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+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
+
+*** 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.
+
+
+
+
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