each
+of its citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour
+to the common weal, and toil and travail that the day&rsquo;s work may
+be done.&nbsp; Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives
+the dreamer.&nbsp; The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in
+us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by
+the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming
+shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open
+to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, &lsquo;What
+are you doing?&rsquo; whereas &lsquo;What are you thinking?&rsquo; is
+the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed
+to whisper to another.&nbsp; They mean well, no doubt, these honest
+beaming folk.&nbsp; Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively
+tedious.&nbsp; But some one should teach them that while, in the opinion
+of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can
+be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation
+of man.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Contemplation?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Contemplation.&nbsp; I said to you some time ago that
+it was far more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.&nbsp;
+Let me say to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult
+thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.&nbsp;
+To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of
+energy.&nbsp; To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was
+the noblest form of energy also.&nbsp; It was to this that the passion
+for holiness led the saint and the mystic of mediaeval days.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; We exist, then, to do nothing?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It is to do nothing that the elect exist.&nbsp; Action
+is limited and relative.&nbsp; Unlimited and absolute is the vision
+of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.&nbsp;
+But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too
+cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious
+of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange
+for life itself.&nbsp; To us the <i>citt&agrave; divina</i> is colourless,
+and the <i>fruitio Dei</i> without meaning.&nbsp; Metaphysics do not
+satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date.&nbsp;
+The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes &lsquo;the
+spectator of all time and of all existence&rsquo; is not really an ideal
+world, but simply a world of abstract ideas.&nbsp; When we enter it,
+we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought.&nbsp; The courts
+of the city of God are not open to us now.&nbsp; Its gates are guarded
+by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our
+nature is most divine.&nbsp; It is enough that our fathers believed.&nbsp;
+They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.&nbsp; Their legacy
+to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid.&nbsp; Had they put
+it into words, it might not live within us as thought.&nbsp; No, Ernest,
+no.&nbsp; We cannot go back to the saint.&nbsp; There is far more to
+be learned from the sinner.&nbsp; We cannot go back to the philosopher,
+and the mystic leads us astray.&nbsp; Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere,
+would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible
+Being which Plato rates so high?&nbsp; What to us is the Illumination
+of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of B&ouml;hme, the monstrous
+Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg&rsquo;s blinded eyes?&nbsp;
+Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one daffodil of the
+field, far less than the meanest of the visible arts, for, just as Nature
+is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind expressing itself under
+the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations,
+she speaks to both sense and soul alike.&nbsp; To the aesthetic temperament
+the vague is always repellent.&nbsp; The Greeks were a nation of artists,
+because they were spared the sense of the infinite.&nbsp; Like Aristotle,
+like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete, and nothing
+but the concrete can satisfy us.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; What then do you propose?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It seems to me that with the development of the critical
+spirit we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the
+collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern,
+in the true meaning of the word modernity.&nbsp; For he to whom the
+present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age
+in which he lives.&nbsp; To realise the nineteenth century, one must
+realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed
+to its making.&nbsp; To know anything about oneself one must know all
+about others.&nbsp; There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise,
+no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive.&nbsp; Is this impossible?&nbsp;
+I think not.&nbsp; By revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all
+action, and so freeing us from the self-imposed and trammelling burden
+of moral responsibility, the scientific principle of Heredity has become,
+as it were, the warrant for the contemplative life.&nbsp; It has shown
+us that we are never less free than when we try to act.&nbsp; It has
+hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall
+the prophecy of our doom.&nbsp; We may not watch it, for it is within
+us.&nbsp; We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.&nbsp;
+It is Nemesis without her mask.&nbsp; It is the last of the Fates, and
+the most terrible.&nbsp; It is the only one of the Gods whose real name
+we know.</p>
+<p>And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has
+robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the subjective
+sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow,
+with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange temperaments and subtle
+susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference,
+complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other,
+and passions that war against themselves.&nbsp; And so, it is not our
+own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that
+dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and
+individual, created for our service, and entering into us for our joy.&nbsp;
+It is something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres
+has made its abode.&nbsp; It is sick with many maladies, and has memories
+of curious sins.&nbsp; It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter.&nbsp;
+It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know
+we cannot gain.&nbsp; One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us.&nbsp;
+It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by
+the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims
+are marring the perfection of our development.&nbsp; It can help us
+to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages,
+and find ourselves not exiled from their air.&nbsp; It can teach us
+how to escape from our experience, and to realise the experiences of
+those who are greater than we are.&nbsp; The pain of Leopardi crying
+out against life becomes our pain.&nbsp; Theocritus blows on his pipe,
+and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd.&nbsp; In the wolfskin
+of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armour of Lancelot
+we ride from the bower of the Queen.&nbsp; We have whispered the secret
+of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained raiment
+of Villon have put our shame into song.&nbsp; We can see the dawn through
+Shelley&rsquo;s eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows
+amorous of our youth.&nbsp; Ours is the anguish of Atys, and ours the
+weak rage and noble sorrows of the Dane.&nbsp; Do you think that it
+is the imagination that enables us to live these countless lives?&nbsp;
+Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity.&nbsp;
+It is simply concentrated race-experience.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; The culture that this transmission of racial experiences
+makes possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and
+indeed may be said to be one with it.&nbsp; For who is the true critic
+but he who bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings
+of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional
+impulse obscure?&nbsp; And who the true man of culture, if not he who
+by fine scholarship and fastidious rejection has made instinct self-conscious
+and intelligent, and can separate the work that has distinction from
+the work that has it not, and so by contact and comparison makes himself
+master of the secrets of style and school, and understands their meanings,
+and listens to their voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested
+curiosity which is the real root, as it is the real flower, of the intellectual
+life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity, and, having learned
+&lsquo;the best that is known and thought in the world,&rsquo; lives&mdash;it
+is not fanciful to say so&mdash;with those who are the Immortals.</p>
+<p>Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim
+not <i>doing</i> but <i>being</i>, and not <i>being</i> merely, but
+<i>becoming</i>&mdash;that is what the critical spirit can give us.&nbsp;
+The gods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle
+tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the
+spectator the tragicomedy of the world that they have made.&nbsp; We,
+too, might live like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate
+emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford.&nbsp; We might
+make ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become
+perfect by the rejection of energy.&nbsp; It has often seemed to me
+that Browning felt something of this.&nbsp; Shakespeare hurls Hamlet
+into active life, and makes him realise his mission by effort.&nbsp;
+Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission
+by thought.&nbsp; Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning.&nbsp;
+He made the soul the protagonist of life&rsquo;s tragedy, and looked
+on action as the one undramatic element of a play.&nbsp; To us, at any
+rate, the &Beta;&Iota;&Omicron;&Sigma; &Theta;&Epsilon;&Omega;&Rho;&Eta;&Tau;&Iota;&Kappa;&Omicron;&Sigma;
+is the true ideal.&nbsp; From the high tower of Thought we can look
+out at the world.&nbsp; Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic
+critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce
+between the joints of his harness.&nbsp; He at least is safe.&nbsp;
+He has discovered how to live.</p>
+<p>Is such a mode of life immoral?&nbsp; Yes: all the arts are immoral,
+except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite
+to action of evil or of good.&nbsp; For action of every kind belongs
+to the sphere of ethics.&nbsp; The aim of art is simply to create a
+mood.&nbsp; Is such a mode of life unpractical?&nbsp; Ah! it is not
+so easy to be unpractical as the ignorant Philistine imagines.&nbsp;
+It were well for England if it were so.&nbsp; There is no country in
+the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours.&nbsp;
+With us, Thought is degraded by its constant association with practice.&nbsp;
+Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence, noisy
+politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor narrow-minded priest
+blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant section of the community
+among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously claim to be able to form
+a disinterested intellectual judgment about any one thing?&nbsp; Each
+of the professions means a prejudice.&nbsp; The necessity for a career
+forces every one to take sides.&nbsp; We live in the age of the overworked,
+and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that
+they become absolutely stupid.&nbsp; And, harsh though it may sound,
+I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom.&nbsp; The
+sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; A charming doctrine, Gilbert.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; I am not sure about that, but it has at least the
+minor merit of being true.&nbsp; That the desire to do good to others
+produces a plentiful crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which
+it is the cause.&nbsp; The prig is a very interesting psychological
+study, and though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still
+to have a pose at all is something.&nbsp; It is a formal recognition
+of the importance of treating life from a definite and reasoned standpoint.&nbsp;
+That Humanitarian Sympathy wars against Nature, by securing the survival
+of the failure, may make the man of science loathe its facile virtues.&nbsp;
+The political economist may cry out against it for putting the improvident
+on the same level as the provident, and so robbing life of the strongest,
+because most sordid, incentive to industry.&nbsp; But, in the eyes of
+the thinker, the real harm that emotional sympathy does is that it limits
+knowledge, and so prevents us from solving any single social problem.&nbsp;
+We are trying at present to stave off the coming crisis, the coming
+revolution as my friends the Fabianists call it, by means of doles and
+alms.&nbsp; Well, when the revolution or crisis arrives, we shall be
+powerless, because we shall know nothing.&nbsp; And so, Ernest, let
+us not be deceived.&nbsp; England will never be civilised till she has
+added Utopia to her dominions.&nbsp; There is more than one of her colonies
+that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land.&nbsp; What
+we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment, and think
+beyond the day.&nbsp; Those who try to lead the people can only do so
+by following the mob.&nbsp; It is through the voice of one crying in
+the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.</p>
+<p>But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of beholding,
+and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, there is something
+that is egotistic.&nbsp; If you think so, do not say so.&nbsp; It takes
+a thoroughly selfish age, like our own, to deify self-sacrifice.&nbsp;
+It takes a thoroughly grasping age, such as that in which we live, to
+set above the fine intellectual virtues, those shallow and emotional
+virtues that are an immediate practical benefit to itself.&nbsp; They
+miss their aim, too, these philanthropists and sentimentalists of our
+day, who are always chattering to one about one&rsquo;s duty to one&rsquo;s
+neighbour.&nbsp; For the development of the race depends on the development
+of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal,
+the intellectual standard is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately
+lost.&nbsp; If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating
+himself&mdash;a rare type in our time, I admit, but still one occasionally
+to be met with&mdash;you rise from table richer, and conscious that
+a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days.&nbsp;
+But oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life
+in trying to educate others!&nbsp; What a dreadful experience that is!&nbsp;
+How appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the
+fatal habit of imparting opinions!&nbsp; How limited in range the creature&rsquo;s
+mind proves to be!&nbsp; How it wearies us, and must weary himself,
+with its endless repetitions and sickly reiteration!&nbsp; How lacking
+it is in any element of intellectual growth!&nbsp; In what a vicious
+circle it always moves!</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert.&nbsp; Have
+you had this dreadful experience, as you call it, lately?</p>
+<p>&nbsp;GILBERT.&nbsp; Few of us escape it. People say that the schoolmaster
+is abroad.&nbsp; I wish to goodness he were.&nbsp; But the type of which,
+after all, he is only one, and certainly the least important, of the
+representatives, seems to me to be really dominating our lives; and
+just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so
+the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied
+in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate
+himself.&nbsp; No, Ernest, self-culture is the true ideal of man.&nbsp;
+Goethe saw it, and the immediate debt that we owe to Goethe is greater
+than the debt we owe to any man since Greek days.&nbsp; The Greeks saw
+it, and have left us, as their legacy to modern thought, the conception
+of the contemplative life as well as the critical method by which alone
+can that life be truly realised.&nbsp; It was the one thing that made
+the Renaissance great, and gave us Humanism.&nbsp; It is the one thing
+that could make our own age great also; for the real weakness of England
+lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the
+poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls
+in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional
+and not intellectual.</p>
+<p>I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment,
+still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years to come, unpopular
+with the crowd.&nbsp; It is so easy for people to have sympathy with
+suffering.&nbsp; It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.&nbsp;
+Indeed, so little do ordinary people understand what thought really
+is, that they seem to imagine that, when they have said that a theory
+is dangerous, they have pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only
+such theories that have any true intellectual value.&nbsp; An idea that
+is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Gilbert, you bewilder me.&nbsp; You have told me that
+all art is, in its essence, immoral.&nbsp; Are you going to tell me
+now that all thought is, in its essence, dangerous?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes, in the practical sphere it is so.&nbsp; The security
+of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of
+the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence
+of any intelligence amongst its members.&nbsp; The great majority of
+people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side
+of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines,
+and rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty
+into any question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define
+man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called
+upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.&nbsp; But let
+us turn from the practical sphere, and say no more about the wicked
+philanthropists, who, indeed, may well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed
+sage of the Yellow River Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such
+well-meaning and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and
+spontaneous virtue that there is in man.&nbsp; They are a wearisome
+topic, and I am anxious to get back to the sphere in which criticism
+is free.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; The sphere of the intellect?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; You remember that I spoke of the critic
+as being in his own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed,
+may be merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion
+for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal,
+or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of a fresh
+medium of expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect.&nbsp;
+Well, you seemed to be a little sceptical about the theory.&nbsp; But
+perhaps I wronged you?</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit
+that I feel very strongly that such work as you describe the critic
+producing&mdash;and creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted
+to be&mdash;is, of necessity, purely subjective, whereas the greatest
+work is objective always, objective and impersonal.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; The difference between objective and subjective work
+is one of external form merely.&nbsp; It is accidental, not essential.&nbsp;
+All artistic creation is absolutely subjective.&nbsp; The very landscape
+that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own
+mind; and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem to
+us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the poets
+who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply
+the poets themselves, not as they thought they were, but as they thought
+they were not; and by such thinking came in strange manner, though but
+for a moment, really so to be.&nbsp; For out of ourselves we can never
+pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not.&nbsp;
+Nay, I would say that the more objective a creation appears to be, the
+more subjective it really is.&nbsp; Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz
+and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men
+of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square;
+but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.&nbsp;
+They were elements of his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses
+that stirred so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce,
+to suffer them to realise their energy, not on the lower plane of actual
+life, where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so made
+imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art where Love can indeed
+find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can stab the eavesdropper
+behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave, and make a guilty
+king drink his own hurt, and see one&rsquo;s father&rsquo;s spirit,
+beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete steel from misty
+wall to wall.&nbsp; Action being limited would have left Shakespeare
+unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it is because he did nothing
+that he has been able to achieve everything, so it is because he never
+speaks to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us
+absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament far more completely
+than do those strange and exquisite sonnets, even, in which he bares
+to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart.&nbsp; Yes, the objective
+form is the most subjective in matter.&nbsp; Man is least himself when
+he talks in his own person.&nbsp; Give him a mask, and he will tell
+you the truth.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form,
+will necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the artist,
+who has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if he recognises
+that each mode of criticism is, in its highest development, simply a
+mood, and that we are never more true to ourselves than when we are
+inconsistent.&nbsp; The aesthetic critic, constant only to the principle
+of beauty in all things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions,
+winning from the various schools the secret of their charm, bowing,
+it may be, before foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at
+strange new gods.&nbsp; What other people call one&rsquo;s past has,
+no doubt, everything to do with them, but has absolutely nothing to
+do with oneself.&nbsp; The man who regards his past is a man who deserves
+to have no future to look forward to.&nbsp; When one has found expression
+for a mood, one has done with it.&nbsp; You laugh; but believe me it
+is so.&nbsp; Yesterday it was Realism that charmed one.&nbsp; One gained
+from it that <i>nouveau frisson</i> which it was its aim to produce.&nbsp;
+One analysed it, explained it, and wearied of it.&nbsp; At sunset came
+the <i>Luministe</i> in painting, and the <i>Symboliste</i> in poetry,
+and the spirit of mediaevalism, that spirit which belongs not to time
+but to temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia, and stirred us
+for a moment by the terrible fascination of pain.&nbsp; To-day the cry
+is for Romance, and already the leaves are tremulous in the valley,
+and on the purple hill-tops walks Beauty with slim gilded feet.&nbsp;
+The old modes of creation linger, of course.&nbsp; The artists reproduce
+either themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration.&nbsp; But
+Criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.</p>
+<p>Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of
+expression.&nbsp; The method of the drama is his, as well as the method
+of the epos.&nbsp; He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking
+to Marvel on the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord
+Brooke discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks; or adopt narration,
+as Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary Portraits&mdash;is
+not that the title of the book?&mdash;presents to us, under the fanciful
+guise of fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of criticism, one on
+the painter Watteau, another on the philosophy of Spinoza, a third on
+the Pagan elements of the early Renaissance, and the last, and in some
+respects the most suggestive, on the source of that Aufkl&auml;rung,
+that enlightening which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to
+which our own culture owes so great a debt.&nbsp; Dialogue, certainly,
+that wonderful literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian
+to Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle
+took such delight, the creative critics of the world have always employed,
+can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.&nbsp;
+By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to
+every fancy, and reality to every mood.&nbsp; By its means he can exhibit
+the object from each point of view, and show it to us in the round,
+as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner all the richness
+and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly
+suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the
+idea more completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give
+a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something
+of the delicate charm of chance.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist,
+and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Ah! it is so easy to convert others.&nbsp; It is so
+difficult to convert oneself.&nbsp; To arrive at what one really believes,
+one must speak through lips different from one&rsquo;s own.&nbsp; To
+know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods.&nbsp; For what
+is Truth?&nbsp; In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that
+has survived.&nbsp; In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation.&nbsp;
+In matters of art, it is one&rsquo;s last mood.&nbsp; And you see now,
+Ernest, that the critic has at his disposal as many objective forms
+of expression as the artist has.&nbsp; Ruskin put his criticism into
+imaginative prose, and is superb in his changes and contradictions;
+and Browning put his into blank verse and made painter and poet yield
+us their secret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater fiction,
+and Rossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione and
+the design of Ingres, and his own design and colour also, feeling, with
+the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that the ultimate
+art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium that of words.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Well, now that you have settled that the critic has
+at his disposal all objective forms, I wish you would tell me what are
+the qualities that should characterise the true critic.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; What would you say they were?</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Well, I should say that a critic should above all things
+be fair.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Ah! not fair.&nbsp; A critic cannot be fair in the
+ordinary sense of the word.&nbsp; It is only about things that do not
+interest one that one can give a really unbiassed opinion, which is
+no doubt the reason why an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.&nbsp;
+The man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who sees absolutely
+nothing at all.&nbsp; Art is a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought
+is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed,
+and, depending upon fine moods and exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed
+into the rigidity of a scientific formula or a theological dogma.&nbsp;
+It is to the soul that Art speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner
+of the mind as well as of the body.&nbsp; One should, of course, have
+no prejudices; but, as a great Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago,
+it is one&rsquo;s business in such matters to have preferences, and
+when one has preferences one ceases to be fair.&nbsp; It is only an
+auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of Art.&nbsp;
+No; fairness is not one of the qualities of the true critic.&nbsp; It
+is not even a condition of criticism.&nbsp; Each form of Art with which
+we come in contact dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of every
+other form.&nbsp; We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work
+in question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret.&nbsp;
+For the time, we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else,
+indeed.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will
+he not?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Rational?&nbsp; There are two ways of disliking art,
+Ernest.&nbsp; One is to dislike it.&nbsp; The other, to like it rationally.&nbsp;
+For Art, as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener and
+spectator a form of divine madness.&nbsp; It does not spring from inspiration,
+but it makes others inspired.&nbsp; Reason is not the faculty to which
+it appeals.&nbsp; If one loves Art at all, one must love it beyond all
+other things in the world, and against such love, the reason, if one
+listened to it, would cry out.&nbsp; There is nothing sane about the
+worship of beauty.&nbsp; It is too splendid to be sane.&nbsp; Those
+of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world
+to be pure visionaries.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Well, at least, the critic will be sincere.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great
+deal of it is absolutely fatal.&nbsp; The true critic will, indeed,
+always be sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he
+will seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will never
+suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped
+mode of looking at things.&nbsp; He will realise himself in many forms,
+and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations
+and fresh points of view.&nbsp; Through constant change, and through
+constant change alone, he will find his true unity.&nbsp; He will not
+consent to be the slave of his own opinions.&nbsp; For what is mind
+but motion in the intellectual sphere?&nbsp; The essence of thought,
+as the essence of life, is growth.&nbsp; You must not be frightened
+by word, Ernest.&nbsp; What people call insincerity is simply a method
+by which we can multiply our personalities.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity
+and fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least on the borderland
+of morals, and the first condition of criticism is that the critic should
+be able to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics
+are absolutely distinct and separate.&nbsp; When they are confused,
+Chaos has come again.&nbsp; They are too often confused in England now,
+and though our modern Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet,
+by means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty
+for a moment.&nbsp; It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism
+that such people find expression.&nbsp; I regret it because there is
+much to be said in favour of modern journalism.&nbsp; By giving us the
+opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance
+of the community.&nbsp; By carefully chronicling the current events
+of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such
+events really are.&nbsp; By invariably discussing the unnecessary it
+makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what
+are not.&nbsp; But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles
+upon modern art.&nbsp; When it does this it stultifies itself.&nbsp;
+And yet Tartuffe&rsquo;s articles and Chadband&rsquo;s notes do this
+good, at least.&nbsp; They serve to show how extremely limited is the
+area over which ethics, and ethical considerations, can claim to exercise
+influence.&nbsp; Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes
+are fixed upon eternal truths.&nbsp; Art is out of the reach of morals,
+for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.&nbsp;
+To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.&nbsp; However,
+let these mouthing Puritans pass; they have their comic side.&nbsp;
+Who can help laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes
+to limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?&nbsp; Some
+limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of
+our newspapers and newspaper writers.&nbsp; For they give us the bald,
+sordid, disgusting facts of life.&nbsp; They chronicle, with degrading
+avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness
+of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings
+of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.&nbsp; But the artist,
+who accepts the facts of life, and yet transforms them into shapes of
+beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows their colour-element,
+and their wonder, and their true ethical import also, and builds out
+of them a world more real than reality itself, and of loftier and more
+noble import&mdash;who shall set limits to him?&nbsp; Not the apostles
+of that new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity &lsquo;writ large.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Not the apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine of the
+hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly.&nbsp; The mere suggestion
+is ridiculous.&nbsp; Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed to
+the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the true
+critic.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; And what are they?&nbsp; Tell me yourself.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic&mdash;a
+temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions
+that beauty gives us.&nbsp; Under what conditions, and by what means,
+this temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not discuss
+at present.&nbsp; It is sufficient to note that it exists, and that
+there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above
+them, separate from the reason and of nobler import, separate from the
+soul and of equal value&mdash;a sense that leads some to create, and
+others, the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely.&nbsp; But
+to be purified and made perfect, this sense requires some form of exquisite
+environment.&nbsp; Without this it starves, or is dulled.&nbsp; You
+remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a young Greek
+should be educated, and with what insistence he dwells upon the importance
+of surroundings, telling us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst
+of fair sights and sounds, so that the beauty of material things may
+prepare his soul for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual.&nbsp;
+Insensibly, and without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that
+real love of beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us,
+is the true aim of education.&nbsp; By slow degrees there is to be engendered
+in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose
+the good in preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and
+discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses grace
+and charm and loveliness.&nbsp; Ultimately, in its due course, this
+taste is to become critical and self-conscious, but at first it is to
+exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and &lsquo;he who has received
+this true culture of the inner man will with clear and certain vision
+perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature, and with a taste
+that cannot err, while he praises, and finds his pleasure in what is
+good, and receives it into his soul, and so becomes good and noble,
+he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth,
+even before he is able to know the reason why&rsquo;: and so, when,
+later on, the critical and self-conscious spirit develops in him, he
+&lsquo;will recognise and salute it as a friend with whom his education
+has made him long familiar.&rsquo;&nbsp; I need hardly say, Ernest,
+how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine
+the smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if
+one ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the
+love of beauty, and that the methods by which education should work
+were the development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the
+creation of the critical spirit.</p>
+<p>Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and
+the dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can
+loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like
+voice singing in Waynfleete&rsquo;s chapel, or lie in the green meadow,
+among the strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt
+noon smite to a finer gold the tower&rsquo;s gilded vanes, or wander
+up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling&rsquo;s shadowy
+fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud&rsquo;s building
+in the College of St. John.&nbsp; Nor is it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge,
+that the sense of beauty can be formed and trained and perfected.&nbsp;
+All over England there is a Renaissance of the decorative Arts.&nbsp;
+Ugliness has had its day.&nbsp; Even in the houses of the rich there
+is taste, and the houses of those who are not rich have been made gracious
+and comely and sweet to live in.&nbsp; Caliban, poor noisy Caliban,
+thinks that when he has ceased to make mows at a thing, the thing ceases
+to exist.&nbsp; But if he mocks no longer, it is because he has been
+met with mockery, swifter and keener than his own, and for a moment
+has been bitterly schooled into that silence which should seal for ever
+his uncouth distorted lips.&nbsp; What has been done up to now, has
+been chiefly in the clearing of the way.&nbsp; It is always more difficult
+to destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is
+vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage
+but also contempt.&nbsp; Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure,
+done.&nbsp; We have got rid of what was bad.&nbsp; We have now to make
+what is beautiful.&nbsp; And though the mission of the aesthetic movement
+is to lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet, as
+the creative instinct is strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt who
+leads in art, there is no reason why in future years this strange Renaissance
+should not become almost as mighty in its way as was that new birth
+of Art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of Italy.</p>
+<p>Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the
+decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that teach
+us.&nbsp; Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at.&nbsp;
+At least, some of them are.&nbsp; But they are quite impossible to live
+with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual.&nbsp; Their
+meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined.&nbsp;
+One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they
+become as tedious as one&rsquo;s relations.&nbsp; I am very fond of
+the work of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London.&nbsp;
+Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school.&nbsp; Some of
+their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of the unapproachable
+beauty of Gautier&rsquo;s immortal <i>Symphonie en Blanc Majeur</i>,
+that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have suggested
+the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.&nbsp;
+For a class that welcomes the incompetent with sympathetic eagerness,
+and that confuses the bizarre with the beautiful, and vulgarity with
+truth, they are extremely accomplished.&nbsp; They can do etchings that
+have the brilliancy of epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as
+paradoxes, and as for their portraits, whatever the commonplace may
+say against them, no one can deny that they possess that unique and
+wonderful charm which belongs to works of pure fiction.&nbsp; But even
+the Impressionists, earnest and industrious as they are, will not do.&nbsp;
+I like them.&nbsp; Their white keynote, with its variations in lilac,
+was an era in colour.&nbsp; Though the moment does not make the man,
+the moment certainly makes the Impressionist, and for the moment in
+art, and the &lsquo;moment&rsquo;s monument,&rsquo; as Rossetti phrased
+it, what may not be said?&nbsp; They are suggestive also.&nbsp; If they
+have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least given great
+encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may have
+all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to
+be ever sensible.&nbsp; Yet they will insist on treating painting as
+if it were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the illiterate,
+and are always prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their
+unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by a
+vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best
+and only modest thing about them.&nbsp; One tires, at the end, of the
+work of individuals whose individuality is always noisy, and generally
+uninteresting.&nbsp; There is far more to be said in favour of that
+newer school at Paris, the <i>Archaicistes</i>, as they call themselves,
+who, refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather,
+do not find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather
+for the imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour,
+and rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they
+see, try to see something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with
+actual and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul
+which is as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid
+in artistic purpose.&nbsp; They, at any rate, work under those decorative
+conditions that each art requires for its perfection, and have sufficient
+aesthetic instinct to regret those sordid and stupid limitations of
+absolute modernity of form which have proved the ruin of so many of
+the Impressionists.&nbsp; Still, the art that is frankly decorative
+is the art to live with.&nbsp; It is, of all our visible arts, the one
+art that creates in us both mood and temperament.&nbsp; Mere colour,
+unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to
+the soul in a thousand different ways.&nbsp; The harmony that resides
+in the delicate proportions of lines and masses becomes mirrored in
+the mind.&nbsp; The repetitions of pattern give us rest.&nbsp; The marvels
+of design stir the imagination.&nbsp; In the mere loveliness of the
+materials employed there are latent elements of culture.&nbsp; Nor is
+this all.&nbsp; By its deliberate rejection of Nature as the ideal of
+beauty, as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary painter,
+decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the reception of true
+imaginative work, but develops in it that sense of form which is the
+basis of creative no less than of critical achievement.&nbsp; For the
+real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form
+to thought and passion.&nbsp; He does not first conceive an idea, and
+then say to himself, &lsquo;I will put my idea into a complex metre
+of fourteen lines,&rsquo; but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme,
+he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere
+form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally
+complete.&nbsp; From time to time the world cries out against some charming
+artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has
+&lsquo;nothing to say.&rsquo;&nbsp; But if he had something to say,
+he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious.&nbsp; It
+is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work.&nbsp;
+He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist
+should.&nbsp; A real passion would ruin him.&nbsp; Whatever actually
+occurs is spoiled for art.&nbsp; All bad poetry springs from genuine
+feeling.&nbsp; To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is
+to be inartistic.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; I wonder do you really believe what you say?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Why should you wonder?&nbsp; It is not merely in art
+that the body is the soul.&nbsp; In every sphere of life Form is the
+beginning of things.&nbsp; The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing
+convey, Plato tells us, both rhythm and harmony into the mind.&nbsp;
+Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments
+of sincerity that make us admire and know the man.&nbsp; He was right,
+though he may not have known how terribly right he was.&nbsp; The Creeds
+are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.&nbsp;
+Yes: Form is everything.&nbsp; It is the secret of life.&nbsp; Find
+expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you.&nbsp; Find
+expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy.&nbsp; Do you wish
+to love?&nbsp; Use Love&rsquo;s Litany, and the words will create the
+yearning from which the world fancies that they spring.&nbsp; Have you
+a grief that corrodes your heart?&nbsp; Steep yourself in the Language
+of grief, learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance,
+and you will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and
+that Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.&nbsp;
+And so, to return to the sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not
+merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, that
+unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their conditions
+of beauty.&nbsp; Start with the worship of form, and there is no secret
+in art that will not be revealed to you, and remember that in criticism,
+as in creation, temperament is everything, and that it is, not by the
+time of their production, but by the temperaments to which they appeal,
+that the schools of art should be historically grouped.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Your theory of education is delightful.&nbsp; But what
+influence will your critic, brought up in these exquisite surroundings,
+possess?&nbsp; Do you really think that any artist is ever affected
+by criticism?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; The influence of the critic will be the mere fact
+of his own existence.&nbsp; He will represent the flawless type.&nbsp;
+In him the culture of the century will see itself realised.&nbsp; You
+must not ask of him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself.&nbsp;
+The demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel
+itself alive.&nbsp; The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence;
+but, if so, he will concern himself not with the individual, but with
+the age, which he will seek to wake into consciousness, and to make
+responsive, creating in it new desires and appetites, and lending it
+his larger vision and his nobler moods.&nbsp; The actual art of to-day
+will occupy him less than the art of to-morrow, far less than the art
+of yesterday, and as for this or that person at present toiling away,
+what do the industrious matter?&nbsp; They do their best, no doubt,
+and consequently we get the worst from them.&nbsp; It is always with
+the best intentions that the worst work is done.&nbsp; And besides,
+my dear Ernest, when a man reaches the age of forty, or becomes a Royal
+Academician, or is elected a member of the Athenaeum Club, or is recognised
+as a popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at suburban railway
+stations, one may have the amusement of exposing him, but one cannot
+have the pleasure of reforming him.&nbsp; And this is, I dare say, very
+fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation is a much more
+painful process than punishment, is indeed punishment in its most aggravated
+and moral form&mdash;a fact which accounts for our entire failure as
+a community to reclaim that interesting phenomenon who is called the
+confirmed criminal.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of
+poetry, and the painter of painting?&nbsp; Each art must appeal primarily
+to the artist who works in it.&nbsp; His judgment will surely be the
+most valuable?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic temperament.&nbsp;
+Art does not address herself to the specialist.&nbsp; Her claim is that
+she is universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one.&nbsp;
+Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is the best judge
+of art, a really great artist can never judge of other people&rsquo;s
+work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his own.&nbsp; That very
+concentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer
+intensity his faculty of fine appreciation.&nbsp; The energy of creation
+hurries him blindly on to his own goal.&nbsp; The wheels of his chariot
+raise the dust as a cloud around him.&nbsp; The gods are hidden from
+each other.&nbsp; They can recognise their worshippers.&nbsp; That is
+all.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty
+of work different from his own.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It is impossible for him to do so.&nbsp; Wordsworth
+saw in <i>Endymion</i> merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley,
+with his dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth&rsquo;s message,
+being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete
+creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet
+of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him.&nbsp; The
+realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles.&nbsp; Those droppings
+of warm tears had no music for him.&nbsp; Milton, with his sense of
+the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare, any
+more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough.&nbsp; Bad artists
+always admire each other&rsquo;s work.&nbsp; They call it being large-minded
+and free from prejudice.&nbsp; But a truly great artist cannot conceive
+of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other
+than those that he has selected.&nbsp; Creation employs all its critical
+faculty within its own sphere.&nbsp; It may not use it in the sphere
+that belongs to others.&nbsp; It is exactly because a man cannot do
+a thing that he is the proper judge of it.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Do you really mean that?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens,
+the vision.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; But what about technique?&nbsp; Surely each art has
+its separate technique?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Certainly: each art has its grammar and its materials.&nbsp;
+There is no mystery about either, and the incompetent can always be
+correct.&nbsp; But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed
+and certain, to find their true realisation they must be touched by
+the imagination into such beauty that they will seem an exception, each
+one of them.&nbsp; Technique is really personality.&nbsp; That is the
+reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it,
+and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.&nbsp; To the great poet,
+there is only one method of music&mdash;his own.&nbsp; To the great
+painter, there is only one manner of painting&mdash;that which he himself
+employs.&nbsp; The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone,
+can appreciate all forms and modes.&nbsp; It is to him that Art makes
+her appeal.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Well, I think I have put all my questions to you.&nbsp;
+And now I must admit -</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Ah! don&rsquo;t say that you agree with me.&nbsp;
+When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; In that case I certainly won&rsquo;t tell you whether
+I agree with you or not.&nbsp; But I will put another question.&nbsp;
+You have explained to me that criticism is a creative art.&nbsp; What
+future has it?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; It is to criticism that the future belongs.&nbsp;
+The subject-matter at the disposal of creation becomes every day more
+limited in extent and variety.&nbsp; Providence and Mr. Walter Besant
+have exhausted the obvious.&nbsp; If creation is to last at all, it
+can only do so on the condition of becoming far more critical than it
+is at present.&nbsp; The old roads and dusty highways have been traversed
+too often.&nbsp; Their charm has been worn away by plodding feet, and
+they have lost that element of novelty or surprise which is so essential
+for romance.&nbsp; He who would stir us now by fiction must either give
+us an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its
+innermost workings.&nbsp; The first is for the moment being done for
+us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling.&nbsp; As one turns over the pages of his
+<i>Plain Tales from the Hills</i>, one feels as if one were seated under
+a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.&nbsp; The bright
+colours of the bazaars dazzle one&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; The jaded, second-rate
+Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings.&nbsp;
+The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic
+realism to what he tells us.&nbsp; From the point of view of literature
+Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.&nbsp; From the point
+of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any
+one has ever known it.&nbsp; Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy.&nbsp;
+Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness.&nbsp; He is our first
+authority on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through
+keyholes, and his backgrounds are real works of art.&nbsp; As for the
+second condition, we have had Browning, and Meredith is with us.&nbsp;
+But there is still much to be done in the sphere of introspection.&nbsp;
+People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid.&nbsp; As far
+as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough.&nbsp; We
+have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all.&nbsp; In one
+single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous
+and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author
+of <i>Le Rouge et le Noir</i>, have sought to track the soul into its
+most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.&nbsp;
+Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and
+it is possible that a further development of the habit of introspection
+may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it seeks to supply
+fresh material.&nbsp; I myself am inclined to think that creation is
+doomed.&nbsp; It springs from too primitive, too natural an impulse.&nbsp;
+However this may be, it is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal
+of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism
+increases daily.&nbsp; There are always new attitudes for the mind,
+and new points of view.&nbsp; The duty of imposing form upon chaos does
+not grow less as the world advances.&nbsp; There was never a time when
+Criticism was more needed than it is now.&nbsp; It is only by its means
+that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.</p>
+<p>Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism.&nbsp; You might
+just as well have asked me the use of thought.&nbsp; It is Criticism,
+as Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the
+age.&nbsp; It is Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day,
+that makes the mind a fine instrument.&nbsp; We, in our educational
+system, have burdened the memory with a load of unconnected facts, and
+laboriously striven to impart our laboriously-acquired knowledge.&nbsp;
+We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.&nbsp;
+It has never occurred to us to try and develop in the mind a more subtle
+quality of apprehension and discernment.&nbsp; The Greeks did this,
+and when we come in contact with the Greek critical intellect, we cannot
+but be conscious that, while our subject-matter is in every respect
+larger and more varied than theirs, theirs is the only method by which
+this subject-matter can be interpreted.&nbsp; England has done one thing;
+it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt
+to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the
+dignity of physical force.&nbsp; But Wisdom has always been hidden from
+it.&nbsp; Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is
+coarse and undeveloped.&nbsp; The only thing that can purify it is the
+growth of the critical instinct.</p>
+<p>It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture possible.&nbsp;
+It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a
+finer essence.&nbsp; Who that desires to retain any sense of form could
+struggle through the monstrous multitudinous books that the world has
+produced, books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls?&nbsp;
+The thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in
+the hands of Criticism.&nbsp; Nay more, where there is no record, and
+history is either lost, or was never written, Criticism can re-create
+the past for us from the very smallest fragment of language or art,
+just as surely as the man of science can from some tiny bone, or the
+mere impress of a foot upon a rock, re-create for us the winged dragon
+or Titan lizard that once made the earth shake beneath its tread, can
+call Behemoth out of his cave, and make Leviathan swim once more across
+the startled sea.&nbsp; Prehistoric history belongs to the philological
+and archaeological critic.&nbsp; It is to him that the origins of things
+are revealed.&nbsp; The self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly
+always misleading.&nbsp; Through philological criticism alone we know
+more of the centuries of which no actual record has been preserved,
+than we do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls.&nbsp; It
+can do for us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics.&nbsp;
+It can give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming.&nbsp;
+It can do for us what History cannot do.&nbsp; It can tell us what man
+thought before he learned how to write.&nbsp; You have asked me about
+the influence of Criticism.&nbsp; I think I have answered that question
+already; but there is this also to be said.&nbsp; It is Criticism that
+makes us cosmopolitan.&nbsp; The Manchester school tried to make men
+realise the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the commercial
+advantages of peace.&nbsp; It sought to degrade the wonderful world
+into a common market-place for the buyer and the seller.&nbsp; It addressed
+itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed.&nbsp; War followed upon
+war, and the tradesman&rsquo;s creed did not prevent France and Germany
+from clashing together in blood-stained battle.&nbsp; There are others
+of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or to
+the shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics.&nbsp; They
+have their Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and their
+proposals for unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among those
+who have never read history.&nbsp; But mere emotional sympathy will
+not do.&nbsp; It is too variable, and too closely connected with the
+passions; and a board of arbitrators who, for the general welfare of
+the race, are to be deprived of the power of putting their decisions
+into execution, will not be of much avail.&nbsp; There is only one thing
+worse than Injustice, and that is Justice without her sword in her hand.&nbsp;
+When Right is not Might, it is Evil.</p>
+<p>No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the
+greed for gain could do so.&nbsp; It is only by the cultivation of the
+habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior
+to race-prejudices.&nbsp; Goethe&mdash;you will not misunderstand what
+I say&mdash;was a German of the Germans.&nbsp; He loved his country&mdash;no
+man more so.&nbsp; Its people were dear to him; and he led them.&nbsp;
+Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard and cornfield,
+his lips were silent.&nbsp; &lsquo;How can one write songs of hatred
+without hating?&rsquo; he said to Eckermann, &lsquo;and how could I,
+to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation
+which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe so
+great a part of my own cultivation?&rsquo;&nbsp; This note, sounded
+in the modern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting
+point for the cosmopolitanism of the future.&nbsp; Criticism will annihilate
+race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the
+variety of its forms.&nbsp; If we are tempted to make war upon another
+nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element
+of our own culture, and possibly its most important element.&nbsp; As
+long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.&nbsp;
+When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.&nbsp;
+The change will of course be slow, and people will not be conscious
+of it.&nbsp; They will not say &lsquo;We will not war against France
+because her prose is perfect,&rsquo; but because the prose of France
+is perfect, they will not hate the land.&nbsp; Intellectual criticism
+will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be
+forged by shopman or sentimentalist.&nbsp; It will give us the peace
+that springs from understanding.</p>
+<p>Nor is this all.&nbsp; It is Criticism that, recognising no position
+as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of
+any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves
+truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it
+to be unattainable.&nbsp; How little we have of this temper in England,
+and how much we need it!&nbsp; The English mind is always in a rage.&nbsp;
+The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels
+of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.&nbsp; It was reserved
+for a man of science to show us the supreme example of that &lsquo;sweet
+reasonableness&rsquo; of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to
+so little effect.&nbsp; The author of the <i>Origin of Species</i> had,
+at any rate, the philosophic temper.&nbsp; If one contemplates the ordinary
+pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian,
+or the indifference of Montaigne.&nbsp; We are dominated by the fanatic,
+whose worst vice is his sincerity.&nbsp; Anything approaching to the
+free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us.&nbsp; People
+cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid,
+who are our shame.&nbsp; There is no sin except stupidity.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; Ah! what an antinomian you are!</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian
+always.&nbsp; To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness,
+is obviously quite easy.&nbsp; It merely requires a certain amount of
+sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain
+low passion for middle-class respectability.&nbsp; Aesthetics are higher
+than ethics.&nbsp; They belong to a more spiritual sphere.&nbsp; To
+discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive.&nbsp;
+Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual,
+than a sense of right and wrong.&nbsp; Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics
+in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the
+external world, sexual is to natural selection.&nbsp; Ethics, like natural
+selection, make existence possible.&nbsp; Aesthetics, like sexual selection,
+make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it
+progress, and variety and change.&nbsp; And when we reach the true culture
+that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have
+dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because
+they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do
+everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing
+that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it
+is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer
+susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions that with
+the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or
+with the shameful vile.&nbsp; Is this dangerous?&nbsp; Yes; it is dangerous&mdash;all
+ideas, as I told you, are so.&nbsp; But the night wearies, and the light
+flickers in the lamp.&nbsp; One more thing I cannot help saying to you.&nbsp;
+You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing.&nbsp; The
+nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account
+of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the
+Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God.&nbsp; Not
+to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important
+eras in the progress of the world.&nbsp; Creation is always behind the
+age.&nbsp; It is Criticism that leads us.&nbsp; The Critical Spirit
+and the World-Spirit are one.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom
+this spirit possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet
+pensive Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and amaranth
+are blooming, he will sit contented &lsquo;in that deep, motionless
+quiet which mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+will look out upon the world and know its secret.&nbsp; By contact with
+divine things he will become divine.&nbsp; His will be the perfect life,
+and his only.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert.&nbsp;
+You have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing than
+to do it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing
+in the world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought
+dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the
+highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the
+artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do
+a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic
+is unfair, insincere, and not rational.&nbsp; My friend, you are a dreamer.</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; Yes: I am a dreamer.&nbsp; For a dreamer is one who
+can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees
+the dawn before the rest of the world.</p>
+<p>ERNEST.&nbsp; His punishment?</p>
+<p>GILBERT.&nbsp; And his reward.&nbsp; But, see, it is dawn already.&nbsp;
+Draw back the curtains and open the windows wide.&nbsp; How cool the
+morning air is!&nbsp; Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband
+of silver.&nbsp; A faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows
+of the white houses are purple.&nbsp; It is too late to sleep.&nbsp;
+Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the roses.&nbsp; Come!&nbsp;
+I am tired of thought.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>THE TRUTH OF MASKS&mdash;A NOTE ON ILLUSION</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made
+on that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian
+revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics
+that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes
+of his actors, and that, could he see Mrs. Langtry&rsquo;s production
+of <i>Antony and</i> <i>Cleopatra</i>, he would probably say that the
+play, and the play only, is the thing, and that everything else is leather
+and prunella.&nbsp; While, as regards any historical accuracy in dress,
+Lord Lytton, in an article in the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, has laid
+it down as a dogma of art that archaeology is entirely out of place
+in the presentation of any of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays, and the attempt
+to introduce it one of the stupidest pedantries of an age of prigs.</p>
+<p>Lord Lytton&rsquo;s position I shall examine later on; but, as regards
+the theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about the costume-wardrobe
+of his theatre, anybody who cares to study Shakespeare&rsquo;s method
+will see that there is absolutely no dramatist of the French, English,
+or Athenian stage who relies so much for his illusionist effects on
+the dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself.</p>
+<p>Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty
+of costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques and dances,
+purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye; and we
+have still his stage-directions for the three great processions in <i>Henry
+the Eighth</i>, directions which are characterised by the most extraordinary
+elaborateness of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in
+Anne Boleyn&rsquo;s hair.&nbsp; Indeed it would be quite easy for a
+modern manager to reproduce these pageants absolutely as Shakespeare
+had them designed; and so accurate were they that one of the court officials
+of the time, writing an account of the last performance of the play
+at the Globe Theatre to a friend, actually complains of their realistic
+character, notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of
+the Garter in the robes and insignia of the order as being calculated
+to bring ridicule on the real ceremonies; much in the same spirit in
+which the French Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful
+actor, M. Christian, from appearing in uniform, on the plea that it
+was prejudicial to the glory of the army that a colonel should be caricatured.&nbsp;
+And elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English
+stage under Shakespeare&rsquo;s influence was attacked by the contemporary
+critics, not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic tendencies
+of realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are always the
+last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.</p>
+<p>The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare
+appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to
+poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing
+certain dramatic effects.&nbsp; Many of his plays, such as <i>Measure
+for</i> <i>Measure</i>, <i>Twelfth Night</i>, <i>The Two Gentleman of</i>
+<i>Verona</i>, <i>All&rsquo;s Well that Ends Well</i>, <i>Cymbeline</i>,
+and others, depend for their illusion on the character of the various
+dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the delightful scene in <i>Henry
+the Sixth</i>, on the modern miracles of healing by faith, loses all
+its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and the <i>d&eacute;no&ucirc;ment</i>
+of the <i>Merry Wives</i> <i>of Windsor</i> hinges on the colour of
+Anne Page&rsquo;s gown.&nbsp; As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises
+the instances are almost numberless.&nbsp; Posthumus hides his passion
+under a peasant&rsquo;s garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot&rsquo;s
+rags; Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired
+in &lsquo;all points as a man&rsquo;; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes
+Imogen to the Youth Fidele; Jessica flees from her father&rsquo;s house
+in boy&rsquo;s dress, and Julia ties up her yellow hair in fantastic
+love-knots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady
+as a shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim; Prince Hal and Poins appear
+first as footpads in buckram suits, and then in white aprons and leather
+jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as for Falstaff, does he not
+come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as Herne the Hunter, and as
+the clothes going to the laundry?</p>
+<p>Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of intensifying
+dramatic situation less numerous.&nbsp; After slaughter of Duncan, Macbeth
+appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep; Timon ends in rags
+the play he had begun in splendour; Richard flatters the London citizens
+in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and, as soon as he has stepped
+in blood to the throne, marches through the streets in crown and George
+and Garter; the climax of <i>The Tempest</i> is reached when Prospero,
+throwing off his enchanter&rsquo;s robes, sends Ariel for his hat and
+rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost
+in <i>Hamlet</i> changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects;
+and as for Juliet, a modern playwright would probably have laid her
+out in her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but
+Shakespeare arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness
+makes the vault &lsquo;a feasting presence full of light,&rsquo; turns
+the tomb into a bridal chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo&rsquo;s
+speech of the triumph of Beauty over Death.</p>
+<p>Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo&rsquo;s
+stockings, the pattern on a wife&rsquo;s handkerchief, the sleeve of
+a young soldier, and a fashionable woman&rsquo;s bonnets, become in
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s hands points of actual dramatic importance, and
+by some of them the action of the play in question is conditioned absolutely.&nbsp;
+Many other dramatists have availed themselves of costume as a method
+of expressing directly to the audience the character of a person on
+his entrance, though hardly so brilliantly as Shakespeare has done in
+the case of the dandy Parolles, whose dress, by the way, only an archaeologist
+can understand; the fun of a master and servant exchanging coats in
+presence of the audience, of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the
+division of a lot of fine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a
+duke while he is in his cups, may be regarded as part of that great
+career which costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes
+down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details of apparel and
+adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast, such immediate and
+tragic effect, such pity and such pathos, as Shakespeare himself.&nbsp;
+Armed cap-&agrave;-pie, the dead King stalks on the battlements of Elsinore
+because all is not right with Denmark; Shylock&rsquo;s Jewish gaberdine
+is part of the stigma under which that wounded and embittered nature
+writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of no better plea than
+the handkerchief he had given Hubert -</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Have you the heart? when your head did but ache,<br />I knit my handkerchief
+about your brows,<br />(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)<br />And
+I did never ask it you again;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>and Orlando&rsquo;s blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre
+note in that exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feeling
+that underlies Rosalind&rsquo;s fanciful wit and wilful jesting.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Last night &rsquo;twas on my arm; I kissed it;<br />I hope it be
+not gone to tell my lord<br />That I kiss aught but he,</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already
+on its way to Rome to rob her of her husband&rsquo;s faith; the little
+Prince passing to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle&rsquo;s
+girdle; Duncan sends a ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own
+murder, and the ring of Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant into
+a wife&rsquo;s comedy.&nbsp; The great rebel York dies with a paper
+crown on his head; Hamlet&rsquo;s black suit is a kind of colour-motive
+in the piece, like the mourning of the Chim&egrave;ne in the <i>Cid</i>;
+and the climax of Antony&rsquo;s speech is the production of Caesar&rsquo;s
+cloak:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>I remember<br />The first time ever Caesar put it on.<br />&rsquo;Twas
+on a summer&rsquo;s evening, in his tent,<br />The day he overcame the
+Nervii:-<br />Look, in this place ran Cassius&rsquo; dagger through:<br />See
+what a rent the envious Casca made:<br />Through this the well-beloved
+Brutus stabbed. . . .<br />Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold<br />Our
+Caesar&rsquo;s vesture wounded?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as
+pathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of Lear&rsquo;s
+wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic
+attire; and when Cloten, stung by the taunt of that simile which his
+sister draws from her husband&rsquo;s raiment, arrays himself in that
+husband&rsquo;s very garb to work upon her the deed of shame, we feel
+that there is nothing in the whole of modern French realism, nothing
+even in <i>Th&eacute;r&egrave;se Raquin</i>, that masterpiece of horror,
+which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with this strange
+scene in <i>Cymbeline.</i></p>
+<p>In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are those
+suggested by costume.&nbsp; Rosalind&rsquo;s</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet
+and hose in my disposition?</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Constance&rsquo;s</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Grief fills the place of my absent child,<br />Stuffs out his vacant
+garments with his form;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth -</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Ah! cut my lace asunder! -</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>are only a few of the many examples one might quote.&nbsp; One of
+the finest effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the
+last act of <i>Lear</i>, tearing the plume from Kent&rsquo;s cap and
+applying it to Cordelia&rsquo;s lips when he came to the line,</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>This feather stirs; she lives!</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked,
+I remember, some fur from his archaeologically-incorrect ermine for
+the same business; but Salvini&rsquo;s was the finer effect of the two,
+as well as the truer.&nbsp; And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last
+act of <i>Richard the Third</i> have not, I am sure, forgotten how much
+the agony and terror of his dream was intensified, by contrast, through
+the calm and quiet that preceded it, and the delivery of such lines
+as</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>What, is my beaver easier than it was?<br />And all my armour laid
+into my tent?<br />Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy -</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the
+last words which Richard&rsquo;s mother called after him as he was marching
+to Bosworth:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,<br />Which in the
+day of battle tire thee more<br />Than all the complete armour that
+thou wear&rsquo;st.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it
+is to be remarked that, while he more than once complains of the smallness
+of the stage on which he has to produce big historical plays, and of
+the want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many effective open-air
+incidents, he always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a
+most elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors
+taking pains about their make-up.&nbsp; Even now it is difficult to
+produce such a play as the <i>Comedy of Errors</i>; and to the picturesque
+accident of Miss Ellen Terry&rsquo;s brother resembling herself we owe
+the opportunity of seeing <i>Twelfth Night</i> adequately performed.&nbsp;
+Indeed, to put any play of Shakespeare&rsquo;s on the stage, absolutely
+as he himself wished it to be done, requires the services of a good
+property-man, a clever wig-maker, a costumier with a sense of colour
+and a knowledge of textures, a master of the methods of making-up, a
+fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an artist to direct personally
+the whole production.&nbsp; For he is most careful to tell us the dress
+and appearance of each character.&nbsp; &lsquo;Racine abhorre la r&eacute;alit&eacute;,&rsquo;
+says Auguste Vacquerie somewhere; &lsquo;il ne daigne pas s&rsquo;occuper
+de son costume.&nbsp; Si l&rsquo;on s&rsquo;en rapportait aux indications
+du po&egrave;te, Agamemnon serait v&ecirc;tu d&rsquo;un sceptre et Achille
+d&rsquo;une &eacute;p&eacute;e.&rsquo;&nbsp; But with Shakespeare it
+is very different.&nbsp; He gives us directions about the costumes of
+Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in <i>Macbeth</i>, and the
+apothecary in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, several elaborate descriptions
+of his fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb
+in which Petruchio is to be married.&nbsp; Rosalind, he tells us, is
+tall, and is to carry a spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller,
+and is to paint her face brown so as to look sunburnt.&nbsp; The children
+who play at fairies in Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white and
+green&mdash;a compliment, by the way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite
+colours they were&mdash;and in white, with green garlands and gilded
+vizors, the angels are to come to Katherine in Kimbolton.&nbsp; Bottom
+is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by his wearing
+an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his boots.&nbsp; The Duchess
+of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her husband in mourning beside
+her.&nbsp; The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the Cardinal, and
+the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are all made occasion
+for jest or taunt in the dialogue.&nbsp; We know the patterns on the
+Dauphin&rsquo;s armour and the Pucelle&rsquo;s sword, the crest on Warwick&rsquo;s
+helmet and the colour of Bardolph&rsquo;s nose.&nbsp; Portia has golden
+hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew
+Aguecheek&rsquo;s hair hangs like flax on a distaff, and won&rsquo;t
+curl at all.&nbsp; Some of the characters are stout, some lean, some
+straight, some hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to blacken
+their faces.&nbsp; Lear has a white beard, Hamlet&rsquo;s father a grizzled,
+and Benedick is to shave his in the course of the play.&nbsp; Indeed,
+on the subject of stage beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate; tells
+us of the many different colours in use, and gives a hint to actors
+always to see that their own are properly tied on.&nbsp; There is a
+dance of reapers in rye-straw hats, and of rustics in hairy coats like
+satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque of Russians, and a classical masque;
+several immortal scenes over a weaver in an ass&rsquo;s head, a riot
+over the colour of a coat which it takes the Lord Mayor of London to
+quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband and his wife&rsquo;s
+milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.</p>
+<p>As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms
+he makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at
+the ridiculous size of the ladies&rsquo; bonnets, and the many descriptions
+of the <i>mundus muliebris</i>, from the long of Autolycus in the <i>Winter&rsquo;s
+Tale</i> down to the account of the Duchess of Milan&rsquo;s gown in
+<i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>, they are far too numerous to quote; though
+it may be worth while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy
+of Clothes is to be found in Lear&rsquo;s scene with Edgar&mdash;a passage
+which has the advantage of brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom
+and somewhat mouthing metaphysics of <i>Sartor Resartus</i>.&nbsp; But
+I think that from what I have already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare
+was very much interested in costume.&nbsp; I do not mean in that shallow
+sense by which it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds and
+daffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan age;
+but that he saw that costume could be made at once impressive of a certain
+effect on the audience and expressive of certain types of character,
+and is one of the essential factors of the means which a true illusionist
+has at his disposal.&nbsp; Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard
+was of as much value as Juliet&rsquo;s loveliness; he sets the serge
+of the radical beside the silks of the lord, and sees the stage effects
+to be got from each: he has as much delight in Caliban as he has in
+Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth of gold, and recognises the artistic
+beauty of ugliness.</p>
+<p>The difficulty Ducis felt about translating <i>Othello</i> in consequence
+of the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and
+his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate &lsquo;Le
+bandeau! le bandeau!&rsquo; may be taken as an example of the difference
+between <i>la trag&eacute;die philosophique</i> and the drama of real
+life; and the introduction for the first time of the word <i>mouchoir</i>
+at the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais was an era in that romantic-realistic
+movement of which Hugo is the father and M. Zola the <i>enfant terrible</i>,
+just as the classicism of the earlier part of the century was emphasised
+by Talma&rsquo;s refusal to play Greek heroes any longer in a powdered
+periwig&mdash;one of the many instances, by the way, of that desire
+for archaeological accuracy in dress which has distinguished the great
+actors of our age.</p>
+<p>In criticising the importance given to money in <i>La Com&eacute;die
+Humaine</i>, Th&eacute;ophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to
+have invented a new hero in fiction, <i>le h&eacute;ros m&eacute;tallique</i>.&nbsp;
+Of Shakespeare it may be said he was the first to see the dramatic value
+of doublets, and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.</p>
+<p>The burning of the Globe Theatre&mdash;an event due, by the way,
+to the results of the passion for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+stage-management&mdash;has unfortunately robbed us of many important
+documents; but in the inventory, still in existence, of the costume-wardrobe
+of a London theatre in Shakespeare&rsquo;s time, there are mentioned
+particular costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns, friars,
+and fools; green coats for Robin Hood&rsquo;s men, and a green gown
+for Maid Marian; a white and gold doublet for Henry the Fifth, and a
+robe for Longshanks; besides surplices, copes, damask gowns, gowns of
+cloth of gold and of cloth of silver, taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet
+coats, satin coats, frieze coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black
+leather, red suits, grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe &lsquo;for
+to goo invisibell,&rsquo; which seems inexpensive at &pound;3, 10s.,
+and four incomparable fardingales&mdash;all of which show a desire to
+give every character an appropriate dress.&nbsp; There are also entries
+of Spanish, Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets, lances, painted
+shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of costumes for
+Turkish Janissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and goddesses
+of Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archaeological research on
+the part of the manager of the theatre.&nbsp; It is true that there
+is a mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the <i>donn&eacute;e</i>
+of the play was after the Fall.</p>
+<p>Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare will
+see that archaeology was one of its special characteristics.&nbsp; After
+that revival of the classical forms of architecture which was one of
+the notes of the Renaissance, and the printing at Venice and elsewhere
+of the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature, had come naturally
+an interest in the ornamentation and costume of the antique world.&nbsp;
+Nor was it for the learning that they could acquire, but rather for
+the loveliness that they might create, that the artists studied these
+things.&nbsp; The curious objects that were being constantly brought
+to light by excavations were not left to moulder in a museum, for the
+contemplation of a callous curator, and the <i>ennui</i> of a policeman
+bored by the absence of crime.&nbsp; They were used as motives for the
+production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful merely, but also
+strange.</p>
+<p>Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian
+Way came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name &lsquo;Julia,
+daughter of Claudius.&rsquo;&nbsp; On opening the coffer they found
+within its marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen
+years of age, preserved by the embalmer&rsquo;s skill from corruption
+and the decay of time.&nbsp; Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled
+round her in crisp curling gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom
+of maidenhood had not yet departed.&nbsp; Borne back to the Capitol,
+she became at once the centre of a new cult, and from all parts of the
+city crowded pilgrims to worship at the wonderful shrine, till the Pope,
+fearing lest those who had found the secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb
+might forget what secrets Judaea&rsquo;s rough and rock-hewn sepulchre
+contained, had the body conveyed away by night, and in secret buried.&nbsp;
+Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the less valuable as
+showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique world.&nbsp;
+Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the antiquarian; it was
+a means by which they could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the
+very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism
+forms that else had been old and outworn.&nbsp; From the pulpit of Niccola
+Pisano down to Mantegna&rsquo;s &lsquo;Triumph of Caesar,&rsquo; and
+the service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this
+spirit can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts&mdash;the
+arts of arrested movement&mdash;but its influence was to be seen also
+in the great Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement
+of the gay courts of the time, and in the public pomps and processions
+with which the citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the
+princes that chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were
+considered so important that large prints were made of them and published&mdash;a
+fact which is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters
+of such kind.</p>
+<p>And this use of archaeology in shows, so far from being a bit of
+priggish pedantry, is in every way legitimate and beautiful.&nbsp; For
+the stage is not merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but is also
+the return of art to life.&nbsp; Sometimes in an archaeological novel
+the use of strange and obsolete terms seems to hide the reality beneath
+the learning, and I dare say that many of the readers of <i>Notre Dame
+de Paris</i> have been much puzzled over the meaning of such expressions
+as <i>la casaque &agrave; mahoitres</i>, <i>les voulgiers</i>, <i>le</i>
+<i>gallimard tach&eacute; d&rsquo;encre</i>, <i>les craaquiniers</i>,
+and the like; but with the stage how different it is!&nbsp; The ancient
+world wakes from its sleep, and history moves as a pageant before our
+eyes, without obliging us to have recourse to a dictionary or an encyclopaedia
+for the perfection of our enjoyment.&nbsp; Indeed, there is not the
+slightest necessity that the public should know the authorities for
+the mounting of any piece.&nbsp; From such materials, for instance,
+as the disk of Theodosius, materials with which the majority of people
+are probably not very familiar, Mr. E. W. Godwin, one of the most artistic
+spirits of this century in England, created the marvellous loveliness
+of the first act of <i>Claudian</i>, and showed us the life of Byzantium
+in the fourth century, not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts,
+not by a novel which requires a glossary to explain it, but by the visible
+presentation before us of all the glory of that great town.&nbsp; And
+while the costumes were true to the smallest points of colour and design,
+yet the details were not assigned that abnormal importance which they
+must necessarily be given in a piecemeal lecture, but were subordinated
+to the rules of lofty composition and the unity of artistic effect.&nbsp;
+Mr. Symonds, speaking of that great picture of Mantegna&rsquo;s, now
+in Hampton Court, says that the artist has converted an antiquarian
+motive into a theme for melodies of line.&nbsp; The same could have
+been said with equal justice of Mr. Godwin&rsquo;s scene.&nbsp; Only
+the foolish called it pedantry, only those who would neither look nor
+listen spoke of the passion of the play being killed by its paint.&nbsp;
+It was in reality a scene not merely perfect in its picturesqueness,
+but absolutely dramatic also, getting rid of any necessity for tedious
+descriptions, and showing us, by the colour and character of Claudian&rsquo;s
+dress, and the dress of his attendants, the whole nature and life of
+the man, from what school of philosophy he affected, down to what horses
+he backed on the turf.</p>
+<p>And indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused
+into some form of art.&nbsp; I have no desire to underrate the services
+of laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempri&egrave;re&rsquo;s
+Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor Max M&uuml;ller&rsquo;s
+treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language.&nbsp; Better
+<i>Endymion</i> than any theory, however sound, or, as in the present
+instance, unsound, of an epidemic among adjectives!&nbsp; And who does
+not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi&rsquo;s book on Vases is that
+it gave Keats the suggestion for his &lsquo;Ode on a Grecian Urn&rsquo;?&nbsp;
+Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric
+art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in
+one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder
+of the unreal world.&nbsp; But the sixteenth century was not merely
+the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also.&nbsp; Every nation
+seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress of its neighbours.&nbsp;
+Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the amount of books
+published on national costumes is quite extraordinary.&nbsp; At the
+beginning of the century the <i>Nuremberg Chronicle</i>, with its two
+thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
+was over seventeen editions were published of Munster&rsquo;s <i>Cosmography</i>.&nbsp;
+Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns,
+of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well
+illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the
+hand of Titian.</p>
+<p>Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their
+knowledge.&nbsp; The development of the habit of foreign travel, the
+increased commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency
+of diplomatic missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying
+the various forms of contemporary dress.&nbsp; After the departure from
+England, for instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan
+and the Prince of Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several
+masques in the strange attire of their visitors.&nbsp; Later on London
+saw, perhaps too often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and
+to Elizabeth came envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells
+us, had an important influence on English costume.</p>
+<p>And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress, or the
+dress of foreign nations; there was also a good deal of research, amongst
+theatrical people especially, into the ancient costume of England itself:
+and when Shakespeare, in the prologue to one of his plays, expresses
+his regret at being unable to produce helmets of the period, he is speaking
+as an Elizabethan manager and not merely as an Elizabethan poet.&nbsp;
+At Cambridge, for instance, during his day, a play of <i>Richard The
+Third</i> was performed, in which the actors were attired in real dresses
+of the time, procured from the great collection of historical costume
+in the Tower, which was always open to the inspection of managers, and
+sometimes placed at their disposal.&nbsp; And I cannot help thinking
+that this performance must have been far more artistic, as regards costume,
+than Garrick&rsquo;s mounting of Shakespeare&rsquo;s own play on the
+subject, in which he himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress,
+and everybody else in the costume of the time of George the Third, Richmond
+especially being much admired in the uniform of a young guardsman.</p>
+<p>For what is the use to the stage of that archaeology which has so
+strangely terrified the critics, but that it, and it alone, can give
+us the architecture and apparel suitable to the time in which the action
+of the play passes?&nbsp; It enables us to see a Greek dressed like
+a Greek, and an Italian like an Italian; to enjoy the arcades of Venice
+and the balconies of Verona; and, if the play deals with any of the
+great eras in our country&rsquo;s history, to contemplate the age in
+its proper attire, and the king in his habit as he lived.&nbsp; And
+I wonder, by the way, what Lord Lytton would have said some time ago,
+at the Princess&rsquo;s Theatre, had the curtain risen on his father&rsquo;s
+Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair, attired in a flowing wig and
+a flowered dressing-gown, a costume which in the last century was considered
+peculiarly appropriate to an antique Roman!&nbsp; For in those halcyon
+days of the drama no archaeology troubled the stage, or distressed the
+critics, and our inartistic grandfathers sat peaceably in a stifling
+atmosphere of anachronisms, and beheld with the calm complacency of
+the age of prose an Iachimo in powder and patches, a Lear in lace ruffles,
+and a Lady Macbeth in a large crinoline.&nbsp; I can understand archaeology
+being attacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but to attack
+it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the mark.&nbsp; However,
+to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as well speak
+disrespectfully of the equator.&nbsp; For archaeology, being a science,
+is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply.&nbsp; Its value depends
+entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it.&nbsp; We
+look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.</p>
+<p>In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for
+the drama.&nbsp; This should be determined by the general spirit of
+the play, more than by any actual historical references which may occur
+in it.&nbsp; Most <i>Hamlets</i> I have seen were placed far too early.&nbsp;
+<i>Hamlet</i> is essentially a scholar of the Revival of Learning; and
+if the allusion to the recent invasion of England by the Danes puts
+it back to the ninth century, the use of foils brings it down much later.&nbsp;
+Once, however, that the date has been fixed, then the archaeologist
+is to supply us with the facts which the artist is to convert into effects.</p>
+<p>It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves show
+us that Shakespeare was indifferent to historical accuracy, and a great
+deal of capital has been made out of Hector&rsquo;s indiscreet quotation
+from Aristotle.&nbsp; Upon the other hand, the anachronisms are really
+few in number, and not very important, and, had Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+attention been drawn to them by a brother artist, he would probably
+have corrected them.&nbsp; For, though they can hardly be called blemishes,
+they are certainly not the great beauties of his work; or, at least,
+if they are, their anachronistic charm cannot be emphasised unless the
+play is accurately mounted according to its proper date.&nbsp; In looking
+at Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays as a whole, however, what is really remarkable
+is their extraordinary fidelity as regards his personages and his plots.&nbsp;
+Many of his <i>dramatis personae</i> are people who had actually existed,
+and some of them might have been seen in real life by a portion of his
+audience.&nbsp; Indeed the most violent attack that was made on Shakespeare
+in his time was for his supposed caricature of Lord Cobham.&nbsp; As
+for his plots, Shakespeare constantly draws them either from authentic
+history, or from the old ballads and traditions which served as history
+to the Elizabethan public, and which even now no scientific historian
+would dismiss as absolutely untrue.&nbsp; And not merely did he select
+fact instead of fancy as the basis of much of his imaginative work,
+but he always gives to each play the general character, the social atmosphere
+in a word, of the age in question.&nbsp; Stupidity he recognises as
+being one of the permanent characteristics of all European civilisations;
+so he sees no difference between a London mob of his own day and a Roman
+mob of pagan days, between a silly watchman in Messina and a silly Justice
+of the Peace in Windsor.&nbsp; But when he deals with higher characters,
+with those exceptions of each age which are so fine that they become
+its types, he gives them absolutely the stamp and seal of their time.&nbsp;
+Virgilia is one of those Roman wives on whose tomb was written &lsquo;Domi
+mansit, lanam fecit,&rsquo; as surely as Juliet is the romantic girl
+of the Renaissance.&nbsp; He is even true to the characteristics of
+race.&nbsp; Hamlet has all the imagination and irresolution of the Northern
+nations, and the Princess Katharine is as entirely French as the heroine
+of <i>Divor&ccedil;ons</i>.&nbsp; Harry the Fifth is a pure Englishman,
+and Othello a true Moor.</p>
+<p>Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from the
+fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it is wonderful how careful he
+is to have his facts perfectly right&mdash;indeed he follows Holinshed
+with curious fidelity.&nbsp; The incessant wars between France and England
+are described with extraordinary accuracy down to the names of the besieged
+towns, the ports of landing and embarkation, the sites and dates of
+the battles, the titles of the commanders on each side, and the lists
+of the killed and wounded.&nbsp; And as regards the Civil Wars of the
+Roses we have many elaborate genealogies of the seven sons of Edward
+the Third; the claims of the rival Houses of York and Lancaster to the
+throne are discussed at length; and if the English aristocracy will
+not read Shakespeare as a poet, they should certainly read him as a
+sort of early Peerage.&nbsp; There is hardly a single title in the Upper
+House, with the exception of course of the uninteresting titles assumed
+by the law lords, which does not appear in Shakespeare along with many
+details of family history, creditable and discreditable.&nbsp; Indeed
+if it be really necessary that the School Board children should know
+all about the Wars of the Roses, they could learn their lessons just
+as well out of Shakespeare as out of shilling primers, and learn them,
+I need not say, far more pleasurably.&nbsp; Even in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+own day this use of his plays was recognised.&nbsp; &lsquo;The historical
+plays teach history to those who cannot read it in the chronicles,&rsquo;
+says Heywood in a tract about the stage, and yet I am sure that sixteenth-century
+chronicles were much more delightful reading than nineteenth-century
+primers are.</p>
+<p>Of course the aesthetic value of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays does not,
+in the slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth,
+and Truth is independent of facts always, inventing or selecting them
+at pleasure.&nbsp; But still Shakespeare&rsquo;s use of facts is a most
+interesting part of his method of work, and shows us his attitude towards
+the stage, and his relations to the great art of illusion.&nbsp; Indeed
+he would have been very much surprised at any one classing his plays
+with &lsquo;fairy tales,&rsquo; as Lord Lytton does; for one of his
+aims was to create for England a national historical drama, which should
+deal with incidents with which the public was well acquainted, and with
+heroes that lived in the memory of a people.&nbsp; Patriotism, I need
+hardly say, is not a necessary quality of art; but it means, for the
+artist, the substitution of a universal for an individual feeling, and
+for the public the presentation of a work of art in a most attractive
+and popular form.&nbsp; It is worth noticing that Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+first and last successes were both historical plays.</p>
+<p>It may be asked, what has this to do with Shakespeare&rsquo;s attitude
+towards costume?&nbsp; I answer that a dramatist who laid such stress
+on historical accuracy of fact would have welcomed historical accuracy
+of costume as a most important adjunct to his illusionist method.&nbsp;
+And I have no hesitation in saying that he did so.&nbsp; The reference
+to helmets of the period in the prologue to <i>Henry the Fifth</i> may
+be considered fanciful, though Shakespeare must have often seen</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>The very casque<br />That did affright the air at Agincourt,</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey, along
+with the saddle of that &lsquo;imp of fame,&rsquo; and the dinted shield
+with its torn blue velvet lining and its tarnished lilies of gold; but
+the use of military tabards in <i>Henry</i> <i>the Sixth</i> is a bit
+of pure archaeology, as they were not worn in the sixteenth century;
+and the King&rsquo;s own tabard, I may mention, was still suspended
+over his tomb in St. George&rsquo;s Chapel, Windsor, in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+day.&nbsp; For, up to the time of the unfortunate triumph of the Philistines
+in 1645, the chapels and cathedrals of England were the great national
+museums of archaeology, and in them were kept the armour and attire
+of the heroes of English history.&nbsp; A good deal was of course preserved
+in the Tower, and even in Elizabeth&rsquo;s day tourists were brought
+there to see such curious relics of the past as Charles Brandon&rsquo;s
+huge lance, which is still, I believe, the admiration of our country
+visitors; but the cathedrals and churches were, as a rule, selected
+as the most suitable shrines for the reception of the historic antiquities.&nbsp;
+Canterbury can still show us the helm of the Black Prince, Westminster
+the robes of our kings, and in old St. Paul&rsquo;s the very banner
+that had waved on Bosworth field was hung up by Richmond himself.</p>
+<p>In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London, he saw the
+apparel and appurtenances of past ages, and it is impossible to doubt
+that he made use of his opportunities.&nbsp; The employment of lance
+and shield, for instance, in actual warfare, which is so frequent in
+his plays, is drawn from archaeology, and not from the military accoutrements
+of his day; and his general use of armour in battle was not a characteristic
+of his age, a time when it was rapidly disappearing before firearms.&nbsp;
+Again, the crest on Warwick&rsquo;s helmet, of which such a point is
+made in <i>Henry the Sixth</i>, is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century
+play when crests were generally worn, but would not have been so in
+a play of Shakespeare&rsquo;s own time, when feathers and plumes had
+taken their place&mdash;a fashion which, as he tells us in <i>Henry
+the Eighth</i>, was borrowed from France.&nbsp; For the historical plays,
+then, we may be sure that archaeology was employed, and as for the others
+I feel certain that it was the case also.&nbsp; The appearance of Jupiter
+on his eagle, thunderbolt in hand, of Juno with her peacocks, and of
+Iris with her many-coloured bow; the Amazon masque and the masque of
+the Five Worthies, may all be regarded as archaeological; and the vision
+which Posthumus sees in prison of Sicilius Leonatus&mdash;&lsquo;an
+old man, attired like a warrior, leading an ancient matron&rsquo;&mdash;is
+clearly so.&nbsp; Of the &lsquo;Athenian dress&rsquo; by which Lysander
+is distinguished from Oberon I have already spoken; but one of the most
+marked instances is in the case of the dress of Coriolanus, for which
+Shakespeare goes directly to Plutarch.&nbsp; That historian, in his
+Life of the great Roman, tells us of the oak-wreath with which Caius
+Marcius was crowned, and of the curious kind of dress in which, according
+to ancient fashion, he had to canvass his electors; and on both of these
+points he enters into long disquisitions, investigating the origin and
+meaning of the old customs.&nbsp; Shakespeare, in the spirit of the
+true artist, accepts the facts of the antiquarian and converts them
+into dramatic and picturesque effects: indeed the gown of humility,
+the &lsquo;woolvish gown,&rsquo; as Shakespeare calls it, is the central
+note of the play.&nbsp; There are other cases I might quote, but this
+one is quite sufficient for my purpose; and it is evident from it at
+any rate that, in mounting a play in the accurate costume of the time,
+according to the best authorities, we are carrying out Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+own wishes and method.</p>
+<p>Even if it were not so, there is no more reason that we should continue
+any imperfections which may be supposed to have characterised Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+stage mounting than that we should have Juliet played by a young man,
+or give up the advantage of changeable scenery.&nbsp; A great work of
+dramatic art should not merely be made expressive of modern passion
+by means of the actor, but should be presented to us in the form most
+suitable to the modern spirit.&nbsp; Racine produced his Roman plays
+in Louis Quatorze dress on a stage crowded with spectators; but we require
+different conditions for the enjoyment of his art.&nbsp; Perfect accuracy
+of detail, for the sake of perfect illusion, is necessary for us.&nbsp;
+What we have to see is that the details are not allowed to usurp the
+principal place.&nbsp; They must be subordinate always to the general
+motive of the play.&nbsp; But subordination in art does not mean disregard
+of truth; it means conversion of fact into effect, and assigning to
+each detail its proper relative value</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>&lsquo;Les petits d&eacute;tails d&rsquo;histoire et de vie domestique
+(says Hugo) doivent &ecirc;tre scrupuleusement &eacute;tudi&eacute;s
+et reproduits par le po&egrave;te, mais uniquement comme des moyens
+d&rsquo;accro&icirc;tre la r&eacute;alit&eacute; de l&rsquo;ensemble,
+et de faire p&eacute;n&eacute;trer jusque dans les coins les plus obscurs
+de l&rsquo;oeuvre cette vie g&eacute;n&eacute;rale et puissante au milieu
+de laquelle les personnages sont plus vrais, et les catastrophes, par
+cons&eacute;queut, plus poignantes.&nbsp; Tout doit &ecirc;tre subordonn&eacute;
+&agrave; ce but.&nbsp; L&rsquo;Homme sur le premier plan, le reste au
+fond.&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>This passage is interesting as coming from the first great French
+dramatist who employed archaeology on the stage, and whose plays, though
+absolutely correct in detail, are known to all for their passion, not
+for their pedantry&mdash;for their life, not for their learning.&nbsp;
+It is true that he has made certain concessions in the case of the employment
+of curious or strange expressions.&nbsp; Ruy Blas talks of M, de Priego
+as &lsquo;sujet du roi&rsquo; instead of &lsquo;noble du roi,&rsquo;
+and Angelo Malipieri speaks of &lsquo;la croix rouge&rsquo; instead
+of &lsquo;la croix de gueules.&rsquo;&nbsp; But they are concessions
+made to the public, or rather to a section of it.&nbsp; &lsquo;J&rsquo;en
+offre ici toute mes excuses aux spectateurs intelligents,&rsquo; he
+says in a note to one of the plays; &lsquo;esp&eacute;rons qu&rsquo;un
+jour un seigneur v&eacute;nitien pourra dire tout bonnement sans p&eacute;ril
+son blason sur le th&eacute;&acirc;tre.&nbsp; C&rsquo;est un progr&egrave;s
+qui viendra.&rsquo;&nbsp; And, though the description of the crest is
+not couched in accurate language, still the crest itself was accurately
+right.&nbsp; It may, of course, be said that the public do not notice
+these things; upon the other hand, it should be remembered that Art
+has no other aim but her own perfection, and proceeds simply by her
+own laws, and that the play which Hamlet describes as being caviare
+to the general is a play he highly praises.&nbsp; Besides, in England,
+at any rate, the public have undergone a transformation; there is far
+more appreciation of beauty now than there was a few years ago; and
+though they may not be familiar with the authorities and archaeological
+data for what is shown to them, still they enjoy whatever loveliness
+they look at.&nbsp; And this is the important thing.&nbsp; Better to
+take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope.&nbsp;
+Archaeological accuracy is merely a condition of illusionist stage effect;
+it is not its quality.&nbsp; And Lord Lytton&rsquo;s proposal that the
+dresses should merely be beautiful without being accurate is founded
+on a misapprehension of the nature of costume, and of its value on the
+stage.&nbsp; This value is twofold, picturesque and dramatic; the former
+depends on the colour of the dress, the latter on its design and character.&nbsp;
+But so interwoven are the two that, whenever in our own day historical
+accuracy has been disregarded, and the various dresses in a play taken
+from different ages, the result has been that the stage has been turned
+into that chaos of costume, that caricature of the centuries, the Fancy
+Dress Ball, to the entire ruin of all dramatic and picturesque effect.&nbsp;
+For the dresses of one age do not artistically harmonise with the dresses
+of another: and, as far as dramatic value goes, to confuse the costumes
+is to confuse the play.&nbsp; Costume is a growth, an evolution, and
+a most important, perhaps the most important, sign of the manners, customs
+and mode of life of each century.&nbsp; The Puritan dislike of colour,
+adornment and grace in apparel was part of the great revolt of the middle
+classes against Beauty in the seventeenth century.&nbsp; A historian
+who disregarded it would give us a most inaccurate picture of the time,
+and a dramatist who did not avail himself of it would miss a most vital
+element in producing an illusionist effect.&nbsp; The effeminacy of
+dress that characterised the reign of Richard the Second was a constant
+theme of contemporary authors.&nbsp; Shakespeare, writing two hundred
+years after, makes the king&rsquo;s fondness for gay apparel and foreign
+fashions a point in the play, from John of Gaunt&rsquo;s reproaches
+down to Richard&rsquo;s own speech in the third act on his deposition
+from the throne.&nbsp; And that Shakespeare examined Richard&rsquo;s
+tomb in Westminster Abbey seems to me certain from York&rsquo;s speech:-</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>See, see, King Richard doth himself appear<br />As doth the blushing
+discontented sun<br />From out the fiery portal of the east,<br />When
+he perceives the envious clouds are bent<br />To dim his glory.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>For we can still discern on the King&rsquo;s robe his favourite badge&mdash;the
+sun issuing from a cloud.&nbsp; In fact, in every age the social conditions
+are so exemplified in costume, that to produce a sixteenth-century play
+in fourteenth-century attire, or <i>vice versa</i>, would make the performance
+seem unreal because untrue.&nbsp; And, valuable as beauty of effect
+on the stage is, the highest beauty is not merely comparable with absolute
+accuracy of detail, but really dependent on it.&nbsp; To invent, an
+entirely new costume is almost impossible except in burlesque or extravaganza,
+and as for combining the dress of different centuries into one, the
+experiment would be dangerous, and Shakespeare&rsquo;s opinion of the
+artistic value of such a medley may be gathered from his incessant satire
+of the Elizabethan dandies for imagining that they were well dressed
+because they got their doublets in Italy, their hats in Germany, and
+their hose in France.&nbsp; And it should be noted that the most lovely
+scenes that have been produced on our stage have been those that have
+been characterised by perfect accuracy, such as Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft&rsquo;s
+eighteenth-century revivals at the Haymarket, Mr. Irying&rsquo;s superb
+production of <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>, and Mr, Barrett&rsquo;s
+<i>Claudian</i>.&nbsp; Besides, and this is perhaps the most complete
+answer to Lord Lytton&rsquo;s theory, it must be remembered that neither
+in costume nor in dialogue is beauty the dramatist&rsquo;s primary aim
+at all.&nbsp; The true dramatist aims first at what is characteristic,
+and no more desires that all his personages should be beautifully attired
+than he desires that they should all have beautiful natures or speak
+beautiful English.&nbsp; The true dramatist, in fact, shows us life
+under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life.&nbsp; The
+Greek dress was the loveliest dress the world has ever seen, and the
+English dress of the last century one of the most monstrous; yet we
+cannot costume a play by Sheridan as we would costume a play by Sophokles.&nbsp;
+For, as Polonius says in his excellent lecture, a lecture to which I
+am glad to have the opportunity of expressing my obligations, one of
+the first qualities of apparel is its expressiveness.&nbsp; And the
+affected style of dress in the last century was the natural characteristic
+of a society of affected manners and affected conversation&mdash;a characteristic
+which the realistic dramatist will highly value down to the smallest
+detail of accuracy, and the materials for which he can get only from
+archaeology.</p>
+<p>But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate; it must be
+also appropriate to the stature and appearance of the actor, and to
+his supposed condition, as well as to his necessary action in the play.&nbsp;
+In Mr. Hare&rsquo;s production <i>of As You Like It</i> at the St. James&rsquo;s
+Theatre, for instance, the whole point of Orlando&rsquo;s complaint
+that he is brought up like a peasant, and not like a gentleman, was
+spoiled by the gorgeousness of his dress, and the splendid apparel worn
+by the banished Duke and his friends was quite out of place.&nbsp; Mr.
+Lewis Wingfield&rsquo;s explanation that the sumptuary laws of the period
+necessitated their doing so, is, I am afraid, hardly sufficient.&nbsp;
+Outlaws, lurking in a forest and living by the chase, are not very likely
+to care much about ordinances of dress.&nbsp; They were probably attired
+like Robin Hood&rsquo;s men, to whom, indeed, they are compared in the
+course of the play.&nbsp; And that their dress was not that of wealthy
+noblemen may be seen by Orlando&rsquo;s words when he breaks in upon
+them.&nbsp; He mistakes them for robbers, and is amazed to find that
+they answer him in courteous and gentle terms.&nbsp; Lady Archibald
+Campbell&rsquo;s production, under Mr. E. W. Godwin&rsquo;s direction,
+of the same play in Coombe Wood was, as regards mounting, far more artistic.&nbsp;
+At least it seemed so to me.&nbsp; The Duke and his companions were
+dressed in serge tunics, leathern jerkins, high boots and gauntlets,
+and wore bycocket hats and hoods.&nbsp; And as they were playing in
+a real forest, they found, I am sure, their dresses extremely convenient.&nbsp;
+To every character in the play was given a perfectly appropriate attire,
+and the brown and green of their costumes harmonised exquisitely with
+the ferns through which they wandered, the trees beneath which they
+lay, and the lovely English landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players.&nbsp;
+The perfect naturalness of the scene was due to the absolute accuracy
+and appropriateness of everything that was worn.&nbsp; Nor could archaeology
+have been put to a severer test, or come out of it more triumphantly.&nbsp;
+The whole production showed once for all that, unless a dress is archaeologically
+correct, and artistically appropriate, it always looks unreal, unnatural,
+and theatrical in the sense of artificial.</p>
+<p>Nor, again, is it enough that there should be accurate and appropriate
+costumes of beautiful colours; there must be also beauty of colour on
+the stage as a whole, and as long as the background is painted by one
+artist, and the foreground figures independently designed by another,
+there is the danger of a want of harmony in the scene as a picture.&nbsp;
+For each scene the colour-scheme should be settled as absolutely as
+for the decoration of a room, and the textures which it is proposed
+to use should be mixed and re-mixed in every possible combination, and
+what is discordant removed.&nbsp; Then, as regards the particular kinds
+of colours, the stage is often too glaring, partly through the excessive
+use of hot, violent reds, and partly through the costumes looking too
+new.&nbsp; Shabbiness, which in modern life is merely the tendency of
+the lower orders towards tone, is not without its artistic value, and
+modern colours are often much improved by being a little faded.&nbsp;
+Blue also is too frequently used: it is not merely a dangerous colour
+to wear by gaslight, but it is really difficult in England to get a
+thoroughly good blue.&nbsp; The fine Chinese blue, which we all so much
+admire, takes two years to dye, and the English public will not wait
+so long for a colour.&nbsp; Peacock blue, of course, has been employed
+on the stage, notably at the Lyceum, with great advantage; but all attempts
+at a good light blue, or good dark blue, which I have seen have been
+failures.&nbsp; The value of black is hardly appreciated; it was used
+effectively by Mr. Irving in <i>Hamlet</i> as the central note of a
+composition, but as a tone-giving neutral its importance is not recognised.&nbsp;
+And this is curious, considering the general colour of the dress of
+a century in which, as Baudelaire says, &lsquo;Nous c&eacute;l&eacute;brons
+tous quelque enterrement.&rsquo;&nbsp; The archaeologist of the future
+will probably point to this age as the time when the beauty of black
+was understood; but I hardly think that, as regards stage-mounting or
+house decoration, it really is.&nbsp; Its decorative value is, of course,
+the same as that of white or gold; it can separate and harmonise colours.&nbsp;
+In modern plays the black frock-coat of the hero becomes important in
+itself, and should be given a suitable background.&nbsp; But it rarely
+is.&nbsp; Indeed the only good background for a play in modern dress
+which I have ever seen was the dark grey and cream-white scene of the
+first act of the <i>Princesse Georges</i> in Mrs. Langtry&rsquo;s production.&nbsp;
+As a rule, the hero is smothered in <i>bric-&agrave;-brac</i> and palm-trees,
+lost in the gilded abyss of Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to
+a mere midge in the midst of marqueterie; whereas the background should
+always be kept as a background, and colour subordinated to effect.&nbsp;
+This, of course, can only be done when there is one single mind directing
+the whole production.&nbsp; The facts of art are diverse, but the essence
+of artistic effect is unity.&nbsp; Monarchy, Anarchy, and Republicanism
+may contend for the government of nations; but a theatre should be in
+the power of a cultured despot.&nbsp; There may be division of labour,
+but there must be no division of mind.&nbsp; Whoever understands the
+costume of an age understands of necessity its architecture and its
+surroundings also, and it is easy to see from the chairs of a century
+whether it was a century of crinolines or not.&nbsp; In fact, in art
+there is no specialism, and a really artistic production should bear
+the impress of one master, and one master only, who not merely should
+design and arrange everything, but should have complete control over
+the way in which each dress is to be worn.</p>
+<p>Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of <i>Hernani</i>, absolutely
+refused to call her lover &lsquo;<i>Mon Lion</i>!&rsquo; unless she
+was allowed to wear a little fashionable <i>toque</i> then much in vogue
+on the Boulevards; and many young ladies on our own stage insist to
+the present day on wearing stiff starched petticoats under Greek dresses,
+to the entire ruin of all delicacy of line and fold; but these wicked
+things should not be allowed.&nbsp; And there should be far more dress
+rehearsals than there are now.&nbsp; Actors such as Mr. Forbes-Robertson,
+Mr. Conway, Mr. George Alexander, and others, not to mention older artists,
+can move with ease and elegance in the attire of any century; but there
+are not a few who seem dreadfully embarrassed about their hands if they
+have no side pockets, and who always wear their dresses as if they were
+costumes.&nbsp; Costumes, of course, they are to the designer; but dresses
+they should be to those that wear them.&nbsp; And it is time that a
+stop should be put to the idea, very prevalent on the stage, that the
+Greeks and Romans always went about bareheaded in the open air&mdash;a
+mistake the Elizabethan managers did not fall into, for they gave hoods
+as well as gowns to their Roman senators.</p>
+<p>More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining to the
+actors that there is a form of gesture and movement that is not merely
+appropriate to each style of dress, but really conditioned by it.&nbsp;
+The extravagant use of the arms in the eighteenth century, for instance,
+was the necessary result of the large hoop, and the solemn dignity of
+Burleigh owed as much to his ruff as to his reason.&nbsp; Besides until
+an actor is at home in his dress, he is not at home in his part.</p>
+<p>Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistic temperament
+in the audience, and producing that joy in beauty for beauty&rsquo;s
+sake without which the great masterpieces of art can never be understood,
+I will not here speak; though it is worth while to notice how Shakespeare
+appreciated that side of the question in the production of his tragedies,
+acting them always by artificial light, and in a theatre hung with black;
+but what I have tried to point out is that archaeology is not a pedantic
+method, but a method of artistic illusion, and that costume is a means
+of displaying character without description, and of producing dramatic
+situations and dramatic effects.&nbsp; And I think it is a pity that
+so many critics should have set themselves to attack one of the most
+important movements on the modern stage before that movement has at
+all reached its proper perfection.&nbsp; That it will do so, however,
+I feel as certain as that we shall require from our dramatic critics
+in the future higher qualification than that they can remember Macready
+or have seen Benjamin Webster; we shall require of them, indeed, that
+they cultivate a sense of beauty.&nbsp; <i>Pour &ecirc;tre plus difficile</i>,
+<i>la t&acirc;che n&rsquo;en est que plus glorieuse</i>.&nbsp; And if
+they will not encourage, at least they must not oppose, a movement of
+which Shakespeare of all dramatists would have most approved, for it
+has the illusion of truth for its method, and the illusion of beauty
+for its result.&nbsp; Not that I agree with everything that I have said
+in this essay.&nbsp; There is much with which I entirely disagree.&nbsp;
+The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic
+criticism attitude is everything.&nbsp; For in art there is no such
+thing as a universal truth.&nbsp; A Truth in art is that whose contradictory
+is also true.&nbsp; And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through
+it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only
+in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel&rsquo;s
+system of contraries.&nbsp; The truths of metaphysics are the truths
+of masks.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, INTENTIONS ***</p>
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+</pre></body>
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