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Title: Intentions
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<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
<p>Transcribed from the 1913 edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h1>INTENTIONS</h1>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
<p>Contents</p>
<p>The Decay of Lying<br />Pen, Pencil, and Poison<br />The Critic as
Artist<br />The Truth of Masks</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE DECAY OF LYING: AN OBSERVATION</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>A DIALOGUE. Persons: Cyril and Vivian. Scene: the Library
of a country house in Nottinghamshire.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>CYRIL. Well, you need not look at the landscape. You
can lie on the grass and smoke and talk.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>CYRIL. Writing an article! That is not very consistent
after what you have just said.</p>
<p>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 <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> 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.</p>
<p>CYRIL. What is the subject?</p>
<p>VIVIAN. I intend to call it ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest.’</p>
<p>CYRIL. Lying! I should have thought that our politicians
kept up that habit.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>CYRIL. Certainly, if you give me a cigarette. Thanks.
By the way, what magazine do you intend it for?</p>
<p>VIVIAN. For the <i>Retrospective Review</i>. I think
I told you that the elect had revived it.</p>
<p>CYRIL. Whom do you mean by ‘the elect’?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>CYRIL. I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits,
I suppose?</p>
<p>VIVIAN. Probably. Besides, you are a little too old.
We don’t admit anybody who is of the usual age.</p>
<p>CYRIL. Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with
each other.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>CYRIL. You will find me all attention.</p>
<p>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 <i>document
humain</i>, his miserable little <i>coin de la création</i>,
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.</p>
<p>‘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—’</p>
<p>CYRIL. My dear fellow!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>The
Black Arrow</i> is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism
to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously
like an experiment out of the <i>Lancet</i>. 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. <i>Robert
Elsmere</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as <i>Robert
Elsmere</i> has been produced, things are not much better. M.
Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style,
strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us
foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies
in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot
laugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that
he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, “L’homme
de génie n’a jamais d’esprit,” is determined
to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.
And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed
at times, as in <i>Germinal</i>, 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 <i>L’Assommoir</i>,
<i>Nana</i> and <i>Pot-Bouille</i>? 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 <i>Jack</i> with his “mots
cruels,” now that we have learned from <i>Vingt Ans de ma Vie
littéraire</i> 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 <i>roman</i>
<i>psychologique</i>, he commits the error of imagining that the men
and women of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for
an innumerable series of chapters. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Deemster</i>, and <i>The Daughter of Heth</i>, and <i>Le
Disciple</i>, and <i>Mr. Isaacs</i>, and as for <i>Robert</i> <i>Elsmere</i>,
I am quite devoted to it. 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
<i>Literature and Dogma</i> with the literature left out. It is
as much behind the age as Paley’s <i>Evidences</i>, 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?</p>
<p>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 <i>L’Assommoir</i> and Balzac’s
<i>Illusions Perdues</i> is the difference between unimaginative realism
and imaginative reality. ‘All Balzac’s characters;’
said Baudelaire, ‘are gifted with the same ardour of life that
animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams.
Each mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very
scullions have genius.’ A steady course of Balzac reduces
our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows
of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured
existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of
the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré.
It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself.
It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.
But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life,
he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high
a value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book
of his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with <i>Salammbô</i>
or <i>Esmond</i>, or <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, or the <i>Vicomte
de Bragelonne.</i></p>
<p>CYRIL. Do you object to modernity of form, then?</p>
<p>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, <i>The Cloister</i> <i>and the Hearth</i>, a book as
much above <i>Romola</i> as <i>Romola</i> is above <i>Daniel Deronda</i>,
and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to
draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management
of our private lunatic asylums. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:-</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>CYRIL. What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind
the age?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>VIVIAN <i>(reading</i>). ‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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 -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>In der Beschränkung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>“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.
<i>The Tempest</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true
about those arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history
of these arts in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism,
with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention,
its dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and
our own imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount,
as in Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest
of Europe by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and
imaginative work in which the visible things of life are transmuted
into artistic conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented
and fashioned for her delight. But wherever we have returned to
Life and Nature, our work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting.
Modern tapestry, with its aërial effects, its elaborate perspective,
its broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism,
has no beauty whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely
detestable. We are beginning to weave possible carpets in England,
but only because we have returned to the method and spirit of the East.
Our rugs and carpets of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing
truths, their inane worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of
visible objects, have become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter.
A cultured Mahomedan once remarked to us, “You Christians are
so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have
never thought of making an artistic application of the second.”
He was perfectly right, and the whole truth of the matter is this: The
proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.’</p>
<p>And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the
question very completely.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Natural History</i>;
in Hanno’s <i>Periplus</i>; in all the early chronicles; in the
Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in the travels
of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes,
with his magnificent <i>Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chronicon</i>; in
the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of Casanova;
in Defoe’s <i>History of the Plague</i>; in Boswell’s <i>Life
of Johnson</i>; in Napoleon’s despatches, and in the works of
our own Carlyle, whose <i>French Revolution</i> is one of the most fascinating
historical novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper
subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground
of dulness. 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.’</p>
<p>CYRIL. My dear boy!</p>
<p>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:-</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain
writer in the <i>Saturday Review</i>, will gravely censure the teller
of fairy tales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who will
measure imaginative work by their own lack of any imaginative faculty,
and will hold up their ink-stained hands in horror if some honest gentleman,
who has never been farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens
a fascinating book of travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great
Raleigh, writes a whole history of the world, without knowing anything
whatsoever about the past. 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.’</p>
<p>CYRIL. Ahem! Another cigarette, please.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>CYRIL. I like that. I can see it. Is that the end?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The
most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the
case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard
or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break
into sweet-shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning
home from the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black
masks and unloaded revolvers. This interesting phenomenon, which
always occurs after the appearance of a new edition of either of the
books I have alluded to, is usually attributed to the influence of literature
on the imagination. But this is a mistake. The imagination
is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form. The
boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative
instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying
to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended
scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed
the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented
it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the
stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in,
is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgénieff,
and completed by Dostoieffski. Robespierre came out of the pages
of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the <i>débris</i>
of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does
not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century,
as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens
de Rubempré, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first
appearance on the stage of the <i>Comédie Humaine</i>.
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 <i>Vanity Fair</i>, she ran away with the nephew of
the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great
splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’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 <i>The Newcomer</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>VIVIAN. My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.</p>
<p>CYRIL. Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes
her effects from him?</p>
<p>VIVIAN. Certainly. Where, if not from the Impressionists,
do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets,
blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?
To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver
mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace
curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that
has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is
entirely due to a particular school of Art. You smile. Consider
the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you
will find that I am right. For what is Nature? Nature is
no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It
is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because
we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts
that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different
from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees
its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence.
At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because
poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such
effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London.
I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know
anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented
them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess.
They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated
realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the
cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold. And so, let
us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.
She has done so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight
that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and
its restless violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole,
Nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she used to give us
Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing
Pissaros. Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still
to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern.
Of course she is not always to be relied upon. The fact is that
she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates an incomparable
and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things.
Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the
sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all
become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for
instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets
are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was
the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism
of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday
evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking
at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look
at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom
one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very
second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s
worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised. Of course, I am
quite ready to admit that Life very often commits the same error.
She produces her false Renés and her sham Vautrins, just as Nature
gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on another a more than questionable
Rousseau. Still, Nature irritates one more when she does things
of that kind. It seems so stupid, so obvious, so unnecessary.
A false Vautrin might be delightful. A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable.
However, I don’t want to be too hard on Nature. I wish the
Channel, especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often like a
Henry Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more
varied, Nature will, no doubt, be more varied also. That she imitates
Art, I don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now.
It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilised man.
But have I proved my theory to your satisfaction?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place
and people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is,
the less it represents to us the spirit of its age. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>CYRIL. But modern portraits by English painters, what of them?
Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>CYRIL. Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end
of your article.</p>
<p>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:-</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Republic</i> 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, <i>La Chimère</i>, 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.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>PEN, PENCIL AND POISON—A STUDY IN GREEN</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists
and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness
of nature. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Monthly
Review</i>, the partner in another literary speculation of Thomas Davis,
that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller,
but ‘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 <i>Gentleman’s Magazine</i> 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.</p>
<p>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:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘These high and gusty relishes of life<br />Have no allayings
of mortality.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance
of a man who had a true passion for letters. ‘To see and
hear and write brave things,’ this was his aim.</p>
<p>Scott, the editor of the <i>London Magazine</i>, 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.
<i>Janus Weathercock</i>, <i>Egomet Bonmot</i>, and <i>Van Vinkvooms</i>,
were some of the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness
or to reveal his levity. 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 <i>a petit-dîner</i>.
Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his
beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured
kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as
being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly
hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and
delightful distinction of being different from others. There was
something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré.
At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw him once.
It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. ‘Amongst the
company, all literary men, sat a murderer,’ he tells us, and he
goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the
face of man and woman, and yet found himself looking with intellectual
interest across the table at the young writer beneath whose affectations
of manner there seemed to him to lie so much unaffected sensibility,
and speculates on ‘what sudden growth of another interest’
would have changed his mood, had he known of what terrible sin the guest
to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even then guilty.</p>
<p>His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by
Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside his
achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us
hardly justifies his reputation.</p>
<p>But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality
by the vulgar test of production. 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 <i>Cupid and Psyche</i>, and the <i>Hypnerotomachia</i>, 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.</p>
<p>There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions
for decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself from
the false taste of his time. 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.</p>
<p>And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate
fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted figures and
the faint ΚΑΛΟΣ finely traced upon
its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’
of Michael Angelo, or of the ‘Pastoral’ of Giorgione.
Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp from some
old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, ‘cased in a
cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded
with small brilliants and rubies,’ and close by it ‘squats
a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of
corn-bearing Sicily.’ Some dark antique bronzes contrast
with the pale gleam of two noble <i>Christi Crucifixi</i>, one carved
in ivory, the other moulded in wax.’ He has his trays of
Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze <i>bonbonnière</i>
with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized ‘brown-biscuit
teapots, filagree-worked,’ his citron morocco letter-case, and
his ‘pomona-green’ chair.</p>
<p>One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts
and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over
his fine collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner’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 <i>altissimo
relievo</i> 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.</p>
<p>As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex
impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step
in aesthetic criticism is to realise one’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.’</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved
from the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the full
hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the
purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saint, besides
an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the foreground in the
indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>And elsewhere he talks learnedly of ‘a delicate Schiavone,
various as a tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,’ of ‘a glowing
portrait, remarkable for <i>morbidezza</i>, by the scarce Moroni,’
and of another picture being ‘pulpy in the carnations.’</p>
<p>But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic
whole, and tries to translate those impressions into words, to give,
as it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect.
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 <i>Repas Italien</i>, 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:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>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’:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>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,’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling
horn of Aurora’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.</p>
<p>From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
forward with loud cries -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;<br />And
put strange pity in their horned countenance.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
death. 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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>London Magazine</i> he was always most
generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham, Hazlitt, Elton,
and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a friend. Some
of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way, and, with
the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their subject:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety
of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart as ever sent
tears to the eyes.</p>
<p>How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most
seasonably out of season. 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
<i>fashion for men of genius</i> 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 ‘<i>That</i>
was nothing; the lyrics were the high things—the lyrics!’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>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 <i>Janus</i> <i>Weathercock</i>
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.</p>
<p>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:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The short tender grass was covered with marguerites—‘such
that men called <i>daisies</i> 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.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned
these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences,
was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most
subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. 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
<i>nux vomica</i>, a poison, one of his biographers tells us, ‘nearly
tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of almost infinite dilution.’
His murders, says De Quincey, were more than were ever made known judicially.
This is no doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention. His
first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths. He poisoned
him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he
had always been very much attached. In the August of the next
year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife’s mother, and in the
following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his sister-in-law.
Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained. It may have
been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power that was
in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.
But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his
wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had
insured her life in various offices. The circumstances were as
follows. On the 12th of December, he and his wife and child came
up to London from Linden House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit
Street, Regent Street. With them were the two sisters, Helen and
Madeleine Abercrombie. On the evening of the 14th they all went
to the play, and at supper that night Helen sickened. The next
day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called
in to attend her. She lived till Monday, the 20th, when, after
the doctor’s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright brought her
some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk. When they returned
Helen Abercrombie was dead. She was about twenty years of age,
a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming red-chalk
drawing of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows
how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence,
a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration.
De Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder.
Let us hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have
no accomplices.</p>
<p>The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined
to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want
of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action
in the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that
one decision should govern all the cases. 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. <i>Egomet Bonmot</i> was represented
by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir
Frederick Pollock appeared for the other side. The plaintiff,
unfortunately, was unable to be present at either of the trials.
The refusal of the companies to give him the £18,000 had placed
him in a position of most painful pecuniary embarrassment. Indeed,
a few months after the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he had been actually
arrested for debt in the streets of London while he was serenading the
pretty daughter of one of his friends. This difficulty was got
over at the time, but shortly afterwards he thought it better to go
abroad till he could come to some practical arrangement with his creditors.
He accordingly went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of the young
lady in question, and while he was there induced him to insure his life
with the Pelican Company for £3000. As soon as the necessary
formalities had been gone through and the policy executed, he dropped
some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they sat together one
evening after dinner. He himself did not gain any monetary advantage
by doing this. His aim was simply to revenge himself on the first
office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin. His friend
died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at once for
a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany, and
was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a beautiful
country house at St. Omer. From this he moved to Paris, where
he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others
talk of his ‘skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded
by all who knew him.’ In 1837 he returned to England privately.
Some strange mad fascination brought him back. He followed a woman
whom he loved.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey. The
following report of the proceedings appeared in the <i>Times</i>:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing
mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of
attorney for £2259, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company
of the Bank of England.</p>
<p>There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which
he pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin
in the course of the morning. On being brought before the judges,
however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and then
pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a capital
nature.</p>
<p>The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other
indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea
of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at
the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation
for life.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.
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 <i>circonstance attenuante</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: ‘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.’</p>
<p>From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent
from there in the <i>Susan</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Paradis Artificiels</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Life of</i> <i>Dickens</i>,
Forster mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother,
Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil
portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that
‘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.</p>
<p>This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled
literary London, and made so brilliant a <i>début</i> 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.</p>
<p>Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able
to form any purely artistic judgment about him. 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 <i>Hunted
Down</i>, the Varney of Bulwer’s <i>Lucretia</i>; 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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING
NOTHING</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>A DIALOGUE. Part I. Persons: Gilbert and Ernest.
Scene: the library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.</p>
<p>GILBERT (at the Piano). My dear Ernest, what are you laughing
at?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>GILBERT. What is the book? Ah! I see. I have not
read it yet. Is it good?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>GILBERT. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It
forgives everything except genius. But I must confess that I like
all memoirs. I like them for their form, just as much as for their
matter. In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is
what fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as Cicero
and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné.
Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather rare,
we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it. Humanity
will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest,
but to the world, and the couchant nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze
for the castle of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, that
in the open Loggia at Florence shows the moon the dead terror that once
turned life to stone, have not given it more pleasure than has that
autobiography in which the supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates
the story of his splendour and his shame. The opinions, the character,
the achievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a sceptic
like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son of
Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm our
ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode of thought
that Cardinal Newman represented—if that can be called a mode
of thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of
the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I think, survive.
But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its
progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely church at Littlemore,
where ‘the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are
few,’ will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow
snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that
gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower’s sure recurrence
a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his
days—a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered
not to be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible.
Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into
the circle of the Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the
better part of valour, bustles about among them in that ‘shaggy
purple gown with gold buttons and looped lace’ which he is so
fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, and prattling, to his
own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue petticoat that he
bought for his wife, of the ‘good hog’s hars-let,’
and the ‘pleasant French fricassee of veal’ that he loved
to eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his ‘gadding
after beauties,’ and his reciting of <i>Hamlet</i> 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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. My dear fellow!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?</p>
<p>GILBERT. Oh! to all our second-rate <i>littérateurs</i>.
We are overrun by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away,
arrive at the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their
one duty is to behave as mutes. But we won’t talk about
them. They are the mere body-snatchers of literature. The
dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul is out
of their reach. And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorák?
Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorák? He writes passionate,
curiously-coloured things.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>GILBERT. And was it?</p>
<p>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. . . .</p>
<p>GILBERT. And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation
is wicked.</p>
<p>ERNEST. I did not say that.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. There is something in what you say, but there is not
everything in what you say. In many points you are unjust.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>ERNEST. Simply this: that in the best days of art there were
no art-critics.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. It is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing
your head in that petulant manner. It is quite true. In
the best days of art there were no art-critics. The sculptor hewed
from the marble block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within
it. The waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to
the statue, and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb.
He poured the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the river of
red metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body
of a god. With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the
sightless eyes. The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his
graver. And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit
portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who passed
by, δια λαμπροτατου
βαινοντες αβρως
αιθερος, 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
<i>agnus castus</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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. ΚΑΛΟΣ
ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ or
ΚΑΛΟΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΗΣ
tells us the story of his days. Again, on the rim of the wide
flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at rest, as his
fancy willed it. From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed Aphrodite
at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. But what is the difference between literature and journalism?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Really?</p>
<p>GILBERT. Yes, a nation of art-critics. But I don’t
wish to destroy the delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn
of the relation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of
his age. To give an accurate description of what has never occurred
is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable
privilege of any man of parts and culture. Still less do I desire
to talk learnedly. Learned conversation is either the affectation
of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.
And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the
foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly
tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes. No:
let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by Dvorák. The
pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, and the heavy eyelids
of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep. Don’t let us
discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious of the fact
that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously,
and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don’t degrade
me into the position of giving you useful information. Education
is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time
that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Through the
parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of
silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her. The
sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the night.
Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful still. Who
knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear the fair
Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. But what are the two supreme and highest arts?</p>
<p>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 <i>Comus</i> with the
measures of <i>Samson Agonistes</i>, or of <i>Paradise Lost</i> or <i>Regained</i>?
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Ah! now you are flippant.</p>
<p>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 <i>Treatise on Poetry</i>. 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 καθαρσις 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 καθαρσις
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.</p>
<p>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
μονοχρονος ηδονη
of another cigarette. Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving
one unsatisfied.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Try one of mine. They are rather good.
I get them direct from Cairo. The only use of our <i>attachés</i>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. I should have said that great artists work unconsciously,
that they were ‘wiser than they knew,’ as, I think, Emerson
remarks somewhere.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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,</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>And so not built at all,<br />And therefore built for ever.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one
feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual,
and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates
the age. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Really?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious
aim is a delusion?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. While you talk it seems to me to be so.</p>
<p>GILBERT. It is so in truth. On the mouldering citadel
of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze. The owl
has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the empty plain
wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced,
oily sea, οινοψ ποντος,
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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Yes; I see now what you mean. But, surely, the
higher you place the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.</p>
<p>GILBERT. Why so?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Independent?</p>
<p>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 <i>Bestia Trionfans</i>
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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. But is Criticism really a creative art?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. From the soul?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. But is that really so?</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is,
and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and
the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that
flute-player’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 <i>Tannhäuser</i>, I seem indeed
to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass,
and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from the caverned hill.
But at other times it speaks to me of a thousand different things, of
myself, it may be, and my own life, or of the lives of others whom one
has loved and grown weary of loving, or of the passions that man has
known, or of the passions that man has not known, and so has sought
for. To-night it may fill one with that ΕΡΩΣ
ΤΩΝ ΑΔΥΝΑΤΩΝ,
that <i>Amour de l’Impossible</i>, which falls like a madness
on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so that
they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in the
infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain, grow faint and swoon or
stumble. 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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of
the highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures
that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the
anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature
or history. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally
be allowed to see the object as in itself it really is.</p>
<p>GILBERT. I am not quite sure. Perhaps I may admit it
after supper. There is a subtle influence in supper.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE CRITIC AS ARTIST—WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE
OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>A DIALOGUE: Part II. Persons: the same. Scene: the same.</p>
<p>ERNEST. The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect,
and now let us return to the point at issue.</p>
<p>GILBERT. Ah! don’t let us do that. Conversation
should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
Let us talk about <i>Moral Indignation</i>, <i>its Cause and Cure</i>,
a subject on which I think of writing: or about <i>The Survival of Thersites</i>,
as shown by the English comic papers; or about any topic that may turn
up.</p>
<p>ERNEST. 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. I would have said that personality would have been
a disturbing element.</p>
<p>GILBERT. No; it is an element of revelation. If you wish
to understand others you must intensify your own individualism.</p>
<p>ERNEST. What, then, is the result?</p>
<p>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 <i>Sonata Appassionata</i> 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 <i>Obiter Dicta</i>. 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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will
give no less than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows?</p>
<p>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 <i>will seek to</i> <i>gain
their impressions almost entirely from what</i> <i>Art has touched</i>.
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Life then is a failure?</p>
<p>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 <i>Divine Comedy</i>, and I know that, if I open it at a
certain place, I shall be filled with a fierce hatred of some one who
has never wronged me, or stirred by a great love for some one whom I
shall never see. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make ourselves
one with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altar with him, and
share his rapture and his scorn. 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</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Que m’importe que tu sois sage?<br />Sois belle! et sois triste!</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never worshipped
joy. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Must we go, then, to Art for everything?</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>ERNEST. Stop a moment. It seems to me that in everything
that you have said there is something radically immoral.</p>
<p>GILBERT. All art is immoral.</p>
<p>ERNEST. All art?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Contemplation?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. We exist, then, to do nothing?</p>
<p>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 <i>città divina</i> is colourless,
and the <i>fruitio Dei</i> without meaning. Metaphysics do not
satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date.
The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes ‘the
spectator of all time and of all existence’ is not really an ideal
world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter it,
we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts
of the city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded
by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our
nature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed.
They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their legacy
to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid. Had they put
it into words, it might not live within us as thought. No, Ernest,
no. We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to
be learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher,
and the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere,
would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible
Being which Plato rates so high? What to us is the Illumination
of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Böhme, the monstrous
Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg’s blinded eyes?
Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one daffodil of the
field, far less than the meanest of the visible arts, for, just as Nature
is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind expressing itself under
the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations,
she speaks to both sense and soul alike. To the 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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. What then do you propose?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has
robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the subjective
sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow,
with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange temperaments and subtle
susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference,
complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other,
and passions that war against themselves. 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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim
not <i>doing</i> but <i>being</i>, and not <i>being</i> merely, but
<i>becoming</i>—that is what the critical spirit can give us.
The gods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle
tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the
spectator the tragicomedy of the world that they have made. We,
too, might live like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate
emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford. We might
make ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become
perfect by the rejection of energy. It has often seemed to me
that Browning felt something of this. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet
into active life, and makes him realise his mission by effort.
Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission
by thought. Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning.
He made the soul the protagonist of life’s tragedy, and looked
on action as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at any
rate, the ΒΙΟΣ ΘΕΩΡΗΤΙΚΟΣ
is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought we can look
out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. A charming doctrine, Gilbert.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of beholding,
and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, there is something
that is egotistic. 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!</p>
<p>ERNEST. You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert. Have
you had this dreadful experience, as you call it, lately?</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p>I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment,
still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years to come, unpopular
with the crowd. 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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. The sphere of the intellect?</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>nouveau frisson</i> which it was its aim to produce.
One analysed it, explained it, and wearied of it. At sunset came
the <i>Luministe</i> in painting, and the <i>Symboliste</i> in poetry,
and the spirit of mediaevalism, that spirit which belongs not to time
but to temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia, and stirred us
for a moment by the terrible fascination of pain. 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.</p>
<p>Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of
expression. The method of the drama is his, as well as the method
of the epos. He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking
to Marvel on the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord
Brooke discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks; or adopt narration,
as Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary Portraits—is
not that the title of the book?—presents to us, under the fanciful
guise of fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of criticism, one on
the painter Watteau, another on the philosophy of Spinoza, a third on
the Pagan elements of the early Renaissance, and the last, and in some
respects the most suggestive, on the source of that Aufklärung,
that enlightening which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to
which our own culture owes so great a debt. Dialogue, certainly,
that wonderful literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian
to Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle
took such delight, the creative critics of the world have always employed,
can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.
By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to
every fancy, and reality to every mood. By its means he can exhibit
the object from each point of view, and show it to us in the round,
as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner all the richness
and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly
suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the
idea more completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give
a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something
of the delicate charm of chance.</p>
<p>ERNEST. By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist,
and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>GILBERT. What would you say they were?</p>
<p>ERNEST. Well, I should say that a critic should above all things
be fair.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will
he not?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Well, at least, the critic will be sincere.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. And what are they? Tell me yourself.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and
the dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can
loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like
voice singing in Waynfleete’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.</p>
<p>Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the
decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that teach
us. 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 <i>Symphonie en Blanc Majeur</i>,
that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have suggested
the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.
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 <i>Archaicistes</i>, as they call themselves,
who, refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather,
do not find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather
for the imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour,
and rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they
see, try to see something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with
actual and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul
which is as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid
in artistic purpose. 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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. I wonder do you really believe what you say?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty
of work different from his own.</p>
<p>GILBERT. It is impossible for him to do so. Wordsworth
saw in <i>Endymion</i> 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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Do you really mean that?</p>
<p>GILBERT. Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens,
the vision.</p>
<p>ERNEST. But what about technique? Surely each art has
its separate technique?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Well, I think I have put all my questions to you.
And now I must admit -</p>
<p>GILBERT. Ah! don’t say that you agree with me.
When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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
<i>Plain Tales from the Hills</i>, one feels as if one were seated under
a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. 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 <i>Le Rouge et le Noir</i>, have sought to track the soul into its
most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Origin of Species</i> 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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. Ah! what an antinomian you are!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom
this spirit possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ERNEST. His punishment?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<h2>THE TRUTH OF MASKS—A NOTE ON ILLUSION</h2>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
<p>In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made
on that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian
revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics
that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes
of his actors, and that, could he see Mrs. Langtry’s production
of <i>Antony and</i> <i>Cleopatra</i>, he would probably say that the
play, and the play only, is the thing, and that everything else is leather
and prunella. While, as regards any historical accuracy in dress,
Lord Lytton, in an article in the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, has laid
it down as a dogma of art that archaeology is entirely out of place
in the presentation of any of Shakespeare’s plays, and the attempt
to introduce it one of the stupidest pedantries of an age of prigs.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty
of costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques and dances,
purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye; and we
have still his stage-directions for the three great processions in <i>Henry
the Eighth</i>, directions which are characterised by the most extraordinary
elaborateness of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in
Anne Boleyn’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.</p>
<p>The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare
appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to
poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing
certain dramatic effects. Many of his plays, such as <i>Measure
for</i> <i>Measure</i>, <i>Twelfth Night</i>, <i>The Two Gentleman of</i>
<i>Verona</i>, <i>All’s Well that Ends Well</i>, <i>Cymbeline</i>,
and others, depend for their illusion on the character of the various
dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the delightful scene in <i>Henry
the Sixth</i>, on the modern miracles of healing by faith, loses all
its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and the <i>dénoûment</i>
of the <i>Merry Wives</i> <i>of Windsor</i> 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?</p>
<p>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 <i>The Tempest</i> 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 <i>Hamlet</i> changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects;
and as for Juliet, a modern playwright would probably have laid her
out in her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but
Shakespeare arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness
makes the vault ‘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.</p>
<p>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-à-pie, the dead King stalks on the battlements of Elsinore
because all is not right with Denmark; Shylock’s Jewish gaberdine
is part of the stigma under which that wounded and embittered nature
writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of no better plea than
the handkerchief he had given Hubert -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Have you the heart? when your head did but ache,<br />I knit my handkerchief
about your brows,<br />(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)<br />And
I did never ask it you again;</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>and Orlando’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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Last night ’twas on my arm; I kissed it;<br />I hope it be
not gone to tell my lord<br />That I kiss aught but he,</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already
on its way to Rome to rob her of her husband’s faith; the little
Prince passing to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle’s
girdle; Duncan sends a ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own
murder, and the ring of Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant into
a wife’s comedy. The great rebel York dies with a paper
crown on his head; Hamlet’s black suit is a kind of colour-motive
in the piece, like the mourning of the Chimène in the <i>Cid</i>;
and the climax of Antony’s speech is the production of Caesar’s
cloak:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>I remember<br />The first time ever Caesar put it on.<br />’Twas
on a summer’s evening, in his tent,<br />The day he overcame the
Nervii:-<br />Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:<br />See
what a rent the envious Casca made:<br />Through this the well-beloved
Brutus stabbed. . . .<br />Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold<br />Our
Caesar’s vesture wounded?</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as
pathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of Lear’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 <i>Thérèse Raquin</i>, that masterpiece of horror,
which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with this strange
scene in <i>Cymbeline.</i></p>
<p>In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are those
suggested by costume. Rosalind’s</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet
and hose in my disposition?</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Constance’s</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Grief fills the place of my absent child,<br />Stuffs out his vacant
garments with his form;</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Ah! cut my lace asunder! -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>are only a few of the many examples one might quote. One of
the finest effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the
last act of <i>Lear</i>, tearing the plume from Kent’s cap and
applying it to Cordelia’s lips when he came to the line,</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>This feather stirs; she lives!</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked,
I remember, some fur from his archaeologically-incorrect ermine for
the same business; but Salvini’s was the finer effect of the two,
as well as the truer. And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last
act of <i>Richard the Third</i> have not, I am sure, forgotten how much
the agony and terror of his dream was intensified, by contrast, through
the calm and quiet that preceded it, and the delivery of such lines
as</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>What, is my beaver easier than it was?<br />And all my armour laid
into my tent?<br />Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy -</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the
last words which Richard’s mother called after him as he was marching
to Bosworth:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,<br />Which in the
day of battle tire thee more<br />Than all the complete armour that
thou wear’st.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it
is to be remarked that, while he more than once complains of the smallness
of the stage on which he has to produce big historical plays, and of
the want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many effective open-air
incidents, he always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a
most elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors
taking pains about their make-up. Even now it is difficult to
produce such a play as the <i>Comedy of Errors</i>; and to the picturesque
accident of Miss Ellen Terry’s brother resembling herself we owe
the opportunity of seeing <i>Twelfth Night</i> adequately performed.
Indeed, to put any play of Shakespeare’s on the stage, absolutely
as he himself wished it to be done, requires the services of a good
property-man, a clever wig-maker, a costumier with a sense of colour
and a knowledge of textures, a master of the methods of making-up, a
fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an artist to direct personally
the whole production. For he is most careful to tell us the dress
and appearance of each character. ‘Racine abhorre la réalité,’
says Auguste Vacquerie somewhere; ‘il ne daigne pas s’occuper
de son costume. Si l’on s’en rapportait aux indications
du poète, Agamemnon serait vêtu d’un sceptre et Achille
d’une épée.’ But with Shakespeare it
is very different. He gives us directions about the costumes of
Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in <i>Macbeth</i>, and the
apothecary in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, several elaborate descriptions
of his fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb
in which Petruchio is to be married. 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.</p>
<p>As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms
he makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at
the ridiculous size of the ladies’ bonnets, and the many descriptions
of the <i>mundus muliebris</i>, from the long of Autolycus in the <i>Winter’s
Tale</i> down to the account of the Duchess of Milan’s gown in
<i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>, they are far too numerous to quote; though
it may be worth while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy
of Clothes is to be found in Lear’s scene with Edgar—a passage
which has the advantage of brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom
and somewhat mouthing metaphysics of <i>Sartor Resartus</i>. 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.</p>
<p>The difficulty Ducis felt about translating <i>Othello</i> in consequence
of the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and
his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate ‘Le
bandeau! le bandeau!’ may be taken as an example of the difference
between <i>la tragédie philosophique</i> and the drama of real
life; and the introduction for the first time of the word <i>mouchoir</i>
at the Théâtre Français was an era in that romantic-realistic
movement of which Hugo is the father and M. Zola the <i>enfant terrible</i>,
just as the classicism of the earlier part of the century was emphasised
by Talma’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.</p>
<p>In criticising the importance given to money in <i>La Comédie
Humaine</i>, Théophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to
have invented a new hero in fiction, <i>le héros métallique</i>.
Of Shakespeare it may be said he was the first to see the dramatic value
of doublets, and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.</p>
<p>The burning of the Globe Theatre—an event due, by the way,
to the results of the passion for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare’s
stage-management—has unfortunately robbed us of many important
documents; but in the inventory, still in existence, of the costume-wardrobe
of a London theatre in Shakespeare’s time, there are mentioned
particular costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns, friars,
and fools; green coats for Robin Hood’s men, and a green gown
for Maid Marian; a white and gold doublet for Henry the Fifth, and a
robe for Longshanks; besides surplices, copes, damask gowns, gowns of
cloth of gold and of cloth of silver, taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet
coats, satin coats, frieze coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black
leather, red suits, grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe ‘for
to goo invisibell,’ which seems inexpensive at £3, 10s.,
and four incomparable fardingales—all of which show a desire to
give every character an appropriate dress. There are also entries
of Spanish, Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets, lances, painted
shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of costumes for
Turkish Janissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and goddesses
of Olympus, which evidence a good deal of 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 <i>donnée</i>
of the play was after the Fall.</p>
<p>Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare will
see that archaeology was one of its special characteristics. 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 <i>ennui</i> 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.</p>
<p>Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian
Way came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name ‘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.</p>
<p>And this use of archaeology in shows, so far from being a bit of
priggish pedantry, is in every way legitimate and beautiful. 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 <i>Notre Dame
de Paris</i> have been much puzzled over the meaning of such expressions
as <i>la casaque à mahoitres</i>, <i>les voulgiers</i>, <i>le</i>
<i>gallimard taché d’encre</i>, <i>les craaquiniers</i>,
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 <i>Claudian</i>, and showed us the life of Byzantium
in the fourth century, not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts,
not by a novel which requires a glossary to explain it, but by the visible
presentation before us of all the glory of that great town. 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.</p>
<p>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 Lemprière’s
Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor Max Müller’s
treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language. Better
<i>Endymion</i> 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 <i>Nuremberg Chronicle</i>, with its two
thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
was over seventeen editions were published of Munster’s <i>Cosmography</i>.
Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns,
of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well
illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the
hand of Titian.</p>
<p>Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their
knowledge. 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.</p>
<p>And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress, or the
dress of foreign nations; there was also a good deal of research, amongst
theatrical people especially, into the ancient costume of England itself:
and when Shakespeare, in the prologue to one of his plays, expresses
his regret at being unable to produce helmets of the period, he is speaking
as an Elizabethan manager and not merely as an Elizabethan poet.
At Cambridge, for instance, during his day, a play of <i>Richard The
Third</i> was performed, in which the actors were attired in real dresses
of the time, procured from the great collection of historical costume
in the Tower, which was always open to the inspection of managers, and
sometimes placed at their disposal. 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.</p>
<p>For what is the use to the stage of that archaeology which has so
strangely terrified the critics, but that it, and it alone, can give
us the architecture and apparel suitable to the time in which the action
of the play passes? 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Hamlets</i> I have seen were placed far too early.
<i>Hamlet</i> is essentially a scholar of the Revival of Learning; and
if the allusion to the recent invasion of England by the Danes puts
it back to the ninth century, the use of foils brings it down much later.
Once, however, that the date has been fixed, then the archaeologist
is to supply us with the facts which the artist is to convert into effects.</p>
<p>It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves show
us that Shakespeare was indifferent to historical accuracy, and a great
deal of capital has been made out of Hector’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 <i>dramatis personae</i> are people who had actually existed,
and some of them might have been seen in real life by a portion of his
audience. 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 <i>Divorçons</i>. Harry the Fifth is a pure Englishman,
and Othello a true Moor.</p>
<p>Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it is wonderful how careful he
is to have his facts perfectly right—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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Henry the Fifth</i> may
be considered fanciful, though Shakespeare must have often seen</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>The very casque<br />That did affright the air at Agincourt,</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey, along
with the saddle of that ‘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 <i>Henry</i> <i>the Sixth</i> is a bit
of pure archaeology, as they were not worn in the sixteenth century;
and the King’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.</p>
<p>In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London, he saw the
apparel and appurtenances of past ages, and it is impossible to doubt
that he made use of his opportunities. 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 <i>Henry the Sixth</i>, is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century
play when crests were generally worn, but would not have been so in
a play of Shakespeare’s own time, when feathers and plumes had
taken their place—a fashion which, as he tells us in <i>Henry
the Eighth</i>, 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.</p>
<p>Even if it were not so, there is no more reason that we should continue
any imperfections which may be supposed to have characterised Shakespeare’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</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>‘Les petits détails d’histoire et de vie domestique
(says Hugo) doivent être scrupuleusement étudiés
et reproduits par le poète, mais uniquement comme des moyens
d’accroître la réalité de l’ensemble,
et de faire pénétrer jusque dans les coins les plus obscurs
de l’oeuvre cette vie générale et puissante au milieu
de laquelle les personnages sont plus vrais, et les catastrophes, par
conséqueut, plus poignantes. Tout doit être subordonné
à ce but. L’Homme sur le premier plan, le reste au
fond.’</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>This passage is interesting as coming from the first great French
dramatist who employed archaeology on the stage, and whose plays, though
absolutely correct in detail, are known to all for their passion, not
for their pedantry—for their life, not for their learning.
It is true that he has made certain concessions in the case of the employment
of curious or strange expressions. Ruy Blas talks of M, de Priego
as ‘sujet du roi’ instead of ‘noble du roi,’
and Angelo Malipieri speaks of ‘la croix rouge’ instead
of ‘la croix de gueules.’ But they are concessions
made to the public, or rather to a section of it. ‘J’en
offre ici toute mes excuses aux spectateurs intelligents,’ he
says in a note to one of the plays; ‘espérons qu’un
jour un seigneur vénitien pourra dire tout bonnement sans péril
son blason sur le théâtre. C’est un progrès
qui viendra.’ And, though the description of the crest is
not couched in accurate language, still the crest itself was accurately
right. It may, of course, be said that the public do not notice
these things; upon the other hand, it should be remembered that Art
has no other aim but her own perfection, and proceeds simply by her
own laws, and that the play which Hamlet describes as being caviare
to the general is a play he highly praises. Besides, in England,
at any rate, the public have undergone a transformation; there is far
more appreciation of beauty now than there was a few years ago; and
though they may not be familiar with the authorities and 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:-</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>See, see, King Richard doth himself appear<br />As doth the blushing
discontented sun<br />From out the fiery portal of the east,<br />When
he perceives the envious clouds are bent<br />To dim his glory.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
<p>For we can still discern on the King’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 <i>vice versa</i>, 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 <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>, and Mr, Barrett’s
<i>Claudian</i>. 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.</p>
<p>But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate; it must be
also appropriate to the stature and appearance of the actor, and to
his supposed condition, as well as to his necessary action in the play.
In Mr. Hare’s production <i>of As You Like It</i> 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.</p>
<p>Nor, again, is it enough that there should be accurate and appropriate
costumes of beautiful colours; there must be also beauty of colour on
the stage as a whole, and as long as the background is painted by one
artist, and the foreground figures independently designed by another,
there is the danger of a want of harmony in the scene as a picture.
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 <i>Hamlet</i> as the central note of a
composition, but as a tone-giving neutral its importance is not recognised.
And this is curious, considering the general colour of the dress of
a century in which, as Baudelaire says, ‘Nous célébrons
tous quelque enterrement.’ The 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 <i>Princesse Georges</i> in Mrs. Langtry’s production.
As a rule, the hero is smothered in <i>bric-à-brac</i> and palm-trees,
lost in the gilded abyss of Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to
a mere midge in the midst of marqueterie; whereas the background should
always be kept as a background, and colour subordinated to effect.
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.</p>
<p>Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of <i>Hernani</i>, absolutely
refused to call her lover ‘<i>Mon Lion</i>!’ unless she
was allowed to wear a little fashionable <i>toque</i> then much in vogue
on the Boulevards; and many young ladies on our own stage insist to
the present day on wearing stiff starched petticoats under Greek dresses,
to the entire ruin of all delicacy of line and fold; but these wicked
things should not be allowed. 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.</p>
<p>More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining to the
actors that there is a form of gesture and movement that is not merely
appropriate to each style of dress, but really conditioned by it.
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.</p>
<p>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. <i>Pour être plus difficile</i>,
<i>la tâche n’en est que plus glorieuse</i>. 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.</p>
<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
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