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Title: Intentions

Author: Oscar Wilde

Release date: April 1, 1997 [eBook #887]
                Most recently updated: October 26, 2014

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen and Co edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTENTIONS ***


Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen and Co edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                                INTENTIONS


                                    BY
                               OSCAR WILDE

                                * * * * *

                            METHUEN & CO. LTD.
                           36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
                                  LONDON

                                * * * * *

                _First Published_, _at 1s. net_, _in 1913_

                                * * * * *

_This Book was First Published_                        _1891_
_Second Edition_                                       _1894_
_First Published_ (_Third Edition_) _by Methuen        _1908_
and Co._
_Fourth Edition_                                       _1909_
_Fifth Edition_                                        _1911_

                                * * * * *

                                DEDICATED
                                    TO
                                MRS. CAREW
                                    BY
                      THE AUTHOR’S LITERARY EXECUTOR

                                * * * * *




CONTENTS

                                 PAGE
THE DECAY OF LYING                  1
PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON            57
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST               95
THE TRUTH OF MASKS                221




THE DECAY OF LYING:
AN OBSERVATION


                  _A DIALOGUE_.  _Persons_: _Cyril and_
              _Vivian_.  _Scene_: _the Library of a country_
                       _house in Nottinghamshire_.

CYRIL (_coming in through the open window from the terrace_).  My dear
Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library.  It is a perfectly
lovely afternoon.  The air is exquisite.  There is a mist upon the woods,
like the purple bloom upon a plum.  Let us go and lie on the grass and
smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.

VIVIAN.  Enjoy Nature!  I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that
faculty.  People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved
her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful
study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our
observation.  My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less
we care for Nature.  What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of
design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely
unfinished condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as
Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.  When I look at a
landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects.  It is fortunate for us,
however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art
at all.  Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature
her proper place.  As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure
myth.  It is not to be found in Nature herself.  It resides in the
imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at
her.

CYRIL.  Well, you need not look at the landscape.  You can lie on the
grass and smoke and talk.

VIVIAN.  But Nature is so uncomfortable.  Grass is hard and lumpy and
damp, and full of dreadful black insects.  Why, even Morris’s poorest
workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature
can.  Nature pales before the furniture of ‘the street which from Oxford
has borrowed its name,’ as the poet you love so much once vilely phrased
it.  I don’t complain.  If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would
never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.
In a house we all feel of the proper proportions.  Everything is
subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.  Egotism
itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is
entirely the result of indoor life.  Out of doors one becomes abstract
and impersonal.  One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.  And then
Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative.  Whenever I am walking in
the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle
that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch.
Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.  Thinking is the
most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die
of any other disease.  Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is
not catching.  Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our
national stupidity.  I only hope we shall be able to keep this great
historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid
that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is
incapable of learning has taken to teaching—that is really what our
enthusiasm for education has come to.  In the meantime, you had better go
back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave me to correct my
proofs.

CYRIL.  Writing an article!  That is not very consistent after what you
have just said.

VIVIAN.  Who wants to be consistent?  The dullard and the doctrinaire,
the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of
action, to the _reductio ad absurdum_ of practice.  Not I.  Like Emerson,
I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’  Besides, my article
is really a most salutary and valuable warning.  If it is attended to,
there may be a new Renaissance of Art.

CYRIL.  What is the subject?

VIVIAN.  I intend to call it ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest.’

CYRIL.  Lying!  I should have thought that our politicians kept up that
habit.

VIVIAN.  I assure you that they do not.  They never rise beyond the level
of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to
argue.  How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank,
fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural
disdain of proof of any kind!  After all, what is a fine lie?  Simply
that which is its own evidence.  If a man is sufficiently unimaginative
to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the
truth at once.  No, the politicians won’t do.  Something may, perhaps, be
urged on behalf of the Bar.  The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its
members.  Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful.  They
can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh
from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries
triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those
clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakeably innocent.  But
they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to
precedent.  In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out.
Newspapers, even, have degenerated.  They may now be absolutely relied
upon.  One feels it as one wades through their columns.  It is always the
unreadable that occurs.  I am afraid that there is not much to be said in
favour of either the lawyer or the journalist.  Besides, what I am
pleading for is Lying in art.  Shall I read you what I have written?  It
might do you a great deal of good.

CYRIL.  Certainly, if you give me a cigarette.  Thanks.  By the way, what
magazine do you intend it for?

VIVIAN.  For the _Retrospective Review_.  I think I told you that the
elect had revived it.

CYRIL.  Whom do you mean by ‘the elect’?

VIVIAN.  Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course.  It is a club to which I
belong.  We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we
meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian.  I am afraid you are not
eligible.  You are too fond of simple pleasures.

CYRIL.  I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits, I
suppose?

VIVIAN.  Probably.  Besides, you are a little too old.  We don’t admit
anybody who is of the usual age.

CYRIL.  Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with each
other.

VIVIAN.  We are.  This is one of the objects of the club.  Now, if you
promise not to interrupt too often, I will read you my article.

CYRIL.  You will find me all attention.

VIVIAN (_reading in a very clear_, _musical voice_).  THE DECAY OF LYING:
A PROTEST.—One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously
commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly
the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.  The
ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the
modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner.
He has his tedious _document humain_, his miserable little _coin de la
création_, into which he peers with his microscope.  He is to be found at
the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up
his subject.  He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but
insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between
encyclopædias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having
drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman,
and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never,
even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself.

‘The lose that results to literature in general from this false ideal of
our time can hardly be overestimated.  People have a careless way of
talking about a “born liar,” just as they talk about a “born poet.”  But
in both cases they are wrong.  Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Pinto
saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the most careful
study, the most disinterested devotion.  Indeed, they have their
technique, just as the more material arts of painting and sculpture have,
their subtle secrets of form and colour, their craft-mysteries, their
deliberate artistic methods.  As one knows the poet by his fine music, so
one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither
case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice.  Here, as
elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection.  But in modern days while
the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if
possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into
disrepute.  Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for
exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic
surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into
something really great and wonderful.  But, as a rule, he comes to
nothing.  He either falls into careless habits of accuracy—’

CYRIL.  My dear fellow!

VIVIAN.  Please don’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence.  ‘He either
falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the
society of the aged and the well-informed.  Both things are equally fatal
to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of
anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty
of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence,
has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than
himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no
one can possibly believe in their probability.  This is no isolated
instance that we are giving.  It is simply one example out of many; and
if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our
monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass
away from the land.

‘Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and
fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively
no other name for it.  There is such a thing as robbing a story of its
reality by trying to make it too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so
inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the
transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of
the _Lancet_.  As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the
makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being
suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he
feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a
footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.  Nor are our other
novelists much better.  Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a
painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of
view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and
caustic satire.  Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but
then he writes at the top of his voice.  He is so loud that one cannot
bear what he says.  Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing
what is not worth finding.  He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm
of a short-sighted detective.  As one turns over the pages, the suspense
of the author becomes almost unbearable.  The horses of Mr. William
Black’s phaeton do not soar towards the sun.  They merely frighten the
sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.  On seeing them
approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect.  Mrs. Oliphant prattles
pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other
wearisome things.  Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the
altar of local colour.  He is like the lady in the French comedy who
keeps talking about “le beau ciel d’Italie.”  Besides, he has fallen into
the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes.  He is always telling us that
to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked.  At times
he is almost edifying.  _Robert Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece—a
masterpiece of the “genre ennuyeux,” the one form of literature that the
English people seems thoroughly to enjoy.  A thoughtful young friend of
ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that
goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and
we can quite believe it.  Indeed it is only in England that such a book
could be produced.  England is the home of lost ideas.  As for that great
and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in
the East-End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they
find life crude, and leave it raw.

‘In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as _Robert Elsmere_
has been produced, things are not much better.  M. Guy de Maupassant,
with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the
few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering
wound.  He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is
ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears.  M.
Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his
pronunciamientos on literature, “L’homme de génie n’a jamais d’esprit,”
is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be
dull.  And how well he succeeds!  He is not without power.  Indeed at
times, as in _Germinal_, there is something almost epic in his work.  But
his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the
ground of morals, but on the ground of art.  From any ethical standpoint
it is just what it should be.  The author is perfectly truthful, and
describes things exactly as they happen.  What more can any moralist
desire?  We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our
time against M. Zola.  It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being
exposed.  But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of
the author of _L’Assommoir_, _Nana_ and _Pot-Bouille_?  Nothing.  Mr.
Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being
like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola’s characters are
much worse.  They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues.
The record of their lives is absolutely without interest.  Who cares what
happens to them?  In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and
imaginative power.  We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an
account of the doings of the lower orders.  M. Daudet is better.  He has
wit, a light touch and an amusing style.  But he has lately committed
literary suicide.  Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle with his “Il
faut lutter pour l’art,” or for Valmajour with his eternal refrain about
the nightingale, or for the poet in _Jack_ with his “mots cruels,” now
that we have learned from _Vingt Ans de ma Vie littéraire_ that these
characters were taken directly from life.  To us they seem to have
suddenly lost all their vitality, all the few qualities they ever
possessed.  The only real people are the people who never existed, and if
a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at
least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.
The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are
what they are, but that the author is what he is.  Otherwise the novel is
not a work of art.  As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the _roman
psychologique_, he commits the error of imagining that the men and women
of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for an
innumerable series of chapters.  In point of fact what is interesting
about people in good society—and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the
Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,—is the mask that each one
of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.  It is a
humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.
In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little
of Falstaff.  The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young
prince his moments of coarse humour.  Where we differ from each other is
purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious
opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like.  The more
one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear.  Sooner
or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too
well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most
depressing and humiliating reality; and if a writer insists upon
analysing the upper classes, he might just as well write of match-girls
and costermongers at once.’  However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain
you any further just here.  I quite admit that modern novels have many
good points.  All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite
unreadable.

CYRIL.  That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I must say that
I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures.  I like _The
Deemster_, and _The Daughter of Heth_, and _Le Disciple_, and _Mr.
Isaacs_, and as for _Robert Elsmere_, I am quite devoted to it.  Not that
I can look upon it as a serious work.  As a statement of the problems
that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated.  It
is simply Arnold’s _Literature and Dogma_ with the literature left out.
It is as much behind the age as Paley’s _Evidences_, or Colenso’s method
of Biblical exegesis.  Nor could anything be less impressive than the
unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so
completely missing its true significance that he proposes to carry on the
business of the old firm under the new name.  On the other hand, it
contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful quotations,
and Green’s philosophy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitter pill of
the author’s fiction.  I also cannot help expressing my surprise that you
have said nothing about the two novelists whom you are always reading,
Balzac and George Meredith.  Surely they are realists, both of them?

VIVIAN.  Ah!  Meredith!  Who can define him?  His style is chaos
illumined by flashes of lightning.  As a writer he has mastered
everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except
tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate.  Somebody
in Shakespeare—Touchstone, I think—talks about a man who is always
breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might
serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith’s method.  But whatever he
is, he is not a realist.  Or rather I would say that he is a child of
realism who is not on speaking terms with his father.  By deliberate
choice he has made himself a romanticist.  He has refused to bow the knee
to Baal, and after all, even if the man’s fine spirit did not revolt
against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite
sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance.  By its means
he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
wonderful roses.  As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of
the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.  The latter he
bequeathed to his disciples.  The former was entirely his own.  The
difference between such a book as M. Zola’s _L’Assommoir_ and Balzac’s
_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and
imaginative reality.  ‘All Balzac’s characters;’ said Baudelaire, ‘are
gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself.  All his
fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams.  Each mind is a weapon loaded
to the muzzle with will.  The very scullions have genius.’  A steady
course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
acquaintances to the shadows of shades.  His characters have a kind of
fervent fiery-coloured existence.  They dominate us, and defy scepticism.
One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de
Rubempré.  It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to
rid myself.  It haunts me in my moments of pleasure.  I remember it when
I laugh.  But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was.  He created
life, he did not copy it.  I admit, however, that he set far too high a
value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of
his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbô_ or
_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de
Bragelonne_.

CYRIL.  Do you object to modernity of form, then?

VIVIAN.  Yes.  It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result.  Pure
modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising.  It cannot help being
so.  The public imagine that, because they are interested in their
immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should
take them as her subject-matter.  But the mere fact that they are
interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art.  The
only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not
concern us.  As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects
us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to
our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live,
it is outside the proper sphere of art.  To art’s subject-matter we
should be more or less indifferent.  We should, at any rate, have no
preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind.  It is
exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an
admirable motive for a tragedy.  I do not know anything in the whole
history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade.
He wrote one beautiful book, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, a book as
much above _Romola_ as _Romola_ is above _Daniel Deronda_, and wasted the
rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public
attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our
private lunatic asylums.  Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all
conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the
poor-law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man
with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of
contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist,
is really a sight for the angels to weep over.  Believe me, my dear
Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and
absolutely wrong.  We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the
vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and
hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside
with Apollo.  Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our
birthright for a mess of facts.

CYRIL.  There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt that
whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely model novel, we have
rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it.  And this is perhaps the
best rough test of what is literature and what is not.  If one cannot
enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at
all.  But what do you say about the return to Life and Nature?  This is
the panacea that is always being recommended to us.

VIVIAN.  I will read you what I say on that subject.  The passage comes
later on in the article, but I may as well give it to you now:—

‘The popular cry of our time is “Let us return to Life and Nature; they
will recreate Art for us, and send the red blood coursing through her
veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong.”
But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meaning efforts.
Nature is always behind the age.  And as for Life, she is the solvent
that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.’

CYRIL.  What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind the age?

VIVIAN.  Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic.  What I mean is this.  If
we take Nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to
self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always
old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date.  One touch of Nature may make
the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of
Art.  If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of
phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to
her.  She has no suggestions of her own.  Wordsworth went to the lakes,
but he was never a lake poet.  He found in stones the sermons he had
already hidden there.  He went moralising about the district, but his
good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry.
Poetry gave him ‘Laodamia,’ and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such
as it is.  Nature gave him ‘Martha Ray’ and ‘Peter Bell,’ and the address
to Mr. Wilkinson’s spade.

CYRIL.  I think that view might be questioned.  I am rather inclined to
believe in ‘the impulse from a vernal wood,’ though of course the
artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of
temperament that receives it, so that the return to Nature would come to
mean simply the advance to a great personality.  You would agree with
that, I fancy.  However, proceed with your article.

VIVIAN (_reading_).  ‘Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely
imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and
non-existent.  This is the first stage.  Then Life becomes fascinated
with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle.
Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and
refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents,
imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable
barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.  The third
stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the
wilderness.  That is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are
now suffering.

‘Take the case of the English drama.  At first in the hands of the monks
Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological.  Then she
enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life’s external forms,
she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more
terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than
lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods,
who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.
To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language
full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence,
or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and
enriched with lofty diction.  She clothed her children in strange raiment
and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its
marble tomb.  A new Cæsar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and
with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river
to Antioch.  Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.
History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the
dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple
truth but complex beauty.  In this they were perfectly right.  Art itself
is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.

‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form.  Even in Shakespeare
we can see the beginning of the end.  It shows itself by the gradual
breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance
given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation.
The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the language is
uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due
to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the
intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be
suffered to find expression.  Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless
artist.  He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s
natural utterance.  He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative
medium she surrenders everything.  Goethe says, somewhere—

    In der Beschränkung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,

“It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,” and the
limitation, the very condition of any art is style.  However, we need not
linger any longer over Shakespeare’s realism.  _The Tempest_ is the most
perfect of palinodes.  All that we desired to point out was, that the
magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within
itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its
strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from
using life as an artistic method.  As the inevitable result of this
substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an
imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama.  The characters
in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they
have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life
and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the
gait, manner, costume and accent of real people; they would pass
unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage.  And yet how wearisome the
plays are!  They do not succeed in producing even that impression of
reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing.
As a method, realism is a complete failure.

‘What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those
arts that we call the decorative arts.  The whole history of these arts
in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its
frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its
dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own
imitative spirit.  Wherever the former has been paramount, as in
Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe
by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative
work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic
conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned
for her delight.  But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting.  Modern
tapestry, with its aërial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad
expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty
whatsoever.  The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable.  We
are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we
have returned to the method and spirit of the East.  Our rugs and carpets
of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane
worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have
become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter.  A cultured
Mahomedan once remarked to us, “You Christians are so occupied in
misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of
making an artistic application of the second.”  He was perfectly right,
and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art
in is not Life but Art.’

And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the
question very completely.

‘It was not always thus.  We need not say anything about the poets, for
they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have been really
faithful to their high mission, and are universally recognised as being
absolutely unreliable.  But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of
the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modern sciolists to verify his
history, may justly be called the “Father of Lies”; in the published
speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his
best; in Pliny’s _Natural History_; in Hanno’s _Periplus_; in all the
early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas
Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus,
and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent _Prodigiorum et Ostentorum
Chronicon_; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of
Casanova; in Defoe’s _History of the Plague_; in Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_; in Napoleon’s despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle,
whose _French Revolution_ is one of the most fascinating historical
novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate
position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness.
Now, everything is changed.  Facts are not merely finding a footing-place
in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded
the kingdom of Romance.  Their chilling touch is over everything.  They
are vulgarising mankind.  The crude commercialism of America, its
materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things,
and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely
due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who,
according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it
is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the
cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any
other moral tale in the whole of literature.’

CYRIL.  My dear boy!

VIVIAN.  I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole
thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute myth.  However,
you must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic future
either of America or of our own country.  Listen to this:—

‘That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its
close we have no doubt whatsoever.  Bored by the tedious and improving
conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the
genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences
are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by
probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the
merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must
return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.  Who he was
who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the
wandering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the
purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat
and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of our
modern anthropologists, for all their much-boasted science, has had the
ordinary courage to tell us.  Whatever was his name or race, he certainly
was the true founder of social intercourse.  For the aim of the liar is
simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.  He is the very basis of
civilised society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions
of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate
at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand’s farcical comedies.

‘Nor will he be welcomed by society alone.  Art, breaking from the
prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false,
beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great
secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and
absolutely a matter of style; while Life—poor, probable, uninteresting
human life—tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert
Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in
general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own
simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.

‘No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer in the
_Saturday Review_, will gravely censure the teller of fairy tales for his
defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work
by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and will hold up their
ink-stained hands in horror if some honest gentleman, who has never been
farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book of
travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole
history of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past.
To excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of him
who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his
servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs
of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood
near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty
Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters.  They
will call upon Shakespeare—they always do—and will quote that hackneyed
passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the
mirror up to Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince
the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.’

CYRIL.  Ahem!  Another cigarette, please.

VIVIAN.  My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic
utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare’s real views upon art than
the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals.  But let me
get to the end of the passage:

‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.  She
is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.  She is a
veil, rather than a mirror.  She has flowers that no forests know of,
birds that no woodland possesses.  She makes and unmakes many worlds, and
can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.  Hers are the “forms
more real than living man,” and hers the great archetypes of which things
that have existence are but unfinished copies.  Nature has, in her eyes,
no laws, no uniformity.  She can work miracles at her will, and when she
calls monsters from the deep they come.  She can bid the almond-tree
blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.  At her
word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of June, and
the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills.  The
dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile
strangely at her when she comes near them.  She has hawk-faced gods that
worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.’

CYRIL.  I like that.  I can see it.  Is that the end?

VIVIAN.  No.  There is one more passage, but it is purely practical.  It
simply suggests some methods by which we could revive this lost art of
Lying.

CYRIL.  Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you a
question.  What do you mean by saying that life, ‘poor, probable,
uninteresting human life,’ will try to reproduce the marvels of art?  I
can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror.
You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked
looking-glass.  But you don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that
Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?

VIVIAN.  Certainly I do.  Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are
always dangerous things—it is none the less true that Life imitates art
far more than Art imitates life.  We have all seen in our own day in
England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented
and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that
whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees,
here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the
strange square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently
loved, there the sweet maidenhood of ‘The Golden Stair,’ the blossom-like
mouth and weary loveliness of the ‘Laus Amoris,’ the passion-pale face of
Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in ‘Merlin’s
Dream.’  And it has always been so.  A great artist invents a type, and
Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an
enterprising publisher.  Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England
what they have given us.  They brought their types with them, and Life
with her keen imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with
models.  The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this,
and set in the bride’s chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that
she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at
in her rapture or her pain.  They knew that Life gains from art not
merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or
soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours
of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of
Praxiteles.  Hence came their objection to realism.  They disliked it on
purely social grounds.  They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly,
and they were perfectly right.  We try to improve the conditions of the
race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous
bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders.  But these
things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty.  For this, Art
is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his
studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they
plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word,
Life is Art’s best, Art’s only pupil.

As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature.  The most
obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of
the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick
Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into
sweet-shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from
the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and
unloaded revolvers.  This interesting phenomenon, which always occurs
after the appearance of a new edition of either of the books I have
alluded to, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the
imagination.  But this is a mistake.  The imagination is essentially
creative, and always seeks for a new form.  The boy-burglar is simply the
inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct.  He is Fact, occupied as
Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him
is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.
Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern
thought, but Hamlet invented it.  The world has become sad because a
puppet was once melancholy.  The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no
faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he
does not believe in, is a purely literary product.  He was invented by
Tourgénieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.  Robespierre came out of the
pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the
_débris_ of a novel.  Literature always anticipates life.  It does not
copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.  The nineteenth century, as we
know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.  Our Luciens de Rubempré, our
Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of
the _Comédie Humaine_.  We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and
unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great
novelist.  I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he
had had any model for Becky Sharp.  She told me that Becky was an
invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested
by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and
was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman.  I inquired what
became of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years
after the appearance of _Vanity Fair_, she ran away with the nephew of
the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great
splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s style, and entirely by
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s methods.  Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared
to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and
other gambling places.  The noble gentleman from whom the same great
sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few months after _The
Newcomer_ had reached a fourth edition, with the word ‘Adsum’ on his
lips.  Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious psychological
story of transformation, a friend of mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the
north of London, and being anxious to get to a railway station, took what
he thought would be a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a
network of mean, evil-looking streets.  Feeling rather nervous he began
to walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right
between his legs.  It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and
trampled upon it.  Being of course very much frightened and a little
hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole street was full
of rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants.  They
surrounded him, and asked him his name.  He was just about to give it
when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson’s
story.  He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own person
that terrible and well-written scene, and at having done accidentally,
though in fact, what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate
intent, that he ran away as hard as he could go.  He was, however, very
closely followed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door of
which happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant, who
happened to be there, exactly what had occurred.  The humanitarian crowd
were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and as
soon as the coast was clear he left.  As he passed out, the name on the
brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye.  It was ‘Jekyll.’  At
least it should have been.

Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course accidental.  In the
following case the imitation was self-conscious.  In the year 1879, just
after I had left Oxford, I met at a reception at the house of one of the
Foreign Ministers a woman of very curious exotic beauty.  We became great
friends, and were constantly together.  And yet what interested me most
in her was not her beauty, but her character, her entire vagueness of
character.  She seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the
possibility of many types.  Sometimes she would give herself up entirely
to art, turn her drawing-room into a studio, and spend two or three days
a week at picture galleries or museums.  Then she would take to attending
race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, and talk about nothing but
betting.  She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics,
and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy.  In fact,
she was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all her
transformations as was that wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of
him.  One day a serial began in one of the French magazines.  At that
time I used to read serial stories, and I well remember the shock of
surprise I felt when I came to the description of the heroine.  She was
so like my friend that I brought her the magazine, and she recognised
herself in it immediately, and seemed fascinated by the resemblance.  I
should tell you, by the way, that the story was translated from some dead
Russian writer, so that the author had not taken his type from my friend.
Well, to put the matter briefly, some months afterwards I was in Venice,
and finding the magazine in the reading-room of the hotel, I took it up
casually to see what had become of the heroine.  It was a most piteous
tale, as the girl had ended by running away with a man absolutely
inferior to her, not merely in social station, but in character and
intellect also.  I wrote to my friend that evening about my views on John
Bellini, and the admirable ices at Florian’s, and the artistic value of
gondolas, but added a postscript to the effect that her double in the
story had behaved in a very silly manner.  I don’t know why I added that,
but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same
thing.  Before my letter had reached her, she had run away with a man who
deserted her in six months.  I saw her in 1884 in Paris, where she was
living with her mother, and I asked her whether the story had had
anything to do with her action.  She told me that she had felt an
absolutely irresistible impulse to follow the heroine step by step in her
strange and fatal progress, and that it was with a feeling of real terror
that she had looked forward to the last few chapters of the story.  When
they appeared, it seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them
in life, and she did so.  It was a most clear example of this imitative
instinct of which I was speaking, and an extremely tragic one.

However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual instances.
Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle.  All that I
desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far
more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously
about it you will find that it is true.  Life holds the mirror up to Art,
and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor,
or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.  Scientifically
speaking, the basis of life—the energy of life, as Aristotle would call
it—is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting
various forms through which this expression can be attained.  Life seizes
on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt.  Young men have
committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand
because by his own hand Werther died.  Think of what we owe to the
imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Cæsar.

CYRIL.  The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make it
complete you must show that Nature, no less than Life, is an imitation of
Art.  Are you prepared to prove that?

VIVIAN.  My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.

CYRIL.  Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her effects
from him?

VIVIAN.  Certainly.  Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get
those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring
the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?  To whom,
if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that
brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved
bridge and swaying barge?  The extraordinary change that has taken place
in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a
particular school of Art.  You smile.  Consider the matter from a
scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am
right.  For what is Nature?  Nature is no great mother who has borne us.
She is our creation.  It is in our brain that she quickens to life.
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it,
depends on the Arts that have influenced us.  To look at a thing is very
different from seeing a thing.  One does not see anything until one sees
its beauty.  Then, and then only, does it come into existence.  At
present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets
and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.
There may have been fogs for centuries in London.  I dare say there were.
But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them.  They did
not exist till Art had invented them.  Now, it must be admitted, fogs are
carried to excess.  They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and
the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis.
Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.  And so,
let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.
She has done so already, indeed.  That white quivering sunlight that one
sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless
violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces
it quite admirably.  Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she
gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pissaros.  Indeed there are
moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time,
when Nature becomes absolutely modern.  Of course she is not always to be
relied upon.  The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position.  Art
creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on
to other things.  Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation
can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect
until we all become absolutely wearied of it.  Nobody of any real
culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.
Sunsets are quite old-fashioned.  They belong to the time when Turner was
the last note in art.  To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism
of temperament.  Upon the other hand they go on.  Yesterday evening Mrs.
Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious
sky, as she called it.  Of course I had to look at it.  She is one of
those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing.  And what
was it?  It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad
period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and
over-emphasised.  Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very
often commits the same error.  She produces her false Renés and her sham
Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on
another a more than questionable Rousseau.  Still, Nature irritates one
more when she does things of that kind.  It seems so stupid, so obvious,
so unnecessary.  A false Vautrin might be delightful.  A doubtful Cuyp is
unbearable.  However, I don’t want to be too hard on Nature.  I wish the
Channel, especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry
Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied,
Nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.  That she imitates Art, I
don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now.  It is the one thing
that keeps her in touch with civilised man.  But have I proved my theory
to your satisfaction?

CYRIL.  You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better.  But
even admitting this strange imitative instinct in Life and Nature, surely
you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper of its age, the
spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and
under whose influence it is produced.

VIVIAN.  Certainly not!  Art never expresses anything but itself.  This
is the principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, more than that
vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells,
that makes music the type of all the arts.  Of course, nations and
individuals, with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of
existence, are always under the impression that it is of them that the
Muses are talking, always trying to find in the calm dignity of
imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always
forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo but Marsyas.  Remote
from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave,
Art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the
opening of the marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own
history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding
expression in a new form.  But it is not so.  The highest art rejects the
burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh
material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty
passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness.  She
develops purely on her own lines.  She is not symbolic of any age.  It is
the ages that are her symbols.

Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place and
people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less
it represents to us the spirit of its age.  The evil faces of the Roman
emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in
which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work, and we fancy
that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of
the ruin of the Empire.  But it was not so.  The vices of Tiberius could
not destroy that supreme civilisation, any more than the virtues of the
Antonines could save it.  It fell for other, for less interesting
reasons.  The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to
interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call
the Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of
Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland?  The more abstract,
the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its
age.  If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look
at its architecture or its music.

CYRIL.  I quite agree with you there.  The spirit of an age may be best
expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract
and ideal.  Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of an age, for
its look, as the phrase goes, we must of course go to the arts of
imitation.

VIVIAN.  I don’t think so.  After all, what the imitative arts really
give us are merely the various styles of particular artists, or of
certain schools of artists.  Surely you don’t imagine that the people of
the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on mediæval
stained glass, or in mediæval stone and wood carving, or on mediæval
metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminated MSS.  They were probably very
ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or
fantastic in their appearance.  The Middle Ages, as we know them in art,
are simply a definite form of style, and there is no reason at all why an
artist with this style should not be produced in the nineteenth century.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would
cease to be an artist.  Take an example from our own day.  I know that
you are fond of Japanese things.  Now, do you really imagine that the
Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence?
If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all.  The Japanese
people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual
artists.  If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great
native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see
that there is not the slightest resemblance between them.  The actual
people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English
people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing
curious or extraordinary about them.  In fact the whole of Japan is a
pure invention.  There is no such country, there are no such people.  One
of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the
Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese.  All he saw,
all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans.  He
was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful
exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell’s Gallery showed only too well.  He did
not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of
style, an exquisite fancy of art.  And so, if you desire to see a
Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio.  On
the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of
certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of
their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go
some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you
cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it
anywhere.  Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the
ancient Greeks.  Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek
people were like?  Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the
stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those
marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same
building?  If you judge from the art, they certainly were so.  But read
an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance.  You will find that the
Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair
yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly
fashionable or fallen creature of our own day.  The fact is that we look
back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very
fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

CYRIL.  But modern portraits by English painters, what of them?  Surely
they are like the people they pretend to represent?

VIVIAN.  Quite so.  They are so like them that a hundred years from now
no one will believe in them.  The only portraits in which one believes
are portraits where there is very little of the sitter, and a very great
deal of the artist.  Holbein’s drawings of the men and women of his time
impress us with a sense of their absolute reality.  But this is simply
because Holbein compelled life to accept his conditions, to restrain
itself within his limitations, to reproduce his type, and to appear as he
wished it to appear.  It is style that makes us believe in a
thing—nothing but style.  Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed
to absolute oblivion.  They never paint what they see.  They paint what
the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

CYRIL.  Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end of your
article.

VIVIAN.  With pleasure.  Whether it will do any good I really cannot say.
Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible.  Why,
even Sleep has played us false, and has closed up the gates of ivory, and
opened the gates of horn.  The dreams of the great middle classes of this
country, as recorded in Mr. Myers’s two bulky volumes on the subject, and
in the Transactions of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing
things that I have ever read.  There is not even a fine nightmare among
them.  They are commonplace, sordid and tedious.  As for the Church, I
cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the
presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the
supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that
mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination.  But in the
English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but
through his capacity for disbelief.  Ours is the only Church where the
sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the
ideal apostle.  Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable
works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is
sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University
to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah’s ark, or
Balaam’s ass, or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear
him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect.
The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to
be regretted.  It is really a degrading concession to a low form of
realism.  It is silly, too.  It springs from an entire ignorance of
psychology.  Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe
the improbable.  However, I must read the end of my article:—

‘What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive
this old art of Lying.  Much of course may be done, in the way of
educating the public, by amateurs in the domestic circle, at literary
lunches, and at afternoon teas.  But this is merely the light and
graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard at Cretan
dinner-parties.  There are many other forms.  Lying for the sake of
gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance—lying with a
moral purpose, as it is usually called—though of late it has been rather
looked down upon, was extremely popular with the antique world.  Athena
laughs when Odysseus tells her “his words of sly devising,” as Mr.
William Morris phrases it, and the glory of mendacity illumines the pale
brow of the stainless hero of Euripidean tragedy, and sets among the
noble women of the past the young bride of one of Horace’s most exquisite
odes.  Later on, what at first had been merely a natural instinct was
elevated into a self-conscious science.  Elaborate rules were laid down
for the guidance of mankind, and an important school of literature grew
up round the subject.  Indeed, when one remembers the excellent
philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question, one cannot help
regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheap and
condensed edition of the works of that great casuist.  A short primer,
“When to Lie and How,” if brought out in an attractive and not too
expensive a form, would no doubt command a large sale, and would prove of
real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people.  Lying
for the sake of the improvement of the young, which is the basis of home
education, still lingers amongst us, and its advantages are so admirably
set forth in the early books of Plato’s _Republic_ that it is unnecessary
to dwell upon them here.  It is a mode of lying for which all good
mothers have peculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still further
development, and has been sadly overlooked by the School Board.  Lying
for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in Fleet Street,
and the profession of a political leader-writer is not without its
advantages.  But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it
certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity.
The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for
its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already
pointed out, Lying in Art.  Just as those who do not love Plato more than
Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do
not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.  The
solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx
in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy, _La Chimère_, dances round
it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.  It may not hear
her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the
commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try
to borrow her wings.

‘And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be!
Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning
over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to
the land.  The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes.
Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the
high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when
books on geography were actually readable.  Dragons will wander about the
waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the
air.  We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the
toad’s head.  Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our
stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful
and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen,
of things that are not and that should be.  But before this comes to pass
we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.’

CYRIL.  Then we must entirely cultivate it at once.  But in order to
avoid making any error I want you to tell me briefly the doctrines of the
new æsthetics.

VIVIAN.  Briefly, then, they are these.  Art never expresses anything but
itself.  It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops
purely on its own lines.  It is not necessarily realistic in an age of
realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith.  So far from being the
creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the
only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.
Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps, and revives some antique form,
as happened in the archaistic movement of late Greek Art, and in the
pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day.  At other times it entirely
anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes
another century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy.  In no case
does it reproduce its age.  To pass from the art of a time to the time
itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.

The second doctrine is this.  All bad art comes from returning to Life
and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.  Life and Nature may
sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of
any real service to art they must be translated into artistic
conventions.  The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it
surrenders everything.  As a method Realism is a complete failure, and
the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and
modernity of subject-matter.  To us, who live in the nineteenth century,
any century is a suitable subject for art except our own.  The only
beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.  It is, to have
the pleasure of quoting myself, exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us
that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy.  Besides, it is
only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.  M. Zola sits down to
give us a picture of the Second Empire.  Who cares for the Second Empire
now?  It is out of date.  Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism
is always in front of Life.

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates
Life.  This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from
the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and
that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise
that energy.  It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but
it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the
history of Art.

It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates
Art.  The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have
already seen through poetry, or in paintings.  This is the secret of
Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature’s weakness.

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
things, is the proper aim of Art.  But of this I think I have spoken at
sufficient length.  And now let us go out on the terrace, where ‘droops
the milk-white peacock like a ghost,’ while the evening star ‘washes the
dusk with silver.’  At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive
effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to
illustrate quotations from the poets.  Come!  We have talked long enough.




PEN, PENCIL AND POISON
A STUDY IN GREEN


IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men
of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.
As a rule this must necessarily be so.  That very concentration of vision
and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic
temperament is in itself a mode of limitation.  To those who are
preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much
importance.  Yet there are many exceptions to this rule.  Rubens served
as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin
secretary to Cromwell.  Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the
humourists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire
nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their
country; and Charles Lamb’s friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the
subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic
temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a
poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose,
an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful,
but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle
and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.

This remarkable man, so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison,’ as a
great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick,
in 1794.  His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray’s
Inn and Hatton Garden.  His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr.
Griffiths, the editor and founder of the _Monthly Review_, the partner in
another literary speculation of Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of
whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller, but ‘a gentleman who
dealt in books,’ the friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the
most well-known men of his day.  Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him
birth, at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_ tells us of her ‘amiable disposition and numerous
accomplishments,’ and adds somewhat quaintly that ‘she is supposed to
have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person
of either sex now living.’  His father did not long survive his young
wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his
grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George
Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned.  His boyhood was passed
at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those many fine Georgian mansions
that have unfortunately disappeared before the inroads of the suburban
builder, and to its lovely gardens and well-timbered park he owed that
simple and impassioned love of nature which never left him all through
his life, and which made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual
influences of Wordsworth’s poetry.  He went to school at Charles Burney’s
academy at Hammersmith.  Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of
music, and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn
out his most remarkable pupil.  He seems to have been a man of a good
deal of culture, and in after years Mr. Wainewright often spoke of him
with much affection as a philosopher, an archæologist, and an admirable
teacher who, while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not
forget the importance of early moral training.  It was under Mr. Burney
that he first developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us
that a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays
great talent and natural feeling.  Indeed, painting was the first art
that fascinated him.  It was not till much later that he sought to find
expression by pen or poison.

Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams
of the romance and chivalry of a soldier’s life, and to have become a
young guardsman.  But the reckless dissipated life of his companions
failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made
for other things.  In a short time he wearied of the service.  ‘Art,’ he
tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and
strange fervour, ‘Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high
influence the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and
tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to
the simple-hearted.’  But Art was not the only cause of the change.  ‘The
writings of Wordsworth,’ he goes on to say, ‘did much towards calming the
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations.  I wept over
them tears of happiness and gratitude.’  He accordingly left the army,
with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, and
returned to Linden House, full of this new-born enthusiasm for culture.
A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was ‘broken like a
vessel of clay,’ prostrated him for a time.  His delicately strung
organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain
on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain.  He shrank from
suffering as a thing that mars and maims human life, and seems to have
wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many
great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged.  But he was
young—only twenty-five years of age—and he soon passed out of the ‘dead
black waters,’ as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic
culture.  As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost
to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up literature as
an art.  ‘I said with John Woodvil,’ he cries, ‘it were a life of gods to
dwell in such an element,’ to see and hear and write brave things:—

    ‘These high and gusty relishes of life
    Have no allayings of mortality.’

It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance
of a man who had a true passion for letters.  ‘To see and hear and write
brave things,’ this was his aim.

Scott, the editor of the _London Magazine_, struck by the young man’s
genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he
exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of
articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonym
he began to contribute to the literature of his day.  _Janus
Weathercock_, _Egomet Bonmot_, and _Van Vinkvooms_, were some of the
grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to
reveal his levity.  A mask tells us more than a face.  These disguises
intensified his personality.  In an incredibly short time he seems to
have made his mark.  Charles Lamb speaks of ‘kind, light-hearted
Wainewright,’ whose prose is ‘capital.’  We hear of him entertaining
Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet
John Clare, and others, at _a petit-dîner_.  Like Disraeli, he determined
to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique
cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well
known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new
manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite
white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being
different from others.  There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de
Rubempré.  At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel.  De Quincey saw him
once.  It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s.  ‘Amongst the company, all
literary men, sat a murderer,’ he tells us, and he goes on to describe
how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman,
and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table
at the young writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to
him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on ‘what sudden
growth of another interest’ would have changed his mood, had he known of
what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even
then guilty.

His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr.
Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside his
achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us
hardly justifies his reputation.

But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by
the vulgar test of production.  This young dandy sought to be somebody,
rather than to do something.  He recognised that Life itself is in art,
and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.
Nor is his work without interest.  We hear of William Blake stopping in
the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be
‘very fine.’  His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been
realised.  He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
culture that are regarded by many as true essentials.  He writes about La
Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance.  He loves
Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of _Cupid
and Psyche_, and the _Hypnerotomachia_, and book-binding and early
editions, and wide-margined proofs.  He is keenly sensitive to the value
of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the
rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live.  He had that
curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a
subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity,
if not a decadence of morals.  Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of
cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that ‘sweet marble monster’
of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.

There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for
decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself from the
false taste of his time.  But it is clear that he was one of the first to
recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote of æsthetic eclecticism, I
mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age
or place, of school or manner.  He saw that in decorating a room, which
is to be, not a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim
at any archæological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves
with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy.  In this artistic
perception he was perfectly right.  All beautiful things belong to the
same age.

And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate
fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted figures and the
faint ΚΑΛΟΣ finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving
of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michael Angelo, or of the ‘Pastoral’ of
Giorgione.  Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp
from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, ‘cased in a
cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with
small brilliants and rubies,’ and close by it ‘squats a little ugly
monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing
Sicily.’  Some dark antique bronzes contrast with the pale gleam of two
noble _Christi Crucifixi_, one carved in ivory, the other moulded in
wax.’  He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze
_bonbonnière_ with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized
‘brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,’ his citron morocco letter-case,
and his ‘pomona-green’ chair.

One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts and
engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over his fine
collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which
he was a warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique
gems and cameos, ‘the head of Alexander on an onyx of two strata,’ or
‘that superb _altissimo relievo_ on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.’  He was
always a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful
suggestions as to the best means of forming a collection.  Indeed, while
fully appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of
reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that he says
about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.

As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex
impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step in
æsthetic criticism is to realise one’s own impressions.  He cared nothing
for abstract discussions on the nature of the Beautiful, and the
historical method, which has since yielded such rich fruit, did not
belong to his day, but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art’s
first appeal is neither to the intellect nor to the emotions, but purely
to the artistic temperament, and he more than once points out that this
temperament, this ‘taste,’ as he calls it, being unconsciously guided and
made perfect by frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a
form of right judgment.  Of course there are fashions in art just as
there are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free
ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of novelty.  He
certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to
form any fair estimate of contemporary work.  But, on the whole, his
taste was good and sound.  He admired Turner and Constable at a time when
they were not so much thought of as they are now, and saw that for the
highest landscape art we require more than ‘mere industry and accurate
transcription.’  Of Crome’s ‘Heath Scene near Norwich’ he remarks that it
shows ‘how much a subtle observation of the elements, in their wild
moods, does for a most uninteresting flat,’ and of the popular type of
landscape of his day he says that it is ‘simply an enumeration of hill
and dale, stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses;
little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which
rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through rifted
clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of the real
painter, are not.’  He had a thorough dislike of what is obvious or
commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie at
dinner, he cared as little for Sir David’s pictures as he did for Mr.
Crabbe’s poems.  With the imitative and realistic tendencies of his day
he had no sympathy and he tells us frankly that his great admiration for
Fuseli was largely due to the fact that the little Swiss did not consider
it necessary that an artist should paint only what he sees.  The
qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and
dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power.  Upon the
other hand, he was not a doctrinaire.  ‘I hold that no work of art can be
tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be
consistent with itself is the question.’  This is one of his excellent
aphorisms.  And in criticising painters so different as Landseer and
Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical,
he is trying ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’

However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease in his
criticisms of contemporary work.  ‘The present,’ he says, ‘is about as
agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first perusal. . . . Modern
things dazzle me.  I must look at them through Time’s telescope.  Elia
complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain; “print,” as
he excellently says, “settles it.”  Fifty years’ toning does the same
thing to a picture.’  He is happier when he is writing about Watteau and
Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and
Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things.
What is Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of
the Renaissance were always dear to him.  He saw what our English school
could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies of pointing
out to the young student the artistic possibilities that lie dormant in
Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work.  In his judgments on the
great Italian Masters, says De Quincey, ‘there seemed a tone of sincerity
and of native sensibility, as in one who spoke for himself, and was not
merely a copier from books.’  The highest praise that we can give to him
is that he tried to revive style as a conscious tradition.  But he saw
that no amount of art lectures or art congresses, or ‘plans for advancing
the fine arts,’ will ever produce this result.  The people, he says very
wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have ‘the
best models constantly before their eyes.’

As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely
technical in his art criticisms.  Of Tintoret’s ‘St. George delivering
the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,’ he remarks:—

    The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from
    the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the full hues
    of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the
    purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saint,
    besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the foreground
    in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle.

And elsewhere he talks learnedly of ‘a delicate Schiavone, various as a
tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,’ of ‘a glowing portrait, remarkable
for _morbidezza_, by the scarce Moroni,’ and of another picture being
‘pulpy in the carnations.’

But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic
whole, and tries to translate those impressions into words, to give, as
it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect.
He was one of the first to develop what has been called the
art-literature of the nineteenth century, that form of literature which
has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning, its two most perfect exponents.
His description of Lancret’s _Repas Italien_, in which ‘a dark-haired
girl, “amorous of mischief,” lies on the daisy-powdered grass,’ is in
some respects very charming.  Here is his account of ‘The Crucifixion,’
by Rembrandt.  It is extremely characteristic of his style—

    Darkness—sooty, portentous darkness—shrouds the whole scene: only
    above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky
    ceiling, a rainy deluge—‘sleety-flaw, discoloured water’—streams down
    amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than
    that palpable night.  Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the
    darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt—the air is stagnant—a
    muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and some of that
    miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill.  The horses snuff the
    coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear.  The moment
    rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by His own weight,
    fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from
    His slit veins, His temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His
    black tongue parched with the fiery death-fever, Jesus cries, ‘I
    thirst.’  The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.

    His head sinks, and the sacred corpse ‘swings senseless of the
    cross.’  A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air and
    vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea
    rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves.  Earth yawns,
    and the graves give up their dwellers.  The dead and the living are
    mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy
    city.  New prodigies await them there.  The veil of the temple—the
    unpierceable veil—is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that
    dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries—the fatal ark with the
    tables and seven-branched candelabrum—is disclosed by the light of
    unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude.

    Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right.  It
    would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing veil
    of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting
    imagination may speculate.  At present it is like a thing in another
    world.  A dark gulf is betwixt us.  It is not tangible by the body.
    We can only approach it in the spirit.

In this passage, written, the author tells us, ‘in awe and reverence,’
there is much that is terrible, and very much that is quite horrible, but
it is not without a certain crude form of power, or, at any rate, a
certain crude violence of words, a quality which this age should highly
appreciate, as it is its chief defect.  It is pleasanter, however, to
pass to this description of Giulio Romano’s ‘Cephalus and Procris’:—

    We should read Moschus’s lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before
    looking at this picture, or study the picture as a preparation for
    the lament.  We have nearly the same images in both.  For either
    victim the high groves and forest dells murmur; the flowers exhale
    sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale mourns on the craggy
    lands, and the swallow in the long-winding vales; ‘the satyrs, too,
    and fauns dark-veiled groan,’ and the fountain nymphs within the wood
    melt into tearful waters.  The sheep and goats leave their pasture;
    and oreads, ‘who love to scale the most inaccessible tops of all
    uprightest rocks,’ hurry down from the song of their wind-courting
    pines; while the dryads bend from the branches of the meeting trees,
    and the rivers moan for white Procris, ‘with many-sobbing streams,’

                   Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.

    The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling
    horn of Aurora’s love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight on
    the top of Hymettus.  The foreground of our subject is a grassy
    sunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of
    land-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping roots and
    stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing
    out light-green shoots.  This bank rises rather suddenly on the right
    to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the entrance of
    which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees
    that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone, parting the
    rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on thorns
    and flowers with jealousy-stung foot—now helpless, heavy, void of all
    motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.

    From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
    forward with loud cries—

    And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
    And put strange pity in their horned countenance.

    Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
    death.  On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with ‘vans
    dejected’ holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan
    people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing their
    children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along from the
    left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on
    whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her
    grief-telling waters.  Above and more remote than the Ephidryad,
    another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned
    pillars of an unshorn grove.  The centre of the picture is filled by
    shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is ‘the vast
    strength of the ocean stream,’ from whose floor the extinguisher of
    stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-washed steeds to
    behold the death-pangs of her rival.

Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable.
The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent.  Much of
the best modern literature springs from the same aim.  In a very ugly and
sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied.  In everything connected
with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and
strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and
scene-painting.  ‘In art,’ he says in one of his essays, ‘whatever is
worth doing at all is worth doing well’; and he points out that once we
allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where
the line is to be drawn.  In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on
a famous occasion, he was ‘on the side of the angels.’  He was one of the
first to admire Keats and Shelley—‘the tremulously-sensitive and poetical
Shelley,’ as he calls him.  His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and
profound.  He thoroughly appreciated William Blake.  One of the best
copies of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that is now in
existence was wrought specially for him.  He loved Alain Chartier, and
Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and
Petrarch.  And to him all the arts were one.  ‘Our critics,’ he remarks
with much wisdom, ‘seem hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds
of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the serious
study of one art co-generates a proportionate perfection in the other’;
and he says elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo
talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his
listeners.  To his fellow-contributors in the _London Magazine_ he was
always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham,
Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a
friend.  Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way,
and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their
subject:—

    What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety
    of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart as ever sent
    tears to the eyes.

    How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most
    seasonably out of season.  His talk without affectation was
    compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity.  Like
    grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets.
    He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the
    _fashion for men of genius_ was a standing dish.  Sir Thomas Browne
    was a ‘bosom cronie’ of his; so was Burton, and old Fuller.  In his
    amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many-folio
    odour; and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he
    induced light dreams.  He would deliver critical touches on these,
    like one inspired, but it was good to let him choose his own game; if
    another began even on the acknowledged pets he was liable to
    interrupt, or rather append, in a mode difficult to define whether as
    misapprehensive or mischievous.  One night at C-’s, the above
    dramatic partners were the temporary subject of chat.  Mr. X.
    commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don’t know
    which of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who told him
    ‘_That_ was nothing; the lyrics were the high things—the lyrics!’

One side of his literary career deserves especial notice.  Modern
journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the
early part of this century.  He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and
delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations.  To have a
style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest
achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street
leader-writers, and this school _Janus Weathercock_ may be said to have
invented.  He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to
make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely
journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what
he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in
what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for
some popular newspaper of our own time.  This being the least valuable
side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence.  A
publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of
the illegalities of his private life.

Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature.  ‘I hold
three things in high estimation,’ he says somewhere: ‘to sit lazily on an
eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees
while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the
consciousness of neighbourhood.  The country gives them all to me.’  He
writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating
Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening,’ just to catch the fine quality of the moment;
about smothering his face ‘in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May
dews’; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine ‘pass
slowly homeward through the twilight,’ and hearing ‘the distant clank of
the sheep-bell.’  One phrase of his, ‘the polyanthus glowed in its cold
bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken
panel,’ is curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage
is rather pretty in its way:—

    The short tender grass was covered with marguerites—‘such that men
    called _daisies_ in our town’—thick as stars on a summer’s night.
    The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high
    dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard
    the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown seeds.
    The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a
    cloud streaked the calm æther; only round the horizon’s edge streamed
    a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village
    with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding
    whiteness.  I thought of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written in March.’

However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned
these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was
also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle
and secret poisoners of this or any age.  How he first became fascinated
by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he
carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods
that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.  Even in later days,
too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about
‘The Excursion,’ and the ‘Poems founded on the Affections.’  There is no
doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine.  In one of
the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which served to show
off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry
crystals of the Indian _nux vomica_, a poison, one of his biographers
tells us, ‘nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of
almost infinite dilution.’  His murders, says De Quincey, were more than
were ever made known judicially.  This is no doubt so, and some of them
are worthy of mention.  His first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas
Griffiths.  He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a
place to which he had always been very much attached.  In the August of
the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife’s mother, and in the
following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his
sister-in-law.  Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained.  It
may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power
that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.
But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his
wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had insured
her life in various offices.  The circumstances were as follows.  On the
12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden
House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street.  With
them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie.  On the
evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night
Helen sickened.  The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of
Hanover Square, was called in to attend her.  She lived till Monday, the
20th, when, after the doctor’s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright
brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk.  When they
returned Helen Abercrombie was dead.  She was about twenty years of age,
a tall graceful girl with fair hair.  A very charming red-chalk drawing
of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much
his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter
for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration.  De Quincey
says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder.  Let us
hope that she was not.  Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.

The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined
to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want
of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in
the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one
decision should govern all the cases.  The trial, however, did not come
on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately
given in the companies’ favour.  The judge on the occasion was Lord
Abinger.  _Egomet Bonmot_ was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William
Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for
the other side.  The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present
at either of the trials.  The refusal of the companies to give him the
£18,000 had placed him in a position of most painful pecuniary
embarrassment.  Indeed, a few months after the murder of Helen
Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the streets of
London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends.
This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he
thought it better to go abroad till he could come to some practical
arrangement with his creditors.  He accordingly went to Boulogne on a
visit to the father of the young lady in question, and while he was there
induced him to insure his life with the Pelican Company for £3000.  As
soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they
sat together one evening after dinner.  He himself did not gain any
monetary advantage by doing this.  His aim was simply to revenge himself
on the first office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin.
His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at
once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany,
and was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a
beautiful country house at St. Omer.  From this he moved to Paris, where
he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others
talk of his ‘skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all
who knew him.’  In 1837 he returned to England privately.  Some strange
mad fascination brought him back.  He followed a woman whom he loved.

It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in
Covent Garden.  His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and he
prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen.  Thirteen years
before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc
Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a power of attorney,
which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had
inherited from his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement.  He
knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to
England he was imperilling his life.  Yet he returned.  Should one
wonder?  It was said that the woman was very beautiful.  Besides, she did
not love him.

It was by a mere accident that he was discovered.  A noise in the street
attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in modern life, he
pushed aside the blind for a moment.  Some one outside called out,
‘That’s Wainewright, the Bank-forger.’  It was Forrester, the Bow Street
runner.

On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey.  The following
report of the proceedings appeared in the _Times_:—

    Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths
    Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing
    mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of
    attorney for £2259, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company
    of the Bank of England.

    There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he
    pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin
    in the course of the morning.  On being brought before the judges,
    however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and
    then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a
    capital nature.

    The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other
    indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea
    of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at
    the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation
    for life.

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.
In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself
‘lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death’ for having been
unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the
British Museum in order to complete his collection.  The sentence now
passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death.  He complained
bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of
reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own,
having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was,
had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,
was at least a _circonstance attenuante_.  The permanence of personality
is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law
solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner.  There is,
however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was
inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the
prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across
him by chance.  They had been going over the prisons of London, searching
for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of
Wainewright.  He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but
Macready was ‘horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in
former years, and at whose table he had dined.’

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of
fashionable lounge.  Many men of letters went down to visit their old
literary comrade.  But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom
Charles Lamb admired.  He seems to have grown quite cynical.

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: ‘Sir, you City men enter on
your speculations, and take the chances of them.  Some of your
speculations succeed, some fail.  Mine happen to have failed, yours
happen to have succeeded.  That is the only difference, sir, between my
visitor and me.  But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have
succeeded to the last.  I have been determined through life to hold the
position of a gentleman.  I have always done so.  I do so still.  It is
the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take
his morning’s turn of sweeping it out.  I occupy a cell with a bricklayer
and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’  When a friend
reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very
thick ankles.’

From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from
there in the _Susan_ to Van Diemen’s Land along with three hundred other
convicts.  The voyage seems to have been most distasteful to him, and in
a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of ‘the
companion of poets and artists’ being compelled to associate with
‘country bumpkins.’  The phrase that he applies to his companions need
not surprise us.  Crime in England is rarely the result of sin.  It is
nearly always the result of starvation.  There was probably no one on
board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a
psychologically interesting nature.

His love of art, however, never deserted him.  At Hobart Town he started
a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his
conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm.  Nor did he
give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in
which he tried to make away with people who had offended him.  But his
hand seems to have lost its cunning.  Both of his attempts were complete
failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian
society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir
John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave.  In it he speaks of
himself as being ‘tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and
realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of the
exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.’  His request,
however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled himself by
making those marvellous _Paradis Artificiels_ whose secret is only known
to the eaters of opium.  In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living
companion being a cat, for which he had evinced at extraordinary
affection.

His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art.  They gave
a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work
certainly lacked.  In a note to the _Life of Dickens_, Forster mentions
that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who
held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young
lady from his clever brush; and it is said that ‘he had contrived to put
the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice,
kind-hearted girl.’  M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young
man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish
impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which
bear a curious resemblance to his victim.  The development of Mr.
Wainewright’s style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive.  One can
fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary
London, and made so brilliant a _début_ in life and letters, is
undoubtedly a most interesting study.  Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest
biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this
memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is
of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretence and
assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power.  This seems
to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view.  The fact of a man being a
poisoner is nothing against his prose.  The domestic virtues are not the
true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement
for second-rate artists.  It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his
critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his
published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in
the bad sense of that bad word.  Here and there he is distinctly vulgar
in expression, and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the true
artist.  But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he
lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought ‘capital’ has no
small historic interest.  That he had a sincere love of art and nature
seems to me quite certain.  There is no essential incongruity between
crime and culture.  We cannot re-write the whole of history for the
purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.

Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form
any purely artistic judgment about him.  It is impossible not to feel a
strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or
Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol.  But had the man worn a costume
and spoken a language different from our own, had he lived in imperial
Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the
seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and
this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced
estimate of his position and value.  I know that there are many
historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think
it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute
their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful
schoolmaster.  This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that
the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it
will make its appearance wherever it is not required.  Nobody with the
true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius,
or censuring Cæsar Borgia.  These personages have become like the puppets
of a play.  They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they
do not harm us.  They are not in immediate relation to us.  We have
nothing to fear from them.  They have passed into the sphere of art and
science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or
disapproval.  And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb’s friend.  At
present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be treated in that
fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming
studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens
of Mr. John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee,
and other distinguished writers.  However, Art has not forgotten him.  He
is the hero of Dickens’s _Hunted Down_, the Varney of Bulwer’s
_Lucretia_; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some
homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison.’  To be
suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.




THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE
IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING


              _A DIALOGUE_.  _Part I._  _Persons_: _Gilbert_
           _and Ernest_.  _Scene_: _the library of a house in_
               _Piccadilly_, _overlooking the Green Park_.

GILBERT (_at the Piano_).  My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

ERNEST (_looking up_).  At a capital story that I have just come across
in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.

GILBERT.  What is the book?  Ah! I see.  I have not read it yet.  Is it
good?

ERNEST.  Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over the
pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs.
They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their
memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however,
is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English
public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to
it.

GILBERT.  Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives
everything except genius.  But I must confess that I like all memoirs.  I
like them for their form, just as much as for their matter.  In
literature mere egotism is delightful.  It is what fascinates us in the
letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and
Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné.  Whenever we come across it, and,
strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not
easily forget it.  Humanity will always love Rousseau for having
confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant
nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the
green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given
it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his
shame.  The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter
very little.  He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or
a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own
secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to
silence.  The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented—if that
can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual
problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I
think, survive.  But the world will never weary of watching that troubled
soul in its progress from darkness to darkness.  The lonely church at
Littlemore, where ‘the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are
few,’ will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow
snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that
gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower’s sure recurrence a prophecy
that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his days—a
prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be
fulfilled.  Yes; autobiography is irresistible.  Poor, silly, conceited
Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into the circle of the
Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the better part of valour,
bustles about among them in that ‘shaggy purple gown with gold buttons
and looped lace’ which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at
his ease, and prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the
Indian blue petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the ‘good hog’s
hars-let,’ and the ‘pleasant French fricassee of veal’ that he loved to
eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his ‘gadding after
beauties,’ and his reciting of _Hamlet_ on a Sunday, and his playing of
the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things.  Even in
actual life egotism is not without its attractions.  When people talk to
us about others they are usually dull.  When they talk to us about
themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them
up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of
which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.

ERNEST.  There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say.  But
do you seriously propose that every man should become his own Boswell?
What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and Recollections
in that case?

GILBERT.  What has become of them?  They are the pest of the age, nothing
more and nothing less.  Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and
it is always Judas who writes the biography.

ERNEST.  My dear fellow!

GILBERT.  I am afraid it is true.  Formerly we used to canonise our
heroes.  The modern method is to vulgarise them.  Cheap editions of great
books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely
detestable.

ERNEST.  May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?

GILBERT.  Oh! to all our second-rate _littérateurs_.  We are overrun by a
set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house
along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as
mutes.  But we won’t talk about them.  They are the mere body-snatchers
of literature.  The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and
the soul is out of their reach.  And now, let me play Chopin to you, or
Dvorák?  Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorák?  He writes passionate,
curiously-coloured things.

ERNEST.  No; I don’t want music just at present.  It is far too
indefinite.  Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner last
night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect, she
insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in the German
language.  Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad to say that it does
not sound in the smallest degree like German.  There are forms of
patriotism that are really quite degrading.  No; Gilbert, don’t play any
more.  Turn round and talk to me.  Talk to me till the white-horned day
comes into the room.  There is something in your voice that is wonderful.

GILBERT (_rising from the piano_).  I am not in a mood for talking
to-night.  I really am not.  How horrid of you to smile!  Where are the
cigarettes?  Thanks.  How exquisite these single daffodils are!  They
seem to be made of amber and cool ivory.  They are like Greek things of
the best period.  What was the story in the confessions of the remorseful
Academician that made you laugh?  Tell it to me.  After playing Chopin, I
feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and
mourning over tragedies that were not my own.  Music always seems to me
to produce that effect.  It creates for one a past of which one has been
ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden
from one’s tears.  I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace
life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly
discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed
through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic
loves, or great renunciations.  And so tell me this story, Ernest.  I
want to be amused.

ERNEST.  Oh!  I don’t know that it is of any importance.  But I thought
it a really admirable illustration of the true value of ordinary
art-criticism.  It seems that a lady once gravely asked the remorseful
Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated picture of ‘A Spring-Day
at Whiteley’s,’ or, ‘Waiting for the Last Omnibus,’ or some subject of
that kind, was all painted by hand?

GILBERT.  And was it?

ERNEST.  You are quite incorrigible.  But, seriously speaking, what is
the use of art-criticism?  Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create
a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which
we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be
wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of
selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a
momentary perfection.  It seems to me that the imagination spreads, or
should spread, a solitude around it, and works best in silence and in
isolation.  Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of
criticism?  Why should those who cannot create take upon themselves to
estimate the value of creative work?  What can they know about it?  If a
man’s work is easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .

GILBERT.  And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is wicked.

ERNEST.  I did not say that.

GILBERT.  Ah! but you should have.  Nowadays, we have so few mysteries
left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.  The members
of the Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad Church Party,
or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott’s Great Writers Series, seem to me to
spend their time in trying to explain their divinity away.  Where one had
hoped that Browning was a mystic they have sought to show that he was
simply inarticulate.  Where one had fancied that he had something to
conceal, they have proved that he had but little to reveal.  But I speak
merely of his incoherent work.  Taken as a whole the man was great.  He
did not belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the
Titan.  He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could sing.  His
work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from
emotion to form, but from thought to chaos.  Still, he was great.  He has
been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking,
and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him,
but rather the processes by which thought moves.  It was the machine he
loved, not what the machine makes.  The method by which the fool arrives
at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.  So
much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he
despised language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of
expression.  Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill
creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real
artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a
spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may
be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and
suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had
knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man’s utterance to the speech of
gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in
Robert Browning’s hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made
him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often
with his tongue in his cheek.  There are moments when he wounds us by
monstrous music.  Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the
strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no
Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory
horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh.  Yet, he
was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from
it men and women that live.  He is the most Shakespearian creature since
Shakespeare.  If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could
stammer through a thousand mouths.  Even now, as I am speaking, and
speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the
pageant of his persons.  There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks
still burning from some girl’s hot kiss.  There, stands dread Saul with
the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.  Mildred Tresham is
there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben
Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed’s.  The spawn of Setebos gibbers in
the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima’s haggard
face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself.  Pale as the white
satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous
eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as
he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go
down.  Yes, Browning was great.  And as what will he be remembered?  As a
poet?  Ah, not as a poet!  He will be remembered as a writer of fiction,
as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.
His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not
answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what
more should an artist do?  Considered from the point of view of a creator
of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet.  Had he been
articulate, he might have sat beside him.  The only man who can touch the
hem of his garment is George Meredith.  Meredith is a prose Browning, and
so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.

ERNEST.  There is something in what you say, but there is not everything
in what you say.  In many points you are unjust.

GILBERT.  It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.  But let us
return to the particular point at issue.  What was it that you said?

ERNEST.  Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no
art-critics.

GILBERT.  I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest.  It has
all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.

ERNEST.  It is true.  Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that
petulant manner.  It is quite true.  In the best days of art there were
no art-critics.  The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great
white-limbed Hermes that slept within it.  The waxers and gilders of
images gave tone and texture to the statue, and the world, when it saw
it, worshipped and was dumb.  He poured the glowing bronze into the mould
of sand, and the river of red metal cooled into noble curves and took the
impress of the body of a god.  With enamel or polished jewels he gave
sight to the sightless eyes.  The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath
his graver.  And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit
portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who passed by,
δια λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες αβρως αιθέρος, became conscious of a new
influence that had come across their lives, and dreamily, or with a sense
of strange and quickening joy, went to their homes or daily labour, or
wandered, it may be, through the city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow
where young Phædrus bathed his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass,
beneath the tall wind—whispering planes and flowering _agnus castus_,
began to think of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed
awe.  In those days the artist was free.  From the river valley he took
the fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone,
fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to the
dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty tombs on
the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and the fading
crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.  On a wall of
fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron,
he pictured one who trod with tired feet the purple white-starred fields
of asphodel, one ‘in whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan War,’
Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or figured Odysseus, the wise and
cunning, bound by tight cords to the mast-step, that he might listen
without hurt to the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear
river of Acheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed;
or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at
Marathon, or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little
Salaminian bay.  He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment
and prepared cedar.  Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted
with wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated
irons making it firm.  Panel and marble and linen canvas became wonderful
as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her own image, was still,
and dared not speak.  All life, indeed, was his, from the merchants
seated in the market-place to the cloaked shepherd lying on the hill;
from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon, to
the king whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon
oil-bright shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans.  Men and women, with
pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passed before him.  He watched them,
and their secret became his.  Through form and colour he re-created a
world.

All subtle arts belonged to him also.  He held the gem against the
revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for Adonis, and
across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds.  He beat out the
gold into roses, and strung them together for necklace or armlet.  He
beat out the gold into wreaths for the conqueror’s helmet, or into
palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the royal dead.  On the
back of the silver mirror he graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or
love-sick Phædra with her nurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting
poppies in her hair.  The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from
the silent wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands.  He decorated the
base and stem and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated
acanthus, or curved and crested wave.  Then in black or red he painted
lads wrestling, or in the race: knights in full armour, with strange
heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped chariot
over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or working their
miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their pain.  Sometimes he
would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground of white the languid
bridegroom and his bride, with Eros hovering round them—an Eros like one
of Donatello’s angels, a little laughing thing with gilded or with azure
wings.  On the curved side he would write the name of his friend.  ΚΑΛΟΣ
ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ or ΚΑΛΟΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΗΣ tells us the story of his days.  Again, on
the rim of the wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion
at rest, as his fancy willed it.  From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed
Aphrodite at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Mænads in his train,
Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained feet, while,
satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated skins, or shook
that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted fir-cone, and wreathed
with dark ivy.  And no one came to trouble the artist at his work.  No
irresponsible chatter disturbed him.  He was not worried by opinions.  By
the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no Higginbotham.  By the
Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing
provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth.
By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the
industrious prattle of what they do not understand.  On the reed-grown
banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism
monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in the
dock.  The Greeks had no art-critics.

GILBERT.  Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are terribly
unsound.  I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of
some one older than yourself.  That is always a dangerous thing to do,
and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it
absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.  As for modern
journalism, it is not my business to defend it.  It justifies its own
existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the
vulgarest.  I have merely to do with literature.

ERNEST.  But what is the difference between literature and journalism?

GILBERT.  Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.  That
is all.  But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no
art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd.  It would be more just to
say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.

ERNEST.  Really?

GILBERT.  Yes, a nation of art-critics.  But I don’t wish to destroy the
delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the relation of the
Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his age.  To give an
accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper
occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of
parts and culture.  Still less do I desire to talk learnedly.  Learned
conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession
of the mentally unemployed.  And, as for what is called improving
conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more
foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the
criminal classes.  No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by
Dvorák.  The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, and the
heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.  Don’t let us
discuss anything solemnly.  I am but too conscious of the fact that we
are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live
in terror of not being misunderstood.  Don’t degrade me into the position
of giving you useful information.  Education is an admirable thing, but
it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth
knowing can be taught.  Through the parted curtains of the window I see
the moon like a clipped piece of silver.  Like gilded bees the stars
cluster round her.  The sky is a hard hollow sapphire.  Let us go out
into the night.  Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
still.  Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear
the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

ERNEST.  You are horribly wilful.  I insist on your discussing this
matter with me.  You have said that the Greeks were a nation of
art-critics.  What art-criticism have they left us?

GILBERT.  My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism
had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none
the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they
invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of
everything else.  For, after all, what is our primary debt to the Greeks?
Simply the critical spirit.  And, this spirit, which they exercised on
questions of religion and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics
and education, they exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of
the two supreme and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless
system of criticism that the world has ever seen.

ERNEST.  But what are the two supreme and highest arts?

GILBERT.  Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life.
The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not
realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.  The principles
of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that
we can hardly understand them.  Recognising that the most perfect art is
that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they
elaborated the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere
material of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system
of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain;
studying, for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as
scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint,
and, I need hardly say, with much keener æsthetic instinct.  In this they
were right, as they were right in all things.  Since the introduction of
printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the
middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a tendency in
literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the
ear which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it
should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide
always.  Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most
perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far
more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and
there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and
richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.  We, in fact, have
made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a
form of elaborate design.  The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded
writing simply as a method of chronicling.  Their test was always the
spoken word in its musical and metrical relations.  The voice was the
medium, and the ear the critic.  I have sometimes thought that the story
of Homer’s blindness might be really an artistic myth, created in
critical days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the great poet
is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with
the eyes of the soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his
song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself
till he has caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the
words that are winged with light.  Certainly, whether this be so or not,
it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that
England’s great poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous
splendour of his later verse.  When Milton could no longer write he began
to sing.  Who would match the measures of _Comus_ with the measures of
_Samson Agonistes_, or of _Paradise Lost_ or _Regained_?  When Milton
became blind he composed, as every one should compose, with the voice
purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days became that mighty
many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all the stateliness
of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have its swiftness, and is the one
imperishable inheritance of English literature sweeping through all the
ages, because above them, and abiding with us ever, being immortal in its
form.  Yes: writing has done much harm to writers.  We must return to the
voice.  That must be our test, and perhaps then we shall be able to
appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism.

As it now is, we cannot do so.  Sometimes, when I have written a piece of
prose that I have been modest enough to consider absolutely free from
fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I may have been guilty of
the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachic movements, a
crime for which a learned critic of the Augustan age censures with most
just severity the brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias.  I grow
cold when I think of it, and wonder to myself if the admirable ethical
effect of the prose of that charming writer, who once in a spirit of
reckless generosity towards the uncultivated portion of our community
proclaimed the monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life,
will not some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the pæons
have been wrongly placed.

ERNEST.  Ah! now you are flippant.

GILBERT.  Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that the
Greeks had no art-critics?  I can understand it being said that the
constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but not that
the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not criticise.  You will
not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art criticism from Plato to
Plotinus.  The night is too lovely for that, and the moon, if she heard
us, would put more ashes on her face than are there already.  But think
merely of one perfect little work of æsthetic criticism, Aristotle’s
_Treatise on Poetry_.  It is not perfect in form, for it is badly
written, consisting perhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or
of isolated fragments destined for some larger book, but in temper and
treatment it is perfect, absolutely.  The ethical effect of art, its
importance to culture, and its place in the formation of character, had
been done once for all by Plato; but here we have art treated, not from
the moral, but from the purely æsthetic point of view.  Plato had, of
course, dealt with many definitely artistic subjects, such as the
importance of unity in a work of art, the necessity for tone and harmony,
the æsthetic value of appearances, the relation of the visible arts to
the external world, and the relation of fiction to fact.  He first
perhaps stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet
satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth,
and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the
Kosmos.  The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may
seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysical sphere
of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer them to the
sphere of art, and you will find that they are still vital and full of
meaning.  It may be that it is as a critic of Beauty that Plato is
destined to live, and that by altering the name of the sphere of his
speculation we shall find a new philosophy.  But Aristotle, like Goethe,
deals with art primarily in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy,
for instance, and investigating the material it uses, which is language,
its subject-matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is
action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are those of
theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is plot, and its
final æsthetic appeal, which is to the sense of beauty realised through
the passions of pity and awe.  That purification and spiritualising of
the nature which he calls κάθαρσις is, as Goethe saw, essentially
æsthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied.  Concerning himself
primarily with the impression that the work of art produces, Aristotle
sets himself to analyse that impression, to investigate its source, to
see how it is engendered.  As a physiologist and psychologist, he knows
that the health of a function resides in energy.  To have a capacity for
a passion and not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and
limited.  The mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the
bosom of much ‘perilous stuff,’ and by presenting high and worthy objects
for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the man; nay,
not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him also into noble
feelings of which he might else have known nothing, the word κάθαρσις
having, it has sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of
initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to fancy,
its true and only meaning here.  This is of course a mere outline of the
book.  But you see what a perfect piece of æsthetic criticism it is.  Who
indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so well?  After reading it,
one does not wonder any longer that Alexandria devoted itself so largely
to art-criticism, and that we find the artistic temperaments of the day
investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great
Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon,
that sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or
the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual
life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value
of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper
subject-matter for the artist.  Indeed, I fear that the inartistic
temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature
and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such
accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or
from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own,
fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they
have been robbed.  And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks
chattered about painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had
their private views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts
guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and
lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their
art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.  Why,
even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought their
dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid them very
handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices.  Whatever, in fact, is
modern in our life we owe to the Greeks.  Whatever is an anachronism is
due to mediævalism.  It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system
of art-criticism, and how fine their critical instinct was, may be seen
from the fact that the material they criticised with most care was, as I
have already said, language.  For the material that painter or sculptor
uses is meagre in comparison with that of words.  Words have not merely
music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any
that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and
plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in
marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs
also, are theirs indeed alone.  If the Greeks had criticised nothing but
language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world.
To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of
all the arts.

But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud.  Out
of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion’s eye.  She is afraid
that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, of Quinctilian and
Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of all those who in the
antique world wrote or lectured upon art matters.  She need not be
afraid.  I am tired of my expedition into the dim, dull abyss of facts.
There is nothing left for me now but the divine μονόχρονος ηδονή of
another cigarette.  Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one
unsatisfied.

ERNEST.  Try one of mine.  They are rather good.  I get them direct from
Cairo.  The only use of our _attachés_ is that they supply their friends
with excellent tobacco.  And as the moon has hidden herself, let us talk
a little longer.  I am quite ready to admit that I was wrong in what I
said about the Greeks.  They were, as you have pointed out, a nation of
art-critics.  I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them.  For
the creative faculty is higher than the critical.  There is really no
comparison between them.

GILBERT.  The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary.  Without the
critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the
name.  You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and
delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us,
and gives to it a momentary perfection.  Well, that spirit of choice,
that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of
its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this
critical faculty can create anything at all in art.  Arnold’s definition
of literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form, but
it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the critical element
in all creative work.

ERNEST.  I should have said that great artists work unconsciously, that
they were ‘wiser than they knew,’ as, I think, Emerson remarks somewhere.

GILBERT.  It is really not so, Ernest.  All fine imaginative work is
self-conscious and deliberate.  No poet sings because he must sing.  At
least, no great poet does.  A great poet sings because he chooses to
sing.  It is so now, and it has always been so.  We are sometimes apt to
think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler,
fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early
poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical
quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song.
The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are
bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed
the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to
sing to the shepherds in the vale.  But in this we are merely lending to
other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own.  Our
historical sense is at fault.  Every century that produces poetry is, so
far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most
natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most
self-conscious effort.  Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without
self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are
one.

ERNEST.  I see what you mean, and there is much in it.  But surely you
would admit that the great poems of the early world, the primitive,
anonymous collective poems, were the result of the imagination of races,
rather than of the imagination of individuals?

GILBERT.  Not when they became poetry.  Not when they received a
beautiful form.  For there is no art where there is no style, and no
style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.  No doubt
Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had
chronicles and plays and novels from which to work, but they were merely
his rough material.  He took them, and shaped them into song.  They
become his, because he made them lovely.  They were built out of music,

       And so not built at all,
    And therefore built for ever.

The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels
that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that
it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.
Indeed, I am inclined to think that each myth and legend that seems to us
to spring out of the wonder, or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was
in its origin the invention of one single mind.  The curiously limited
number of the myths seems to me to point to this conclusion.  But we must
not go off into questions of comparative mythology.  We must keep to
criticism.  And what I want to point out is this.  An age that has no
criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and
confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no
art at all.  There have been critical ages that have not been creative,
in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in which the spirit of man has
sought to set in order the treasures of his treasure-house, to separate
the gold from the silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over the
jewels, and to give names to the pearls.  But there has never been a
creative age that has not been critical also.  For it is the critical
faculty that invents fresh forms.  The tendency of creation is to repeat
itself.  It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that
springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.  There is
really not a single form that art now uses that does not come to us from
the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were either
stereotyped or invented or made perfect.  I say Alexandria, not merely
because it was there that the Greek spirit became most self-conscious,
and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and theology, but because it
was to that city, and not to Athens, that Rome turned for her models, and
it was through the survival, such as it was, of the Latin language that
culture lived at all.  When, at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned
upon Europe, the soil had been in some measure prepared for it.  But, to
get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome and usually
inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been due to
the Greek critical spirit.  To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire
drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll,
the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the
oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and
the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that word.  In fact, we owe it
everything, except the sonnet, to which, however, some curious parallels
of thought-movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism,
to which no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham Scotch
dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has recently proposed
should be made the basis for a final and unanimous effort on the part of
our second-rate poets to make themselves really romantic.  Each new
school, as it appears, cries out against criticism, but it is to the
critical faculty in man that it owes its origin.  The mere creative
instinct does not innovate, but reproduces.

ERNEST.  You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of the
creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory.  But what of
criticism outside creation?  I have a foolish habit of reading
periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly
valueless.

GILBERT.  So is most modern creative work also.  Mediocrity weighing
mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother—that
is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us from
time to time.  And yet, I feel I am a little unfair in this matter.  As a
rule, the critics—I speak, of course, of the higher class, of those in
fact who write for the sixpenny papers—are far more cultured than the
people whose work they are called upon to review.  This is, indeed, only
what one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation
than creation does.

ERNEST.  Really?

GILBERT.  Certainly.  Anybody can write a three-volumed novel.  It merely
requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.  The
difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty of
sustaining any standard.  Where there is no style a standard must be
impossible.  The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the
reporters of the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the
doings of the habitual criminals of art.  It is sometimes said of them
that they do not read all through the works they are called upon to
criticise.  They do not.  Or at least they should not.  If they did so,
they would become confirmed misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase
from one of the pretty Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the
rest of their lives.  Nor is it necessary.  To know the vintage and
quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.  It must be
perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or
worth nothing.  Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the
instinct for form.  Who wants to wade through a dull volume?  One tastes
it, and that is quite enough—more than enough, I should imagine.  I am
aware that there are many honest workers in painting as well as in
literature who object to criticism entirely.  They are quite right.
Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age.  It brings us
no new element of pleasure.  It suggests no fresh departure of thought,
or passion, or beauty.  It should not be spoken of.  It should be left to
the oblivion that it deserves.

ERNEST.  But, my dear fellow—excuse me for interrupting you—you seem to
me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too
far.  For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult
to do a thing than to talk about it.

GILBERT.  More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it?  Not at
all.  That is a gross popular error.  It is very much more difficult to
talk about a thing than to do it.  In the sphere of actual life that is
of course obvious.  Anybody can make history.  Only a great man can write
it.  There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share
with the lower animals.  It is only by language that we rise above them,
or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child,
of thought.  Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in
its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be
that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have
nothing whatsoever to do.  No, Ernest, don’t talk about action.  It is a
blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of
whose nature it is unconscious.  It is a thing incomplete in its essence,
because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always
at variance with its aim.  Its basis is the lack of imagination.  It is
the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

ERNEST.  Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball.  You
hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy.  You do
nothing but re-write history.

GILBERT.  The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.  That is not
the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit.  When we have
fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise
that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of
action.  He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their
results.  From the field in which he thought that he had sown thorns, we
have gathered our vintage, and the fig-tree that he planted for our
pleasure is as barren as the thistle, and more bitter.  It is because
Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find
its way.

ERNEST.  You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious aim is
a delusion?

GILBERT.  It is worse than a delusion.  If we lived long enough to see
the results of our actions it may be that those who call themselves good
would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls
evil stirred by a noble joy.  Each little thing that we do passes into
the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make
them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new
civilisation, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone
before.  But men are the slaves of words.  They rage against Materialism,
as they call it, forgetting that there has been no material improvement
that has not spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if
any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world’s faculties in
barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds.
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress.  Without it the
world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.  By its
curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race.  Through its
intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of
type.  In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one
with the higher ethics.  And as for the virtues!  What are the virtues?
Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little about chastity, and it may be
that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not to their own purity,
that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom from stain.  Charity,
as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been
compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.  The mere
existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much
nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect
development.  It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and
self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that
old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the
world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its
altars in the land.  Virtues!  Who knows what the virtues are?  Not you.
Not I.  Not any one.  It is well for our vanity that we slay the
criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had
gained by his crime.  It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his
martyrdom.  He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.

ERNEST.  Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note.  Let us go back to the more
gracious fields of literature.  What was it you said?  That it was more
difficult to talk about a thing than to do it?

GILBERT (_after a pause_).  Yes: I believe I ventured upon that simple
truth.  Surely you see now that I am right?  When man acts he is a
puppet.  When he describes he is a poet.  The whole secret lies in that.
It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy Ilion to send the notched
arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl against the shield of hide and
flamelike brass the long ash-handled spear.  It was easy for the
adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian carpets for her lord, and then, as
he lay couched in the marble bath, to throw over his head the purple net,
and call to her smooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the
heart that should have broken at Aulis.  For Antigone even, with Death
waiting for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the
tainted air at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the
wretched naked corse that had no tomb.  But what of those who wrote about
these things?  What of those who gave them reality, and made them live
for ever?  Are they not greater than the men and women they sing of?
‘Hector that sweet knight is dead,’ and Lucian tells us how in the dim
under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen, and marvelled that
it was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships were launched,
those beautiful mailed men laid low, those towered cities brought to
dust.  Yet, every day the swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the
battlements, and looks down at the tide of war.  The greybeards wonder at
her loveliness, and she stands by the side of the king.  In his chamber
of stained ivory lies her leman.  He is polishing his dainty armour, and
combing the scarlet plume.  With squire and page, her husband passes from
tent to tent.  She can see his bright hair, and hears, or fancies that
she hears, that clear cold voice.  In the courtyard below, the son of
Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass.  The white arms of Andromache
are around his neck.  He sets his helmet on the ground, lest their babe
should be frightened.  Behind the embroidered curtains of his pavilion
sits Achilles, in perfumed raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver
the friend of his soul arrays himself to go forth to the fight.  From a
curiously carven chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his
ship-side, the Lord of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that
the lip of man had never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and
with fresh water cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black
wine its burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon the
ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophets worshipped,
and prays to Him, and knows not that he prays in vain, and that by the
hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous’ son, Euphorbus, whose
love-locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid, the lion-hearted,
Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his doom.  Phantoms, are
they?  Heroes of mist and mountain?  Shadows in a song?  No: they are
real.  Action!  What is action?  It dies at the moment of its energy.  It
is a base concession to fact.  The world is made by the singer for the
dreamer.

ERNEST.  While you talk it seems to me to be so.

GILBERT.  It is so in truth.  On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the
lizard like a thing of green bronze.  The owl has built her nest in the
palace of Priam.  Over the empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with
their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced, oily sea, οινοψ πόντος, as
Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great
galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely
tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his
net.  Yet, every morning the doors of the city are thrown open, and on
foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors go forth to battle, and
mock their enemies from behind their iron masks.  All day long the fight
rages, and when night comes the torches gleam by the tents, and the
cresset burns in the hall.  Those who live in marble or on painted panel,
know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its
beauty, but limited to one note of passion or one mood of calm.  Those
whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of
courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering.  The seasons come and
go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years
pass by before them.  They have their youth and their manhood, they are
children, and they grow old.  It is always dawn for St. Helena, as
Veronese saw her at the window.  Through the still morning air the angels
bring her the symbol of God’s pain.  The cool breezes of the morning lift
the gilt threads from her brow.  On that little hill by the city of
Florence, where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the
solstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly
can the slim naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of
clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the
chords.  It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free
among the silver poplars of France.  In eternal twilight they move, those
frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch
the dew-drenched grass they tread on.  But those who walk in epos, drama,
or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons wax and
wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and from
sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting day with all its gold and
shadow.  For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the
Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her
raiment for their pleasure.  The statue is concentrated to one moment of
perfection.  The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual
element of growth or change.  If they know nothing of death, it is
because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death
belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and
who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall
from a past of glory or of shame.  Movement, that problem of the visible
arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone.  It is Literature that
shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.

ERNEST.  Yes; I see now what you mean.  But, surely, the higher you place
the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.

GILBERT.  Why so?

ERNEST.  Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo of rich
music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form.  It may, indeed, be that life
is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms are mean and its
heroisms ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature to create,
from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be
more marvellous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common
eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek to realise their
perfection.  But surely, if this new world has been made by the spirit
and touch of a great artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect
that there will be nothing left for the critic to do.  I quite understand
now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far more difficult to talk
about a thing than to do it.  But it seems to me that this sound and
sensible maxim, which is really extremely soothing to one’s feelings, and
should be adopted as its motto by every Academy of Literature all over
the world, applies only to the relations that exist between Art and Life,
and not to any relations that there may be between Art and Criticism.

GILBERT.  But, surely, Criticism is itself an art.  And just as artistic
creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed,
without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really
creative in the highest sense of the word.  Criticism is, in fact, both
creative and independent.

ERNEST.  Independent?

GILBERT.  Yes; independent.  Criticism is no more to be judged by any low
standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or
sculptor.  The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that
he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour,
or the unseen world of passion and of thought.  He does not even require
for the perfection of his art the finest materials.  Anything will serve
his purpose.  And just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the
silly wife of a small country doctor in the squalid village of
Yonville-l’Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a
classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or
of no importance, such as the pictures in this year’s Royal Academy, or
in any year’s Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris’s poems, M.
Ohnet’s novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic
can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of
contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct
with intellectual subtlety.  Why not?  Dulness is always an irresistible
temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent _Bestia
Trionfans_ that calls wisdom from its cave.  To an artist so creative as
the critic, what does subject-matter signify?  No more and no less than
it does to the novelist and the painter.  Like them, he can find his
motives everywhere.  Treatment is the test.  There is nothing that has
not in it suggestion or challenge.

ERNEST.  But is Criticism really a creative art?

GILBERT.  Why should it not be?  It works with materials, and puts them
into a form that is at once new and delightful.  What more can one say of
poetry?  Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation.
For just as the great artists, from Homer and Æschylus, down to
Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their
subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale,
so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified
for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already
added.  Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the
purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than
creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself,
and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would
put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.  Certainly, it is never
trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude.  No ignoble considerations
of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of
domestic or public life, affect it ever.  One may appeal from fiction
unto fact.  But from the soul there is no appeal.

ERNEST.  From the soul?

GILBERT.  Yes, from the soul.  That is what the highest criticism really
is, the record of one’s own soul.  It is more fascinating than history,
as it is concerned simply with oneself.  It is more delightful than
philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not
vague.  It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not
with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s
physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods
and imaginative passions of the mind.  I am always amused by the silly
vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that
the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate
work.  The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it
is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his
fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will
prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will
turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though
the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn.  His sole aim is to
chronicle his own impressions.  It is for him that pictures are painted,
books written, and marble hewn into form.

ERNEST.  I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.

GILBERT.  Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all
revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her
Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the
Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as
in itself it really is.  But this is a very serious error, and takes no
cognisance of Criticism’s most perfect form, which is in its essence
purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret
of another.  For the highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive
but as impressive purely.

ERNEST.  But is that really so?

GILBERT.  Of course it is.  Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on
Turner are sound or not?  What does it matter?  That mighty and majestic
prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so
rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best,
in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art
as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted
canvases in England’s Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at
times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on
account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in
those long-cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though
through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual
and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,
with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think,
even as Literature is the greater art.  Who, again, cares whether Mr.
Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo
never dreamed of?  The painter may have been merely the slave of an
archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool
galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange
figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in
some faint light under sea,’ I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than the
rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many
times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep
seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange
webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of
Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her
but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with
which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and
the hands.’  And I say to my friend, ‘The presence that thus so strangely
rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand
years man had come to desire’; and he answers me, ‘Hers is the head upon
which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little
weary.’

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and
reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the
music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that
flute-player’s music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle
and poisonous curves.  Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had
any one told him of this picture that ‘all the thoughts and experience of
the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to
refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the
lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition
and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias?’  He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none
of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious
colour-harmonies of blue and green.  And it is for this very reason that
the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.  It
treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.  It
does not confine itself—let us at least suppose so for the moment—to
discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.
And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing
is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in
his soul who wrought it.  Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the
beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and
sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital
portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of
what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.  The longer I
study, Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts
is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may be
marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention
on the part of the artist.  For when the work is finished it has, as it
were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other
than that which was put into its lips to say.  Sometimes, when I listen
to the overture to _Tannhäuser_, I seem indeed to see that comely knight
treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass, and to hear the voice of
Venus calling to him from the caverned hill.  But at other times it
speaks to me of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my
own life, or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of
loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions that
man has not known, and so has sought for.  To-night it may fill one with
that ΕΡΩΣ ΤΩΝ ΑΔΥΝΑΤΩΝ, that _Amour de l’Impossible_, which falls like a
madness on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so
that they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in
the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain, grow faint and swoon or
stumble.  To-morrow, like the music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us,
the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it may perform the office of a
physician, and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that
is wounded, and ‘bring the soul into harmony with all right things.’  And
what is true about music is true about all the arts.  Beauty has as many
meanings as man has moods.  Beauty is the symbol of symbols.  Beauty
reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.  When it shows us
itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

ERNEST.  But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?

GILBERT.  It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the
individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form
which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood
incompletely.

ERNEST.  The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and
the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really
is not; that is your theory, I believe?

GILBERT.  Yes, that is my theory.  To the critic the work of art is
simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily
bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.  The one
characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever
one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty,
that gives to creation its universal and æsthetic element, makes the
critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things
which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or
painted the panel or graved the gem.

It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the
highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures
that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the
anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature
or history.  But this is not so.  Indeed, pictures of this kind are far
too intelligible.  As a class, they rank with illustrations, and, even
considered from this point of view are failures, as they do not stir the
imagination, but set definite bounds to it.  For the domain of the
painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of the
poet.  To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not
merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to
also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of
colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought.
The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the
body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only through
conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical
equivalents that he can deal with psychology.  And how inadequately does
he do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban of the Moor for the
noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of
Lear!  Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him.  Most of our elderly
English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the
domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and
striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is
invisible, the splendour of what is not seen.  Their pictures are, as a
natural consequence, insufferably tedious.  They have degraded the
invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking
at is the obvious.  I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of
the same subject.  They have always done so and will always do so.  But
while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must
be pictorial always.  For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in
nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen.

And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate
the critic.  He will turn from them to such works as make him brood and
dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion,
and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider
world.  It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that
he cannot realise his ideal.  But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of
most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely.  For, when
the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than
itself.  This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.  Music
can never reveal its ultimate secret.  This, also, is the explanation of
the value of limitations in art.  The sculptor gladly surrenders
imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because
by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation
of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a
realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual.  It is
through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and
so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty
of reason, but to the æsthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both
reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both
to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking
whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very
complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the
ultimate impression itself.  You see, then, how it is that the æsthetic
critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to
deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks
rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their
imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation
final.  Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will
have to the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such
resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the painter
of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between
Nature and the work of the decorative artist.  Just as on the flowerless
carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to look
on, though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the
pearl and purple of the sea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at
Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is
made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock’s tail,
though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of
whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows
us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty,
and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the
problem of Art’s unity.

But I see it is time for supper.  After we have discussed some Chambertin
and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of the critic
considered in the light of the interpreter.

ERNEST.  Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally be allowed
to see the object as in itself it really is.

GILBERT.  I am not quite sure.  Perhaps I may admit it after supper.
There is a subtle influence in supper.




THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE
OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING


             _A DIALOGUE_: _Part II._  _Persons_: _the same_.
                           _Scene_: _the same_.

ERNEST.  The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect, and
now let us return to the point at issue.

GILBERT.  Ah! don’t let us do that.  Conversation should touch
everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.  Let us talk about
_Moral Indignation_, _its Cause and Cure_, a subject on which I think of
writing: or about _The Survival of Thersites_, as shown by the English
comic papers; or about any topic that may turn up.

ERNEST.  No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism.  You have told
me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as expressive, but as
impressive purely, and is consequently both creative and independent, is
in fact an art by itself, occupying the same relation to creative work
that creative work does to the visible world of form and colour, or the
unseen world of passion and of thought.  Well, now, tell me, will not the
critic be sometimes a real interpreter?

GILBERT.  Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses.  He can
pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, to an
analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I
hold it to be, there are many delightful things to be said and done.  Yet
his object will not always be to explain the work of art.  He may seek
rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker,
that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike.
Ordinary people are ‘terribly at ease in Zion.’  They propose to walk arm
in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, ‘Why
should we read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton?  We can read
the plays and the poems.  That is enough.’  But an appreciation of Milton
is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate
scholarship.  And he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must
understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance
and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he
must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between
the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school
of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and
Marlowe’s greater son; he must know the materials that were at
Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the
conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the
literary criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons;
he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed
verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the
connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of
the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan
London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true
position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.
The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as
a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by
one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name.  Rather, he will
look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify,
and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of
men.

And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens.  The critic will indeed be
an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the sense of one who
simply repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips
to say.  For, just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign
nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life
that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by
intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the
personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality
enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes,
the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.

ERNEST.  I would have said that personality would have been a disturbing
element.

GILBERT.  No; it is an element of revelation.  If you wish to understand
others you must intensify your own individualism.

ERNEST.  What, then, is the result?

GILBERT.  I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by definite
example.  It seems to me that, while the literary critic stands of course
first, as having the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material,
each of the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned to it.  The actor is
a critic of the drama.  He shows the poet’s work under new conditions,
and by a method special to himself.  He takes the written word, and
action, gesture and voice become the media of revelation.  The singer or
the player on lute and viol is the critic of music.  The etcher of a
picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of
a new material its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the
relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the
critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from
that of the work itself, and the employment of a new material is a
critical as well as a creative element.  Sculpture, too, has its critic,
who may be either the carver of a gem, as he was in Greek days, or some
painter like Mantegna, who sought to reproduce on canvas the beauty of
plastic line and the symphonic dignity of processional bas-relief.  And
in the case of all these creative critics of art it is evident that
personality is an absolute essential for any real interpretation.  When
Rubinstein plays to us the _Sonata Appassionata_ of Beethoven, he gives
us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven
absolutely—Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and
made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality.  When a
great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience.  His own
individuality becomes a vital part of the interpretation.  People
sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not
Shakespeare’s; and this fallacy—for it is a fallacy—is, I regret to say,
repeated by that charming and graceful writer who has lately deserted the
turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the
author of _Obiter Dicta_.  In point of fact, there is no such thing as
Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a
work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life.  There
are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.

ERNEST.  As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?

GILBERT.  Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is only to
personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of the two
comes right interpretative criticism.

ERNEST.  The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will give no
less than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows?

GILBERT.  He will be always showing us the work of art in some new
relation to our age.  He will always be reminding us that great works of
art are living things—are, in fact, the only things that live.  So much,
indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that, as civilisation
progresses and we become more highly organised, the elect spirits of each
age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less
interested in actual life, and _will seek to gain their impressions
almost entirely from what Art has touched_.  For life is terribly
deficient in form.  Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the
wrong people.  There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its
tragedies seem to culminate in farce.  One is always wounded when one
approaches it.  Things last either too long, or not long enough.

ERNEST.  Poor life!  Poor human life!  Are you not even touched by the
tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.

GILBERT.  Too quickly touched by them, I fear.  For when one looks back
upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled
with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a
dream and an illusion.  What are the unreal things, but the passions that
once burned one like fire?  What are the incredible things, but the
things that one has faithfully believed?  What are the improbable things?
The things that one has done oneself.  No, Ernest; life cheats us with
shadows, like a puppet-master.  We ask it for pleasure.  It gives it to
us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train.  We come across some
noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our
days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place,
and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we
find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at
the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and
so madly kissed.

ERNEST.  Life then is a failure?

GILBERT.  From the artistic point of view, certainly.  And the chief
thing that makes life a failure from this artistic point of view is the
thing that lends to life its sordid security, the fact that one can never
repeat exactly the same emotion.  How different it is in the world of
Art!  On a shelf of the bookcase behind you stands the _Divine Comedy_,
and I know that, if I open it at a certain place, I shall be filled with
a fierce hatred of some one who has never wronged me, or stirred by a
great love for some one whom I shall never see.  There is no mood or
passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her
secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are going to be.  We
can choose our day and select our hour.  We can say to ourselves,
‘To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley
of the shadow of death,’ and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood,
and the Mantuan stands by our side.  We pass through the gate of the
legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the horror of
another world.  The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces and their
cowls of gilded lead.  Out of the ceaseless winds that drive them, the
carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh, and the
glutton lashed by the rain.  We break the withered branches from the tree
in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds
with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries.  Out of a
horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame
the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of
that bed becomes ours for a moment.  Through the dim purple air fly those
who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit
of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the
semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false
coin.  He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry and gaping
lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water
that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentine hills.  Sinon,
the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him.  He smites him in the face, and
they wrangle.  We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil
chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by giants where great
Nimrod blows his horn.  Terrible things are in store for us, and we go to
meet them in Dante’s raiment and with Dante’s heart.  We traverse the
marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat through the slimy
waves.  He calls to us, and we reject him.  When we hear the voice of his
agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our scorn.
We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, in which traitors stick like
straws in glass.  Our foot strikes against the head of Bocca.  He will
not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming
skull.  Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his face that he may weep
a little.  We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered his
dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from him;
such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who more base than he who has
mercy for the condemned of God?  In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man
who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew Cæsar.  We
tremble, and come forth to re-behold the stars.

In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holy mountain rises
into the pure light of day.  There is peace for us, and for those who for
a season abide in it there is some peace also, though, pale from the
poison of the Maremma, Madonna Pia passes before us, and Ismene, with the
sorrow of earth still lingering about her, is there.  Soul after soul
makes us share in some repentance or some joy.  He whom the mourning of
his widow taught to drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us of Nella
praying in her lonely bed, and we learn from the mouth of Buonconte how a
single tear may save a dying sinner from the fiend.  Sordello, that noble
and disdainful Lombard, eyes us from afar like a couchant lion.  When he
learns that Virgil is one of Mantua’s citizens, he falls upon his neck,
and when he learns that he is the singer of Rome he falls before his
feet.  In that valley whose grass and flowers are fairer than cleft
emerald and Indian wood, and brighter than scarlet and silver, they are
singing who in the world were kings; but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg
do not move to the music of the others, and Philip of France beats his
breast and Henry of England sits alone.  On and on we go, climbing the
marvellous stair, and the stars become larger than their wont, and the
song of the kings grows faint, and at length we reach the seven trees of
gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise.  In a griffin-drawn chariot
appears one whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiled in white, and
mantled in green, and robed in a vesture that is coloured like live fire.
The ancient flame wakes within us.  Our blood quickens through terrible
pulses.  We recognise her.  It is Beatrice, the woman we have worshipped.
The ice congealed about our heart melts.  Wild tears of anguish break
from us, and we bow our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have
sinned.  When we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of
the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress
of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven.  Out of that eternal
pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us.  Her beauty
troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing that falls through
water, she passes away, we gaze after her with wistful eyes.  The sweet
planet of Venus is full of lovers.  Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the
lady of Sordello’s heart, is there, and Folco, the passionate singer of
Provence, who in sorrow for Azalais forsook the world, and the
Canaanitish harlot whose soul was the first that Christ redeemed.
Joachim of Flora stands in the sun, and, in the sun, Aquinas recounts the
story of St. Francis and Bonaventure the story of St. Dominic.  Through
the burning rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida approaches.  He tells us of the
arrow that is shot from the bow of exile, and how salt tastes the bread
of another, and how steep are the stairs in the house of a stranger.  In
Saturn the soul sings not, and even she who guides us dare not smile.  On
a ladder of gold the flames rise and fall.  At last, we see the pageant
of the Mystical Rose.  Beatrice fixes her eyes upon the face of God to
turn them not again.  The beatific vision is granted to us; we know the
Love that moves the sun and all the stars.

Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make ourselves one
with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altar with him, and share
his rapture and his scorn.  And if we grow tired of an antique time, and
desire to realise our own age in all its weariness and sin, are there not
books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us
live in a score of shameful years?  Close to your hand lies a little
volume, bound in some Nile-green skin that has been powdered with gilded
nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory.  It is the book that Gautier
loved, it is Baudelaire’s masterpiece.  Open it at that sad madrigal that
begins

    Que m’importe que tu sois sage?
    Sois belle! et sois triste!

and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never
worshipped joy.  Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures himself, let
its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts, and you
will become for a moment what he was who wrote it; nay, not for a moment
only, but for many barren moonlit nights and sunless sterile days will a
despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you, and the misery
of another gnaw your heart away.  Read the whole book, suffer it to tell
even one of its secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to
know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent of
strange crimes of which it is guiltless, and to make atonement for
terrible pleasures that it has never known.  And then, when you are tired
of these flowers of evil, turn to the flowers that grow in the garden of
Perdita, and in their dew-drenched chalices cool your fevered brow, and
let their loveliness heal and restore your soul; or wake from his
forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and bid the lover of Heliodore
make you music, for he too has flowers in his song, red pomegranate
blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh, ringed daffodils and dark blue
hyacinths, and marjoram and crinkled ox-eyes.  Dear to him was the
perfume of the bean-field at evening, and dear to him the odorous
eared-spikenard that grew on the Syrian hills, and the fresh green thyme,
the wine-cup’s charm.  The feet of his love as she walked in the garden
were like lilies set upon lilies.  Softer than sleep-laden poppy petals
were her lips, softer than violets and as scented.  The flame-like crocus
sprang from the grass to look at her.  For her the slim narcissus stored
the cool rain; and for her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that
wooed them.  And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus was as fair
as she was.

It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion.  We sicken with the
same maladies as the poets, and the singer lends us his pain.  Dead lips
have their message for us, and hearts that have fallen to dust can
communicate their joy.  We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine, and
we follow Manon Lescaut over the whole world.  Ours is the love-madness
of the Tyrian, and the terror of Orestes is ours also.  There is no
passion that we cannot feel, no pleasure that we may not gratify, and we
can choose the time of our initiation and the time of our freedom also.
Life!  Life!  Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our
experience.  It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its
utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which
is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.
It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the
meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.

ERNEST.  Must we go, then, to Art for everything?

GILBERT.  For everything.  Because Art does not hurt us.  The tears that
we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is
the function of Art to awaken.  We weep, but we are not wounded.  We
grieve, but our grief is not bitter.  In the actual life of man, sorrow,
as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection.  But the
sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may
quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks.  It is through
Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through
Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid
perils of actual existence.  This results not merely from the fact that
nothing that one can imagine is worth doing, and that one can imagine
everything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, like the
forces of the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy.  One can
feel so much, and no more.  And how can it matter with what pleasure life
tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one’s
soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed
one has found the true secret of joy, and wept away one’s tears over
their deaths who, like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio, can never
die?

ERNEST.  Stop a moment.  It seems to me that in everything that you have
said there is something radically immoral.

GILBERT.  All art is immoral.

ERNEST.  All art?

GILBERT.  Yes.  For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art,
and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that
practical organisation of life that we call society.  Society, which is
the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of
human energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy
stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, of each of its
citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour to the
common weal, and toil and travail that the day’s work may be done.
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.  The
beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its
eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this
dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one
at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public,
and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas
‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilised
being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.  They mean well, no
doubt, these honest beaming folk.  Perhaps that is the reason why they
are so excessively tedious.  But some one should teach them that while,
in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any
citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the
proper occupation of man.

ERNEST.  Contemplation?

GILBERT.  Contemplation.  I said to you some time ago that it was far
more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.  Let me say to you
now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world,
the most difficult and the most intellectual.  To Plato, with his passion
for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.  To Aristotle, with his
passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also.  It was
to this that the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of
mediæval days.

ERNEST.  We exist, then, to do nothing?

GILBERT.  It is to do nothing that the elect exist.  Action is limited
and relative.  Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at
ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.  But we who are
born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too
critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite
pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life
itself.  To us the _città divina_ is colourless, and the _fruitio Dei_
without meaning.  Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and
religious ecstasy is out of date.  The world through which the Academic
philosopher becomes ‘the spectator of all time and of all existence’ is
not really an ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas.  When we
enter it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought.  The courts
of the city of God are not open to us now.  Its gates are guarded by
Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our nature
is most divine.  It is enough that our fathers believed.  They have
exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.  Their legacy to us is the
scepticism of which they were afraid.  Had they put it into words, it
might not live within us as thought.  No, Ernest, no.  We cannot go back
to the saint.  There is far more to be learned from the sinner.  We
cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray.  Who,
as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single
rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high?
What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision
of Böhme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg’s
blinded eyes?  Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one
daffodil of the field, far less than the meanest of the visible arts,
for, just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind
expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the
lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike.
To the æsthetic temperament the vague is always repellent.  The Greeks
were a nation of artists, because they were spared the sense of the
infinite.  Like Aristotle, like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire
the concrete, and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.

ERNEST.  What then do you propose?

GILBERT.  It seems to me that with the development of the critical spirit
we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective
life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true
meaning of the word modernity.  For he to whom the present is the only
thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.  To
realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has
preceded it and that has contributed to its making.  To know anything
about oneself one must know all about others.  There must be no mood with
which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make
alive.  Is this impossible?  I think not.  By revealing to us the
absolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self-imposed
and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the scientific principle
of Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative
life.  It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to
act.  It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written
upon the wall the prophecy of our doom.  We may not watch it, for it is
within us.  We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.
It is Nemesis without her mask.  It is the last of the Fates, and the
most terrible.  It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know.

And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has robbed
energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the subjective
sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow,
with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange temperaments and subtle
susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference,
complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other,
and passions that war against themselves.  And so, it is not our own life
that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within
us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual,
created for our service, and entering into us for our joy.  It is
something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has
made its abode.  It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of
curious sins.  It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter.  It
fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we
cannot gain.  One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us.  It can lead
us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of
familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the
perfection of our development.  It can help us to leave the age in which
we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled
from their air.  It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and
to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are.  The
pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain.  Theocritus
blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd.  In
the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armour
of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen.  We have whispered the
secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained
raiment of Villon have put our shame into song.  We can see the dawn
through Shelley’s eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows
amorous of our youth.  Ours is the anguish of Atys, and ours the weak
rage and noble sorrows of the Dane.  Do you think that it is the
imagination that enables us to live these countless lives?  Yes: it is
the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity.  It is
simply concentrated race-experience.

ERNEST.  But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?

GILBERT.  The culture that this transmission of racial experiences makes
possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may
be said to be one with it.  For who is the true critic but he who bears
within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations,
and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure?
And who the true man of culture, if not he who by fine scholarship and
fastidious rejection has made instinct self-conscious and intelligent,
and can separate the work that has distinction from the work that has it
not, and so by contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets
of style and school, and understands their meanings, and listens to their
voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the
real root, as it is the real flower, of the intellectual life, and thus
attains to intellectual clarity, and, having learned ‘the best that is
known and thought in the world,’ lives—it is not fanciful to say so—with
those who are the Immortals.

Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not
_doing_ but _being_, and not _being_ merely, but _becoming_—that is what
the critical spirit can give us.  The gods live thus: either brooding
over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus
fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragicomedy of
the world that they have made.  We, too, might live like them, and set
ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man
and nature afford.  We might make ourselves spiritual by detaching
ourselves from action, and become perfect by the rejection of energy.  It
has often seemed to me that Browning felt something of this.  Shakespeare
hurls Hamlet into active life, and makes him realise his mission by
effort.  Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised
his mission by thought.  Incident and event were to him unreal or
unmeaning.  He made the soul the protagonist of life’s tragedy, and
looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play.  To us, at any
rate, the ΒΙΟΣ ΘΕΩΡΗΤΙΚΟΣ is the true ideal.  From the high tower of
Thought we can look out at the world.  Calm, and self-centred, and
complete, the æsthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a
venture can pierce between the joints of his harness.  He at least is
safe.  He has discovered how to live.

Is such a mode of life immoral?  Yes: all the arts are immoral, except
those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite to
action of evil or of good.  For action of every kind belongs to the
sphere of ethics.  The aim of art is simply to create a mood.  Is such a
mode of life unpractical?  Ah! it is not so easy to be unpractical as the
ignorant Philistine imagines.  It were well for England if it were so.
There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as
this country of ours.  With us, Thought is degraded by its constant
association with practice.  Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of
actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor
narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant
section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously
claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any
one thing?  Each of the professions means a prejudice.  The necessity for
a career forces every one to take sides.  We live in the age of the
overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so
industrious that they become absolutely stupid.  And, harsh though it may
sound, I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom.  The
sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

ERNEST.  A charming doctrine, Gilbert.

GILBERT.  I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minor merit
of being true.  That the desire to do good to others produces a plentiful
crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which it is the cause.  The
prig is a very interesting psychological study, and though of all poses a
moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is
something.  It is a formal recognition of the importance of treating life
from a definite and reasoned standpoint.  That Humanitarian Sympathy wars
against Nature, by securing the survival of the failure, may make the man
of science loathe its facile virtues.  The political economist may cry
out against it for putting the improvident on the same level as the
provident, and so robbing life of the strongest, because most sordid,
incentive to industry.  But, in the eyes of the thinker, the real harm
that emotional sympathy does is that it limits knowledge, and so prevents
us from solving any single social problem.  We are trying at present to
stave off the coming crisis, the coming revolution as my friends the
Fabianists call it, by means of doles and alms.  Well, when the
revolution or crisis arrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall
know nothing.  And so, Ernest, let us not be deceived.  England will
never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions.  There is
more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for
so fair a land.  What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the
moment, and think beyond the day.  Those who try to lead the people can
only do so by following the mob.  It is through the voice of one crying
in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of beholding,
and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, there is something that
is egotistic.  If you think so, do not say so.  It takes a thoroughly
selfish age, like our own, to deify self-sacrifice.  It takes a
thoroughly grasping age, such as that in which we live, to set above the
fine intellectual virtues, those shallow and emotional virtues that are
an immediate practical benefit to itself.  They miss their aim, too,
these philanthropists and sentimentalists of our day, who are always
chattering to one about one’s duty to one’s neighbour.  For the
development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and
where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard
is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost.  If you meet at dinner
a man who has spent his life in educating himself—a rare type in our
time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met with—you rise from
table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched
and sanctified your days.  But oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man
who has spent his life in trying to educate others!  What a dreadful
experience that is!  How appalling is that ignorance which is the
inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions!  How limited
in range the creature’s mind proves to be!  How it wearies us, and must
weary himself, with its endless repetitions and sickly reiteration!  How
lacking it is in any element of intellectual growth!  In what a vicious
circle it always moves!

ERNEST.  You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert.  Have you had this
dreadful experience, as you call it, lately?

GILBERT.  Few of us escape it. People say that the schoolmaster is
abroad.  I wish to goodness he were.  But the type of which, after all,
he is only one, and certainly the least important, of the
representatives, seems to me to be really dominating our lives; and just
as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the
nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in
trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate
himself.  No, Ernest, self-culture is the true ideal of man.  Goethe saw
it, and the immediate debt that we owe to Goethe is greater than the debt
we owe to any man since Greek days.  The Greeks saw it, and have left us,
as their legacy to modern thought, the conception of the contemplative
life as well as the critical method by which alone can that life be truly
realised.  It was the one thing that made the Renaissance great, and gave
us Humanism.  It is the one thing that could make our own age great also;
for the real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or
unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes,
or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the
fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment,
still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years to come, unpopular
with the crowd.  It is so easy for people to have sympathy with
suffering.  It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.
Indeed, so little do ordinary people understand what thought really is,
that they seem to imagine that, when they have said that a theory is
dangerous, they have pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such
theories that have any true intellectual value.  An idea that is not
dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

ERNEST.  Gilbert, you bewilder me.  You have told me that all art is, in
its essence, immoral.  Are you going to tell me now that all thought is,
in its essence, dangerous?

GILBERT.  Yes, in the practical sphere it is so.  The security of society
lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability
of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any
intelligence amongst its members.  The great majority of people being
fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that
splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage
so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any
question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a
rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act
in accordance with the dictates of reason.  But let us turn from the
practical sphere, and say no more about the wicked philanthropists, who,
indeed, may well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of the
Yellow River Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such well-meaning
and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous virtue
that there is in man.  They are a wearisome topic, and I am anxious to
get back to the sphere in which criticism is free.

ERNEST.  The sphere of the intellect?

GILBERT.  Yes.  You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in his
own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be merely of
value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some new mood
of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps
greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of a fresh medium of
expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect.  Well, you
seemed to be a little sceptical about the theory.  But perhaps I wronged
you?

ERNEST.  I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit that I feel
very strongly that such work as you describe the critic producing—and
creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to be—is, of necessity,
purely subjective, whereas the greatest work is objective always,
objective and impersonal.

GILBERT.  The difference between objective and subjective work is one of
external form merely.  It is accidental, not essential.  All artistic
creation is absolutely subjective.  The very landscape that Corot looked
at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind; and those great
figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to possess an actual
existence of their own, apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned
them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves, not
as they thought they were, but as they thought they were not; and by such
thinking came in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to
be.  For out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation
what in the creator was not.  Nay, I would say that the more objective a
creation appears to be, the more subjective it really is.  Shakespeare
might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of
London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each
other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out
of his passion.  They were elements of his nature to which he gave
visible form, impulses that stirred so strongly within him that he had,
as it were perforce, to suffer them to realise their energy, not on the
lower plane of actual life, where they would have been trammelled and
constrained and so made imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art
where Love can indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can
stab the eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave,
and make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one’s father’s spirit,
beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete steel from misty
wall to wall.  Action being limited would have left Shakespeare
unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it is because he did nothing
that he has been able to achieve everything, so it is because he never
speaks to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us
absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament far more
completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets, even, in which he
bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart.  Yes, the objective
form is the most subjective in matter.  Man is least himself when he
talks in his own person.  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the
truth.

ERNEST.  The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form, will
necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the artist, who
has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.

GILBERT.  Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if he recognises that
each mode of criticism is, in its highest development, simply a mood, and
that we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.
The æsthetic critic, constant only to the principle of beauty in all
things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions, winning from the
various schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before
foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods.
What other people call one’s past has, no doubt, everything to do with
them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself.  The man who regards
his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to.
When one has found expression for a mood, one has done with it.  You
laugh; but believe me it is so.  Yesterday it was Realism that charmed
one.  One gained from it that _nouveau frisson_ which it was its aim to
produce.  One analysed it, explained it, and wearied of it.  At sunset
came the _Luministe_ in painting, and the _Symboliste_ in poetry, and the
spirit of mediævalism, that spirit which belongs not to time but to
temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia, and stirred us for a moment
by the terrible fascination of pain.  To-day the cry is for Romance, and
already the leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple
hill-tops walks Beauty with slim gilded feet.  The old modes of creation
linger, of course.  The artists reproduce either themselves or each
other, with wearisome iteration.  But Criticism is always moving on, and
the critic is always developing.

Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of
expression.  The method of the drama is his, as well as the method of the
epos.  He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking to Marvel on
the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord Brooke
discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks; or adopt narration, as
Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary Portraits—is not that
the title of the book?—presents to us, under the fanciful guise of
fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of criticism, one on the painter
Watteau, another on the philosophy of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan
elements of the early Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the
most suggestive, on the source of that Aufklärung, that enlightening
which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to which our own culture
owes so great a debt.  Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary form
which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from
Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, the
creative critics of the world have always employed, can never lose for
the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.  By its means he can
both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and
reality to every mood.  By its means he can exhibit the object from each
point of view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us
things, gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect
that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the
central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more
completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller
completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the
delicate charm of chance.

ERNEST.  By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and
convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.

GILBERT.  Ah! it is so easy to convert others.  It is so difficult to
convert oneself.  To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak
through lips different from one’s own.  To know the truth one must
imagine myriads of falsehoods.  For what is Truth?  In matters of
religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived.  In matters of
science, it is the ultimate sensation.  In matters of art, it is one’s
last mood.  And you see now, Ernest, that the critic has at his disposal
as many objective forms of expression as the artist has.  Ruskin put his
criticism into imaginative prose, and is superb in his changes and
contradictions; and Browning put his into blank verse and made painter
and poet yield us their secret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater
fiction, and Rossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of
Giorgione and the design of Ingres, and his own design and colour also,
feeling, with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that
the ultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium that of
words.

ERNEST.  Well, now that you have settled that the critic has at his
disposal all objective forms, I wish you would tell me what are the
qualities that should characterise the true critic.

GILBERT.  What would you say they were?

ERNEST.  Well, I should say that a critic should above all things be
fair.

GILBERT.  Ah! not fair.  A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of
the word.  It is only about things that do not interest one that one can
give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an
unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.  The man who sees both
sides of a question, is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.  Art is
a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by
emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine
moods and exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a
scientific formula or a theological dogma.  It is to the soul that Art
speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of
the body.  One should, of course, have no prejudices; but, as a great
Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago, it is one’s business in such
matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences one ceases to
be fair.  It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire
all schools of Art.  No; fairness is not one of the qualities of the true
critic.  It is not even a condition of criticism.  Each form of Art with
which we come in contact dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of
every other form.  We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in
question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret.  For the
time, we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed.

ERNEST.  The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will he not?

GILBERT.  Rational?  There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest.  One is
to dislike it.  The other, to like it rationally.  For Art, as Plato saw,
and not without regret, creates in listener and spectator a form of
divine madness.  It does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others
inspired.  Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals.  If one loves
Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and
against such love, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out.
There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty.  It is too splendid to
be sane.  Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always
seem to the world to be pure visionaries.

ERNEST.  Well, at least, the critic will be sincere.

GILBERT.  A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it
is absolutely fatal.  The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in
his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in
every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited
to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped mode of looking at
things.  He will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand
different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh
points of view.  Through constant change, and through constant change
alone, he will find his true unity.  He will not consent to be the slave
of his own opinions.  For what is mind but motion in the intellectual
sphere?  The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.  You
must not be frightened by word, Ernest.  What people call insincerity is
simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

ERNEST.  I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.

GILBERT.  Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity and
fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least on the borderland of
morals, and the first condition of criticism is that the critic should be
able to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are
absolutely distinct and separate.  When they are confused, Chaos has come
again.  They are too often confused in England now, and though our modern
Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their
extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment.  It
is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find
expression.  I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of
modern journalism.  By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps
us in touch with the ignorance of the community.  By carefully
chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what
very little importance such events really are.  By invariably discussing
the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for
culture, and what are not.  But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to
write articles upon modern art.  When it does this it stultifies itself.
And yet Tartuffe’s articles and Chadband’s notes do this good, at least.
They serve to show how extremely limited is the area over which ethics,
and ethical considerations, can claim to exercise influence.  Science is
out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.
Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things
beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.  To morals belong the lower and
less intellectual spheres.  However, let these mouthing Puritans pass;
they have their comic side.  Who can help laughing when an ordinary
journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal
of the artist?  Some limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be
placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers.  For they give
us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life.  They chronicle, with
degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the
conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details
of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.  But the
artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet transforms them into
shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows
their colour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical import
also, and builds out of them a world more real than reality itself, and
of loftier and more noble import—who shall set limits to him?  Not the
apostles of that new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity ‘writ
large.’  Not the apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine
of the hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly.  The mere suggestion
is ridiculous.  Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed to the
discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the true critic.

ERNEST.  And what are they?  Tell me yourself.

GILBERT.  Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic—a
temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various
impressions that beauty gives us.  Under what conditions, and by what
means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not
discuss at present.  It is sufficient to note that it exists, and that
there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above
them, separate from the reason and of nobler import, separate from the
soul and of equal value—a sense that leads some to create, and others,
the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely.  But to be purified
and made perfect, this sense requires some form of exquisite environment.
Without this it starves, or is dulled.  You remember that lovely passage
in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with
what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings, telling us
how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds,
so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the
reception of the beauty that is spiritual.  Insensibly, and without
knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of beauty which,
as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education.
By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temperament as
will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to
the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine
instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveliness.
Ultimately, in its due course, this taste is to become critical and
self-conscious, but at first it is to exist purely as a cultivated
instinct, and ‘he who has received this true culture of the inner man
will with clear and certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in
art or nature, and with a taste that cannot err, while he praises, and
finds his pleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and so
becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now in
the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why’:
and so, when, later on, the critical and self-conscious spirit develops
in him, he ‘will recognise and salute it as a friend with whom his
education has made him long familiar.’  I need hardly say, Ernest, how
far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the
smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one
ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of
beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the
development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of
the critical spirit.

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the
dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter
in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice
singing in Waynfleete’s chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the
strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to
a finer gold the tower’s gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church
staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling’s shadowy fans, or pass through the
sculptured gateway of Laud’s building in the College of St. John.  Nor is
it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed
and trained and perfected.  All over England there is a Renaissance of
the decorative Arts.  Ugliness has had its day.  Even in the houses of
the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are not rich have
been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in.  Caliban, poor noisy
Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to make mows at a thing, the
thing ceases to exist.  But if he mocks no longer, it is because he has
been met with mockery, swifter and keener than his own, and for a moment
has been bitterly schooled into that silence which should seal for ever
his uncouth distorted lips.  What has been done up to now, has been
chiefly in the clearing of the way.  It is always more difficult to
destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is
vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage
but also contempt.  Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure, done.
We have got rid of what was bad.  We have now to make what is beautiful.
And though the mission of the æsthetic movement is to lure people to
contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet, as the creative instinct is
strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt who leads in art, there is no
reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not become
almost as mighty in its way as was that new birth of Art that woke many
centuries ago in the cities of Italy.

Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the
decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that teach
us.  Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at.  At least,
some of them are.  But they are quite impossible to live with; they are
too clever, too assertive, too intellectual.  Their meaning is too
obvious, and their method too clearly defined.  One exhausts what they
have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as
one’s relations.  I am very fond of the work of many of the Impressionist
painters of Paris and London.  Subtlety and distinction have not yet left
the school.  Some of their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one
of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier’s immortal _Symphonie en Blanc
Majeur_, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have
suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.
For a class that welcomes the incompetent with sympathetic eagerness, and
that confuses the bizarre with the beautiful, and vulgarity with truth,
they are extremely accomplished.  They can do etchings that have the
brilliancy of epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes, and
as for their portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them, no
one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm which
belongs to works of pure fiction.  But even the Impressionists, earnest
and industrious as they are, will not do.  I like them.  Their white
keynote, with its variations in lilac, was an era in colour.  Though the
moment does not make the man, the moment certainly makes the
Impressionist, and for the moment in art, and the ‘moment’s monument,’ as
Rossetti phrased it, what may not be said?  They are suggestive also.  If
they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least given
great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may
have all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to
be ever sensible.  Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it
were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the illiterate, and
are always prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their
unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by a
vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and
only modest thing about them.  One tires, at the end, of the work of
individuals whose individuality is always noisy, and generally
uninteresting.  There is far more to be said in favour of that newer
school at Paris, the _Archaicistes_, as they call themselves, who,
refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather, do not
find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the
imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour, and
rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see,
try to see something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual
and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as
far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic
purpose.  They, at any rate, work under those decorative conditions that
each art requires for its perfection, and have sufficient æsthetic
instinct to regret those sordid and stupid limitations of absolute
modernity of form which have proved the ruin of so many of the
Impressionists.  Still, the art that is frankly decorative is the art to
live with.  It is, of all our visible arts, the one art that creates in
us both mood and temperament.  Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and
unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand
different ways.  The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of
lines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind.  The repetitions of
pattern give us rest.  The marvels of design stir the imagination.  In
the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements
of culture.  Nor is this all.  By its deliberate rejection of Nature as
the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary
painter, decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the reception of
true imaginative work, but develops in it that sense of form which is the
basis of creative no less than of critical achievement.  For the real
artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to
thought and passion.  He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to
himself, ‘I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,’
but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain
modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is
to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete.  From
time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet,
because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has ‘nothing to say.’
But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result
would be tedious.  It is just because he has no new message, that he can
do beautiful work.  He gains his inspiration from form, and from form
purely, as an artist should.  A real passion would ruin him.  Whatever
actually occurs is spoiled for art.  All bad poetry springs from genuine
feeling.  To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be
inartistic.

ERNEST.  I wonder do you really believe what you say?

GILBERT.  Why should you wonder?  It is not merely in art that the body
is the soul.  In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of things.
The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Plato tells us, both
rhythm and harmony into the mind.  Forms are the food of faith, cried
Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that make us admire and
know the man.  He was right, though he may not have known how terribly
right he was.  The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational,
but because they are repeated.  Yes: Form is everything.  It is the
secret of life.  Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to
you.  Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy.  Do you
wish to love?  Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning
from which the world fancies that they spring.  Have you a grief that
corrodes your heart?  Steep yourself in the Language of grief, learn its
utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that
mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, which is the
birth of passion, is also the death of pain.  And so, to return to the
sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not merely the critical
temperament, but also the æsthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that
reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty.  Start with
the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be
revealed to you, and remember that in criticism, as in creation,
temperament is everything, and that it is, not by the time of their
production, but by the temperaments to which they appeal, that the
schools of art should be historically grouped.

ERNEST.  Your theory of education is delightful.  But what influence will
your critic, brought up in these exquisite surroundings, possess?  Do you
really think that any artist is ever affected by criticism?

GILBERT.  The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own
existence.  He will represent the flawless type.  In him the culture of
the century will see itself realised.  You must not ask of him to have
any aim other than the perfecting of himself.  The demand of the
intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel itself alive.  The
critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will
concern himself not with the individual, but with the age, which he will
seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it
new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his
nobler moods.  The actual art of to-day will occupy him less than the art
of to-morrow, far less than the art of yesterday, and as for this or that
person at present toiling away, what do the industrious matter?  They do
their best, no doubt, and consequently we get the worst from them.  It is
always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.  And
besides, my dear Ernest, when a man reaches the age of forty, or becomes
a Royal Academician, or is elected a member of the Athenæum Club, or is
recognised as a popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at
suburban railway stations, one may have the amusement of exposing him,
but one cannot have the pleasure of reforming him.  And this is, I dare
say, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation is a
much more painful process than punishment, is indeed punishment in its
most aggravated and moral form—a fact which accounts for our entire
failure as a community to reclaim that interesting phenomenon who is
called the confirmed criminal.

ERNEST.  But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry, and
the painter of painting?  Each art must appeal primarily to the artist
who works in it.  His judgment will surely be the most valuable?

GILBERT.  The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic temperament.
Art does not address herself to the specialist.  Her claim is that she is
universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one.  Indeed, so far
from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really
great artist can never judge of other people’s work at all, and can
hardly, in fact, judge of his own.  That very concentration of vision
that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of
fine appreciation.  The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his
own goal.  The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around
him.  The gods are hidden from each other.  They can recognise their
worshippers.  That is all.

ERNEST.  You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty of work
different from his own.

GILBERT.  It is impossible for him to do so.  Wordsworth saw in
_Endymion_ merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his
dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth’s message, being repelled by
its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature,
could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake,
and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him.  The realism of Euripides
was hateful to Sophokles.  Those droppings of warm tears had no music for
him.  Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not understand the
method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of
Gainsborough.  Bad artists always admire each other’s work.  They call it
being large-minded and free from prejudice.  But a truly great artist
cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any
conditions other than those that he has selected.  Creation employs all
its critical faculty within its own sphere.  It may not use it in the
sphere that belongs to others.  It is exactly because a man cannot do a
thing that he is the proper judge of it.

ERNEST.  Do you really mean that?

GILBERT.  Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens, the
vision.

ERNEST.  But what about technique?  Surely each art has its separate
technique?

GILBERT.  Certainly: each art has its grammar and its materials.  There
is no mystery about either, and the incompetent can always be correct.
But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and certain, to
find their true realisation they must be touched by the imagination into
such beauty that they will seem an exception, each one of them.
Technique is really personality.  That is the reason why the artist
cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the æsthetic
critic can understand it.  To the great poet, there is only one method of
music—his own.  To the great painter, there is only one manner of
painting—that which he himself employs.  The æsthetic critic, and the
æsthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and modes.  It is to him
that Art makes her appeal.

ERNEST.  Well, I think I have put all my questions to you.  And now I
must admit—

GILBERT.  Ah! don’t say that you agree with me.  When people agree with
me I always feel that I must be wrong.

ERNEST.  In that case I certainly won’t tell you whether I agree with you
or not.  But I will put another question.  You have explained to me that
criticism is a creative art.  What future has it?

GILBERT.  It is to criticism that the future belongs.  The subject-matter
at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and
variety.  Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted the obvious.
If creation is to last at all, it can only do so on the condition of
becoming far more critical than it is at present.  The old roads and
dusty highways have been traversed too often.  Their charm has been worn
away by plodding feet, and they have lost that element of novelty or
surprise which is so essential for romance.  He who would stir us now by
fiction must either give us an entirely new background, or reveal to us
the soul of man in its innermost workings.  The first is for the moment
being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling.  As one turns over the pages of
his _Plain Tales from the Hills_, one feels as if one were seated under a
palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.  The bright
colours of the bazaars dazzle one’s eyes.  The jaded, second-rate
Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings.  The
mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism
to what he tells us.  From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is
a genius who drops his aspirates.  From the point of view of life, he is
a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy.  Mr. Kipling knows its essence
and its seriousness.  He is our first authority on the second-rate, and
has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real
works of art.  As for the second condition, we have had Browning, and
Meredith is with us.  But there is still much to be done in the sphere of
introspection.  People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid.
As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough.  We
have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all.  In one single
ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and
more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of _Le
Rouge et le Noir_, have sought to track the soul into its most secret
places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.  Still, there is a
limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it is possible that
a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal to
that creative faculty to which it seeks to supply fresh material.  I
myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed.  It springs from too
primitive, too natural an impulse.  However this may be, it is certain
that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always
diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily.
There are always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view.  The
duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world
advances.  There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it
is now.  It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of
the point at which it has arrived.

Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism.  You might just as
well have asked me the use of thought.  It is Criticism, as Arnold points
out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age.  It is
Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that makes the mind a
fine instrument.  We, in our educational system, have burdened the memory
with a load of unconnected facts, and laboriously striven to impart our
laboriously-acquired knowledge.  We teach people how to remember, we
never teach them how to grow.  It has never occurred to us to try and
develop in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and
discernment.  The Greeks did this, and when we come in contact with the
Greek critical intellect, we cannot but be conscious that, while our
subject-matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs,
theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can be
interpreted.  England has done one thing; it has invented and established
Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the
community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.  But
Wisdom has always been hidden from it.  Considered as an instrument of
thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped.  The only thing that
can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.

It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture possible.
It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a
finer essence.  Who that desires to retain any sense of form could
struggle through the monstrous multitudinous books that the world has
produced, books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls?  The
thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands
of Criticism.  Nay more, where there is no record, and history is either
lost, or was never written, Criticism can re-create the past for us from
the very smallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as the man
of science can from some tiny bone, or the mere impress of a foot upon a
rock, re-create for us the winged dragon or Titan lizard that once made
the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth out of his cave, and
make Leviathan swim once more across the startled sea.  Prehistoric
history belongs to the philological and archæological critic.  It is to
him that the origins of things are revealed.  The self-conscious deposits
of an age are nearly always misleading.  Through philological criticism
alone we know more of the centuries of which no actual record has been
preserved, than we do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls.
It can do for us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics.  It
can give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming.  It can
do for us what History cannot do.  It can tell us what man thought before
he learned how to write.  You have asked me about the influence of
Criticism.  I think I have answered that question already; but there is
this also to be said.  It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan.  The
Manchester school tried to make men realise the brotherhood of humanity,
by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace.  It sought to degrade
the wonderful world into a common market-place for the buyer and the
seller.  It addressed itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed.  War
followed upon war, and the tradesman’s creed did not prevent France and
Germany from clashing together in blood-stained battle.  There are others
of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or to the
shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics.  They have their
Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and their proposals for
unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among those who have never
read history.  But mere emotional sympathy will not do.  It is too
variable, and too closely connected with the passions; and a board of
arbitrators who, for the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived
of the power of putting their decisions into execution, will not be of
much avail.  There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and that is
Justice without her sword in her hand.  When Right is not Might, it is
Evil.

No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the greed
for gain could do so.  It is only by the cultivation of the habit of
intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to
race-prejudices.  Goethe—you will not misunderstand what I say—was a
German of the Germans.  He loved his country—no man more so.  Its people
were dear to him; and he led them.  Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon
trampled upon vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent.  ‘How can one
write songs of hatred without hating?’ he said to Eckermann, ‘and how
could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a
nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe
so great a part of my own cultivation?’  This note, sounded in the modern
world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the
cosmopolitanism of the future.  Criticism will annihilate
race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the
variety of its forms.  If we are tempted to make war upon another nation,
we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own
culture, and possibly its most important element.  As long as war is
regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.  When it is
looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.  The change will of
course be slow, and people will not be conscious of it.  They will not
say ‘We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,’ but
because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.
Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than
those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist.  It will give us
the peace that springs from understanding.

Nor is this all.  It is Criticism that, recognising no position as final,
and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or
school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its
own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it to be
unattainable.  How little we have of this temper in England, and how much
we need it!  The English mind is always in a rage.  The intellect of the
race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate
politicians or third-rate theologians.  It was reserved for a man of
science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of
which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect.  The author
of the _Origin of Species_ had, at any rate, the philosophic temper.  If
one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can
but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne.  We
are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.
Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown
amongst us.  People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful,
but the stupid, who are our shame.  There is no sin except stupidity.

ERNEST.  Ah! what an antinomian you are!

GILBERT.  The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always.
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously
quite easy.  It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a
certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for
middle-class respectability.  Æsthetics are higher than ethics.  They
belong to a more spiritual sphere.  To discern the beauty of a thing is
the finest point to which we can arrive.  Even a colour-sense is more
important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right
and wrong.  Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious
civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to
natural selection.  Ethics, like natural selection, make existence
possible.  Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and
wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and
change.  And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to
that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those
to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the
ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the
soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being
an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a
richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought,
acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the
uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile.  Is this dangerous?  Yes;
it is dangerous—all ideas, as I told you, are so.  But the night wearies,
and the light flickers in the lamp.  One more thing I cannot help saying
to you.  You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing.  The
nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of
the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of
Nature, the other the critic of the books of God.  Not to recognise this
is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress
of the world.  Creation is always behind the age.  It is Criticism that
leads us.  The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.

ERNEST.  And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this spirit
possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?

GILBERT.  Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet pensive
Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and amaranth are
blooming, he will sit contented ‘in that deep, motionless quiet which
mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.’  He will look out upon the world
and know its secret.  By contact with divine things he will become
divine.  His will be the perfect life, and his only.

ERNEST.  You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert.  You
have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do
it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the
world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought
dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the
highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the
artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do a
thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is
unfair, insincere, and not rational.  My friend, you are a dreamer.

GILBERT.  Yes: I am a dreamer.  For a dreamer is one who can only find
his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before
the rest of the world.

ERNEST.  His punishment?

GILBERT.  And his reward.  But, see, it is dawn already.  Draw back the
curtains and open the windows wide.  How cool the morning air is!
Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver.  A faint purple
mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple.
It is too late to sleep.  Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the
roses.  Come!  I am tired of thought.




THE TRUTH OF MASKS
A NOTE ON ILLUSION


IN many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made on
that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian
revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics
that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes of
his actors, and that, could he see Mrs. Langtry’s production of _Antony
and Cleopatra_, he would probably say that the play, and the play only,
is the thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella.  While,
as regards any historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article
in the _Nineteenth Century_, has laid it down as a dogma of art that
archæology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of
Shakespeare’s plays, and the attempt to introduce it one of the stupidest
pedantries of an age of prigs.

Lord Lytton’s position I shall examine later on; but, as regards the
theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about the
costume-wardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to study Shakespeare’s
method will see that there is absolutely no dramatist of the French,
English, or Athenian stage who relies so much for his illusionist effects
on the dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself.

Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty of
costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques and dances,
purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye; and we have
still his stage-directions for the three great processions in _Henry the
Eighth_, directions which are characterised by the most extraordinary
elaborateness of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in
Anne Boleyn’s hair.  Indeed it would be quite easy for a modern manager
to reproduce these pageants absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed;
and so accurate were they that one of the court officials of the time,
writing an account of the last performance of the play at the Globe
Theatre to a friend, actually complains of their realistic character,
notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of the Garter in
the robes and insignia of the order as being calculated to bring ridicule
on the real ceremonies; much in the same spirit in which the French
Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful actor, M.
Christian, from appearing in uniform, on the plea that it was prejudicial
to the glory of the army that a colonel should be caricatured.  And
elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English
stage under Shakespeare’s influence was attacked by the contemporary
critics, not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic
tendencies of realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are
always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare
appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to
poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing
certain dramatic effects.  Many of his plays, such as _Measure for
Measure_, _Twelfth Night_, _The Two Gentleman of Verona_, _All’s Well
that Ends Well_, _Cymbeline_, and others, depend for their illusion on
the character of the various dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the
delightful scene in _Henry the Sixth_, on the modern miracles of healing
by faith, loses all its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and
the _dénoûment_ of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ hinges on the colour of
Anne Page’s gown.  As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises the
instances are almost numberless.  Posthumus hides his passion under a
peasant’s garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot’s rags; Portia wears
the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired in ‘all points as a
man’; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen to the Youth Fidele;
Jessica flees from her father’s house in boy’s dress, and Julia ties up
her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry
the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim;
Prince Hal and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits, and then
in white aprons and leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as
for Falstaff, does he not come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as
Herne the Hunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?

Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of
intensifying dramatic situation less numerous.  After slaughter of
Duncan, Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep; Timon
ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richard flatters the
London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and, as soon as he
has stepped in blood to the throne, marches through the streets in crown
and George and Garter; the climax of _The Tempest_ is reached when
Prospero, throwing off his enchanter’s robes, sends Ariel for his hat and
rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in
_Hamlet_ changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects; and
as for Juliet, a modern playwright would probably have laid her out in
her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare
arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault
‘a feasting presence full of light,’ turns the tomb into a bridal
chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo’s speech of the triumph
of Beauty over Death.

Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo’s
stockings, the pattern on a wife’s handkerchief, the sleeve of a young
soldier, and a fashionable woman’s bonnets, become in Shakespeare’s hands
points of actual dramatic importance, and by some of them the action of
the play in question is conditioned absolutely.  Many other dramatists
have availed themselves of costume as a method of expressing directly to
the audience the character of a person on his entrance, though hardly so
brilliantly as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles,
whose dress, by the way, only an archæologist can understand; the fun of
a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of
shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of fine
clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups,
may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always
played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but
nobody from the mere details of apparel and adornment has ever drawn such
irony of contrast, such immediate and tragic effect, such pity and such
pathos, as Shakespeare himself.  Armed cap-à-pie, the dead King stalks on
the battlements of Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark;
Shylock’s Jewish gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded
and embittered nature writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of
no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert—

    Have you the heart? when your head did but ache,
    I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
    (The best I had, a princess wrought it me)
    And I did never ask it you again;

and Orlando’s blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre note in that
exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feeling that
underlies Rosalind’s fanciful wit and wilful jesting.

    Last night ’twas on my arm; I kissed it;
    I hope it be not gone to tell my lord
    That I kiss aught but he,

says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already on its
way to Rome to rob her of her husband’s faith; the little Prince passing
to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle’s girdle; Duncan sends a
ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own murder, and the ring of
Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant into a wife’s comedy.  The great
rebel York dies with a paper crown on his head; Hamlet’s black suit is a
kind of colour-motive in the piece, like the mourning of the Chimène in
the _Cid_; and the climax of Antony’s speech is the production of Cæsar’s
cloak:—

             I remember
    The first time ever Cæsar put it on.
    ’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,
    The day he overcame the Nervii:—
    Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
    See what a rent the envious Casca made:
    Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . .
    Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
    Our Cæsar’s vesture wounded?

The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as pathetic
as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of Lear’s wandering on
the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic attire; and when
Cloten, stung by the taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her
husband’s raiment, arrays himself in that husband’s very garb to work
upon her the deed of shame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of
modern French realism, nothing even in _Thérèse Raquin_, that masterpiece
of horror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with
this strange scene in _Cymbeline_.

In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are those
suggested by costume.  Rosalind’s

    Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet
    and hose in my disposition?

Constance’s

    Grief fills the place of my absent child,
    Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth—

    Ah! cut my lace asunder!—

are only a few of the many examples one might quote.  One of the finest
effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the last act of
_Lear_, tearing the plume from Kent’s cap and applying it to Cordelia’s
lips when he came to the line,

                        This feather stirs; she lives!

Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked, I
remember, some fur from his archæologically-incorrect ermine for the same
business; but Salvini’s was the finer effect of the two, as well as the
truer.  And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last act of _Richard the
Third_ have not, I am sure, forgotten how much the agony and terror of
his dream was intensified, by contrast, through the calm and quiet that
preceded it, and the delivery of such lines as

    What, is my beaver easier than it was?
    And all my armour laid into my tent?
    Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy—

lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the last
words which Richard’s mother called after him as he was marching to
Bosworth:—

    Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,
    Which in the day of battle tire thee more
    Than all the complete armour that thou wear’st.

As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it is to
be remarked that, while he more than once complains of the smallness of
the stage on which he has to produce big historical plays, and of the
want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many effective open-air
incidents, he always writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a most
elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors taking
pains about their make-up.  Even now it is difficult to produce such a
play as the _Comedy of Errors_; and to the picturesque accident of Miss
Ellen Terry’s brother resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing
_Twelfth Night_ adequately performed.  Indeed, to put any play of
Shakespeare’s on the stage, absolutely as he himself wished it to be
done, requires the services of a good property-man, a clever wig-maker, a
costumier with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, a master of
the methods of making-up, a fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an
artist to direct personally the whole production.  For he is most careful
to tell us the dress and appearance of each character.  ‘Racine abhorre
la réalité,’ says Auguste Vacquerie somewhere; ‘il ne daigne pas
s’occuper de son costume.  Si l’on s’en rapportait aux indications du
poète, Agamemnon serait vêtu d’un sceptre et Achille d’une épée.’  But
with Shakespeare it is very different.  He gives us directions about the
costumes of Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in _Macbeth_, and
the apothecary in _Romeo and Juliet_, several elaborate descriptions of
his fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb in which
Petruchio is to be married.  Rosalind, he tells us, is tall, and is to
carry a spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller, and is to paint her
face brown so as to look sunburnt.  The children who play at fairies in
Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white and green—a compliment, by the
way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite colours they were—and in white,
with green garlands and gilded vizors, the angels are to come to
Katherine in Kimbolton.  Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished
from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his
boots.  The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her
husband in mourning beside her.  The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of
the Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are
all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue.  We know the
patterns on the Dauphin’s armour and the Pucelle’s sword, the crest on
Warwick’s helmet and the colour of Bardolph’s nose.  Portia has golden
hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew
Aguecheek’s hair hangs like flax on a distaff, and won’t curl at all.
Some of the characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some
hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to blacken their faces.
Lear has a white beard, Hamlet’s father a grizzled, and Benedick is to
shave his in the course of the play.  Indeed, on the subject of stage
beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate; tells us of the many different
colours in use, and gives a hint to actors always to see that their own
are properly tied on.  There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats, and
of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque of
Russians, and a classical masque; several immortal scenes over a weaver
in an ass’s head, a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes the
Lord Mayor of London to quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband
and his wife’s milliner about the slashing of a sleeve.

As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms he
makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at the
ridiculous size of the ladies’ bonnets, and the many descriptions of the
_mundus muliebris_, from the long of Autolycus in the _Winter’s Tale_
down to the account of the Duchess of Milan’s gown in _Much Ado About
Nothing_, they are far too numerous to quote; though it may be worth
while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to
be found in Lear’s scene with Edgar—a passage which has the advantage of
brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing
metaphysics of _Sartor Resartus_.  But I think that from what I have
already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much interested
in costume.  I do not mean in that shallow sense by which it has been
concluded from his knowledge of deeds and daffodils that he was the
Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan age; but that he saw that
costume could be made at once impressive of a certain effect on the
audience and expressive of certain types of character, and is one of the
essential factors of the means which a true illusionist has at his
disposal.  Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard was of as much
value as Juliet’s loveliness; he sets the serge of the radical beside the
silks of the lord, and sees the stage effects to be got from each: he has
as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth
of gold, and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.

The difficulty Ducis felt about translating _Othello_ in consequence of
the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his
attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate ‘Le bandeau!
le bandeau!’ may be taken as an example of the difference between _la
tragédie philosophique_ and the drama of real life; and the introduction
for the first time of the word _mouchoir_ at the Théâtre Français was an
era in that romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and
M. Zola the _enfant terrible_, just as the classicism of the earlier part
of the century was emphasised by Talma’s refusal to play Greek heroes any
longer in a powdered periwig—one of the many instances, by the way, of
that desire for archæological accuracy in dress which has distinguished
the great actors of our age.

In criticising the importance given to money in _La Comédie Humaine_,
Théophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero
in fiction, _le héros métallique_.  Of Shakespeare it may be said he was
the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may
depend on a crinoline.

The burning of the Globe Theatre—an event due, by the way, to the results
of the passion for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare’s
stage-management—has unfortunately robbed us of many important documents;
but in the inventory, still in existence, of the costume-wardrobe of a
London theatre in Shakespeare’s time, there are mentioned particular
costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns, friars, and fools;
green coats for Robin Hood’s men, and a green gown for Maid Marian; a
white and gold doublet for Henry the Fifth, and a robe for Longshanks;
besides surplices, copes, damask gowns, gowns of cloth of gold and of
cloth of silver, taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet coats, satin coats,
frieze coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather, red suits,
grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe ‘for to goo invisibell,’ which
seems inexpensive at £3, 10s., and four incomparable fardingales—all of
which show a desire to give every character an appropriate dress.  There
are also entries of Spanish, Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets,
lances, painted shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of
costumes for Turkish Janissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and
goddesses of Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archæological
research on the part of the manager of the theatre.  It is true that
there is a mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the _donnée_ of the
play was after the Fall.

Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare will see that
archæology was one of its special characteristics.  After that revival of
the classical forms of architecture which was one of the notes of the
Renaissance, and the printing at Venice and elsewhere of the masterpieces
of Greek and Latin literature, had come naturally an interest in the
ornamentation and costume of the antique world.  Nor was it for the
learning that they could acquire, but rather for the loveliness that they
might create, that the artists studied these things.  The curious objects
that were being constantly brought to light by excavations were not left
to moulder in a museum, for the contemplation of a callous curator, and
the _ennui_ of a policeman bored by the absence of crime.  They were used
as motives for the production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful
merely, but also strange.

Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way
came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name ‘Julia,
daughter of Claudius.’  On opening the coffer they found within its
marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age,
preserved by the embalmer’s skill from corruption and the decay of time.
Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curling
gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet
departed.  Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the centre of a
new cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at
the wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the
secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judæa’s rough
and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by night,
and in secret buried.  Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the
less valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the
antique world.  Archæology to them was not a mere science for the
antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of
antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new
wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn.  From the
pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna’s ‘Triumph of Cæsar,’ and the
service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit
can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts—the arts
of arrested movement—but its influence was to be seen also in the great
Græco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts
of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the
citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that
chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so
important that large prints were made of them and published—a fact which
is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such kind.

And this use of archæology in shows, so far from being a bit of priggish
pedantry, is in every way legitimate and beautiful.  For the stage is not
merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but is also the return of art
to life.  Sometimes in an archæological novel the use of strange and
obsolete terms seems to hide the reality beneath the learning, and I dare
say that many of the readers of _Notre Dame de Paris_ have been much
puzzled over the meaning of such expressions as _la casaque à mahoitres_,
_les voulgiers_, _le gallimard taché d’encre_, _les craaquiniers_, and
the like; but with the stage how different it is!  The ancient world
wakes from its sleep, and history moves as a pageant before our eyes,
without obliging us to have recourse to a dictionary or an encyclopædia
for the perfection of our enjoyment.  Indeed, there is not the slightest
necessity that the public should know the authorities for the mounting of
any piece.  From such materials, for instance, as the disk of Theodosius,
materials with which the majority of people are probably not very
familiar, Mr. E. W. Godwin, one of the most artistic spirits of this
century in England, created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of
_Claudian_, and showed us the life of Byzantium in the fourth century,
not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts, not by a novel which
requires a glossary to explain it, but by the visible presentation before
us of all the glory of that great town.  And while the costumes were true
to the smallest points of colour and design, yet the details were not
assigned that abnormal importance which they must necessarily be given in
a piecemeal lecture, but were subordinated to the rules of lofty
composition and the unity of artistic effect.  Mr. Symonds, speaking of
that great picture of Mantegna’s, now in Hampton Court, says that the
artist has converted an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of
line.  The same could have been said with equal justice of Mr. Godwin’s
scene.  Only the foolish called it pedantry, only those who would neither
look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play being killed by its
paint.  It was in reality a scene not merely perfect in its
picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also, getting rid of any
necessity for tedious descriptions, and showing us, by the colour and
character of Claudian’s dress, and the dress of his attendants, the whole
nature and life of the man, from what school of philosophy he affected,
down to what horses he backed on the turf.

And indeed archæology is only really delightful when transfused into some
form of art.  I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious
scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lemprière’s Dictionary is
of far more value to us than Professor Max Müller’s treatment of the same
mythology as a disease of language.  Better _Endymion_ than any theory,
however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic
among adjectives!  And who does not feel that the chief glory of
Piranesi’s book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?  Art, and art only, can make archæology
beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most
vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of
actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.  But the sixteenth
century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio
also.  Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress
of its neighbours.  Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the
amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary.
At the beginning of the century the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, with its two
thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
was over seventeen editions were published of Munster’s _Cosmography_.
Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of
Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well
illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the
hand of Titian.

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their
knowledge.  The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased
commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic
missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various
forms of contemporary dress.  After the departure from England, for
instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of
Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the
strange attire of their visitors.  Later on London saw, perhaps too
often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came
envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an
important influence on English costume.

And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress, or the dress
of foreign nations; there was also a good deal of research, amongst
theatrical people especially, into the ancient costume of England itself:
and when Shakespeare, in the prologue to one of his plays, expresses his
regret at being unable to produce helmets of the period, he is speaking
as an Elizabethan manager and not merely as an Elizabethan poet.  At
Cambridge, for instance, during his day, a play of _Richard The Third_
was performed, in which the actors were attired in real dresses of the
time, procured from the great collection of historical costume in the
Tower, which was always open to the inspection of managers, and sometimes
placed at their disposal.  And I cannot help thinking that this
performance must have been far more artistic, as regards costume, than
Garrick’s mounting of Shakespeare’s own play on the subject, in which he
himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress, and everybody else in the
costume of the time of George the Third, Richmond especially being much
admired in the uniform of a young guardsman.

For what is the use to the stage of that archæology which has so
strangely terrified the critics, but that it, and it alone, can give us
the architecture and apparel suitable to the time in which the action of
the play passes?  It enables us to see a Greek dressed like a Greek, and
an Italian like an Italian; to enjoy the arcades of Venice and the
balconies of Verona; and, if the play deals with any of the great eras in
our country’s history, to contemplate the age in its proper attire, and
the king in his habit as he lived.  And I wonder, by the way, what Lord
Lytton would have said some time ago, at the Princess’s Theatre, had the
curtain risen on his father’s Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair,
attired in a flowing wig and a flowered dressing-gown, a costume which in
the last century was considered peculiarly appropriate to an antique
Roman!  For in those halcyon days of the drama no archæology troubled the
stage, or distressed the critics, and our inartistic grandfathers sat
peaceably in a stifling atmosphere of anachronisms, and beheld with the
calm complacency of the age of prose an Iachimo in powder and patches, a
Lear in lace ruffles, and a Lady Macbeth in a large crinoline.  I can
understand archæology being attacked on the ground of its excessive
realism, but to attack it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the
mark.  However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as
well speak disrespectfully of the equator.  For archæology, being a
science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply.  Its value depends
entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it.  We look to
the archæologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the
first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama.
This should be determined by the general spirit of the play, more than by
any actual historical references which may occur in it.  Most _Hamlets_ I
have seen were placed far too early.  _Hamlet_ is essentially a scholar
of the Revival of Learning; and if the allusion to the recent invasion of
England by the Danes puts it back to the ninth century, the use of foils
brings it down much later.  Once, however, that the date has been fixed,
then the archæologist is to supply us with the facts which the artist is
to convert into effects.

It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves show us
that Shakespeare was indifferent to historical accuracy, and a great deal
of capital has been made out of Hector’s indiscreet quotation from
Aristotle.  Upon the other hand, the anachronisms are really few in
number, and not very important, and, had Shakespeare’s attention been
drawn to them by a brother artist, he would probably have corrected them.
For, though they can hardly be called blemishes, they are certainly not
the great beauties of his work; or, at least, if they are, their
anachronistic charm cannot be emphasised unless the play is accurately
mounted according to its proper date.  In looking at Shakespeare’s plays
as a whole, however, what is really remarkable is their extraordinary
fidelity as regards his personages and his plots.  Many of his _dramatis
personæ_ are people who had actually existed, and some of them might have
been seen in real life by a portion of his audience.  Indeed the most
violent attack that was made on Shakespeare in his time was for his
supposed caricature of Lord Cobham.  As for his plots, Shakespeare
constantly draws them either from authentic history, or from the old
ballads and traditions which served as history to the Elizabethan public,
and which even now no scientific historian would dismiss as absolutely
untrue.  And not merely did he select fact instead of fancy as the basis
of much of his imaginative work, but he always gives to each play the
general character, the social atmosphere in a word, of the age in
question.  Stupidity he recognises as being one of the permanent
characteristics of all European civilisations; so he sees no difference
between a London mob of his own day and a Roman mob of pagan days,
between a silly watchman in Messina and a silly Justice of the Peace in
Windsor.  But when he deals with higher characters, with those exceptions
of each age which are so fine that they become its types, he gives them
absolutely the stamp and seal of their time.  Virgilia is one of those
Roman wives on whose tomb was written ‘Domi mansit, lanam fecit,’ as
surely as Juliet is the romantic girl of the Renaissance.  He is even
true to the characteristics of race.  Hamlet has all the imagination and
irresolution of the Northern nations, and the Princess Katharine is as
entirely French as the heroine of _Divorçons_.  Harry the Fifth is a pure
Englishman, and Othello a true Moor.

Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from the
fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it is wonderful how careful he is
to have his facts perfectly right—indeed he follows Holinshed with
curious fidelity.  The incessant wars between France and England are
described with extraordinary accuracy down to the names of the besieged
towns, the ports of landing and embarkation, the sites and dates of the
battles, the titles of the commanders on each side, and the lists of the
killed and wounded.  And as regards the Civil Wars of the Roses we have
many elaborate genealogies of the seven sons of Edward the Third; the
claims of the rival Houses of York and Lancaster to the throne are
discussed at length; and if the English aristocracy will not read
Shakespeare as a poet, they should certainly read him as a sort of early
Peerage.  There is hardly a single title in the Upper House, with the
exception of course of the uninteresting titles assumed by the law lords,
which does not appear in Shakespeare along with many details of family
history, creditable and discreditable.  Indeed if it be really necessary
that the School Board children should know all about the Wars of the
Roses, they could learn their lessons just as well out of Shakespeare as
out of shilling primers, and learn them, I need not say, far more
pleasurably.  Even in Shakespeare’s own day this use of his plays was
recognised.  ‘The historical plays teach history to those who cannot read
it in the chronicles,’ says Heywood in a tract about the stage, and yet I
am sure that sixteenth-century chronicles were much more delightful
reading than nineteenth-century primers are.

Of course the æsthetic value of Shakespeare’s plays does not, in the
slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth, and Truth is
independent of facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure.
But still Shakespeare’s use of facts is a most interesting part of his
method of work, and shows us his attitude towards the stage, and his
relations to the great art of illusion.  Indeed he would have been very
much surprised at any one classing his plays with ‘fairy tales,’ as Lord
Lytton does; for one of his aims was to create for England a national
historical drama, which should deal with incidents with which the public
was well acquainted, and with heroes that lived in the memory of a
people.  Patriotism, I need hardly say, is not a necessary quality of
art; but it means, for the artist, the substitution of a universal for an
individual feeling, and for the public the presentation of a work of art
in a most attractive and popular form.  It is worth noticing that
Shakespeare’s first and last successes were both historical plays.

It may be asked, what has this to do with Shakespeare’s attitude towards
costume?  I answer that a dramatist who laid such stress on historical
accuracy of fact would have welcomed historical accuracy of costume as a
most important adjunct to his illusionist method.  And I have no
hesitation in saying that he did so.  The reference to helmets of the
period in the prologue to _Henry the Fifth_ may be considered fanciful,
though Shakespeare must have often seen

             The very casque
    That did affright the air at Agincourt,

where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey, along with
the saddle of that ‘imp of fame,’ and the dinted shield with its torn
blue velvet lining and its tarnished lilies of gold; but the use of
military tabards in _Henry the Sixth_ is a bit of pure archæology, as
they were not worn in the sixteenth century; and the King’s own tabard, I
may mention, was still suspended over his tomb in St. George’s Chapel,
Windsor, in Shakespeare’s day.  For, up to the time of the unfortunate
triumph of the Philistines in 1645, the chapels and cathedrals of England
were the great national museums of archæology, and in them were kept the
armour and attire of the heroes of English history.  A good deal was of
course preserved in the Tower, and even in Elizabeth’s day tourists were
brought there to see such curious relics of the past as Charles Brandon’s
huge lance, which is still, I believe, the admiration of our country
visitors; but the cathedrals and churches were, as a rule, selected as
the most suitable shrines for the reception of the historic antiquities.
Canterbury can still show us the helm of the Black Prince, Westminster
the robes of our kings, and in old St. Paul’s the very banner that had
waved on Bosworth field was hung up by Richmond himself.

In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London, he saw the apparel
and appurtenances of past ages, and it is impossible to doubt that he
made use of his opportunities.  The employment of lance and shield, for
instance, in actual warfare, which is so frequent in his plays, is drawn
from archæology, and not from the military accoutrements of his day; and
his general use of armour in battle was not a characteristic of his age,
a time when it was rapidly disappearing before firearms.  Again, the
crest on Warwick’s helmet, of which such a point is made in _Henry the
Sixth_, is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century play when crests
were generally worn, but would not have been so in a play of
Shakespeare’s own time, when feathers and plumes had taken their place—a
fashion which, as he tells us in _Henry the Eighth_, was borrowed from
France.  For the historical plays, then, we may be sure that archæology
was employed, and as for the others I feel certain that it was the case
also.  The appearance of Jupiter on his eagle, thunderbolt in hand, of
Juno with her peacocks, and of Iris with her many-coloured bow; the
Amazon masque and the masque of the Five Worthies, may all be regarded as
archæological; and the vision which Posthumus sees in prison of Sicilius
Leonatus—‘an old man, attired like a warrior, leading an ancient
matron’—is clearly so.  Of the ‘Athenian dress’ by which Lysander is
distinguished from Oberon I have already spoken; but one of the most
marked instances is in the case of the dress of Coriolanus, for which
Shakespeare goes directly to Plutarch.  That historian, in his Life of
the great Roman, tells us of the oak-wreath with which Caius Marcius was
crowned, and of the curious kind of dress in which, according to ancient
fashion, he had to canvass his electors; and on both of these points he
enters into long disquisitions, investigating the origin and meaning of
the old customs.  Shakespeare, in the spirit of the true artist, accepts
the facts of the antiquarian and converts them into dramatic and
picturesque effects: indeed the gown of humility, the ‘woolvish gown,’ as
Shakespeare calls it, is the central note of the play.  There are other
cases I might quote, but this one is quite sufficient for my purpose; and
it is evident from it at any rate that, in mounting a play in the
accurate costume of the time, according to the best authorities, we are
carrying out Shakespeare’s own wishes and method.

Even if it were not so, there is no more reason that we should continue
any imperfections which may be supposed to have characterised
Shakespeare’s stage mounting than that we should have Juliet played by a
young man, or give up the advantage of changeable scenery.  A great work
of dramatic art should not merely be made expressive of modern passion by
means of the actor, but should be presented to us in the form most
suitable to the modern spirit.  Racine produced his Roman plays in Louis
Quatorze dress on a stage crowded with spectators; but we require
different conditions for the enjoyment of his art.  Perfect accuracy of
detail, for the sake of perfect illusion, is necessary for us.  What we
have to see is that the details are not allowed to usurp the principal
place.  They must be subordinate always to the general motive of the
play.  But subordination in art does not mean disregard of truth; it
means conversion of fact into effect, and assigning to each detail its
proper relative value

    ‘Les petits détails d’histoire et de vie domestique (says Hugo)
    doivent être scrupuleusement étudiés et reproduits par le poète, mais
    uniquement comme des moyens d’accroître la réalité de l’ensemble, et
    de faire pénétrer jusque dans les coins les plus obscurs de l’œuvre
    cette vie générale et puissante au milieu de laquelle les personnages
    sont plus vrais, et les catastrophes, par conséqueut, plus
    poignantes.  Tout doit être subordonné à ce but.  L’Homme sur le
    premier plan, le reste au fond.’

This passage is interesting as coming from the first great French
dramatist who employed archæology on the stage, and whose plays, though
absolutely correct in detail, are known to all for their passion, not for
their pedantry—for their life, not for their learning.  It is true that
he has made certain concessions in the case of the employment of curious
or strange expressions.  Ruy Blas talks of M, de Priego as ‘sujet du roi’
instead of ‘noble du roi,’ and Angelo Malipieri speaks of ‘la croix
rouge’ instead of ‘la croix de gueules.’  But they are concessions made
to the public, or rather to a section of it.  ‘J’en offre ici toute mes
excuses aux spectateurs intelligents,’ he says in a note to one of the
plays; ‘espérons qu’un jour un seigneur vénitien pourra dire tout
bonnement sans péril son blason sur le théâtre.  C’est un progrès qui
viendra.’  And, though the description of the crest is not couched in
accurate language, still the crest itself was accurately right.  It may,
of course, be said that the public do not notice these things; upon the
other hand, it should be remembered that Art has no other aim but her own
perfection, and proceeds simply by her own laws, and that the play which
Hamlet describes as being caviare to the general is a play he highly
praises.  Besides, in England, at any rate, the public have undergone a
transformation; there is far more appreciation of beauty now than there
was a few years ago; and though they may not be familiar with the
authorities and archæological data for what is shown to them, still they
enjoy whatever loveliness they look at.  And this is the important thing.
Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a
microscope.  Archæological accuracy is merely a condition of illusionist
stage effect; it is not its quality.  And Lord Lytton’s proposal that the
dresses should merely be beautiful without being accurate is founded on a
misapprehension of the nature of costume, and of its value on the stage.
This value is twofold, picturesque and dramatic; the former depends on
the colour of the dress, the latter on its design and character.  But so
interwoven are the two that, whenever in our own day historical accuracy
has been disregarded, and the various dresses in a play taken from
different ages, the result has been that the stage has been turned into
that chaos of costume, that caricature of the centuries, the Fancy Dress
Ball, to the entire ruin of all dramatic and picturesque effect.  For the
dresses of one age do not artistically harmonise with the dresses of
another: and, as far as dramatic value goes, to confuse the costumes is
to confuse the play.  Costume is a growth, an evolution, and a most
important, perhaps the most important, sign of the manners, customs and
mode of life of each century.  The Puritan dislike of colour, adornment
and grace in apparel was part of the great revolt of the middle classes
against Beauty in the seventeenth century.  A historian who disregarded
it would give us a most inaccurate picture of the time, and a dramatist
who did not avail himself of it would miss a most vital element in
producing an illusionist effect.  The effeminacy of dress that
characterised the reign of Richard the Second was a constant theme of
contemporary authors.  Shakespeare, writing two hundred years after,
makes the king’s fondness for gay apparel and foreign fashions a point in
the play, from John of Gaunt’s reproaches down to Richard’s own speech in
the third act on his deposition from the throne.  And that Shakespeare
examined Richard’s tomb in Westminster Abbey seems to me certain from
York’s speech:—

    See, see, King Richard doth himself appear
    As doth the blushing discontented sun
    From out the fiery portal of the east,
    When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
    To dim his glory.

For we can still discern on the King’s robe his favourite badge—the sun
issuing from a cloud.  In fact, in every age the social conditions are so
exemplified in costume, that to produce a sixteenth-century play in
fourteenth-century attire, or _vice versa_, would make the performance
seem unreal because untrue.  And, valuable as beauty of effect on the
stage is, the highest beauty is not merely comparable with absolute
accuracy of detail, but really dependent on it.  To invent, an entirely
new costume is almost impossible except in burlesque or extravaganza, and
as for combining the dress of different centuries into one, the
experiment would be dangerous, and Shakespeare’s opinion of the artistic
value of such a medley may be gathered from his incessant satire of the
Elizabethan dandies for imagining that they were well dressed because
they got their doublets in Italy, their hats in Germany, and their hose
in France.  And it should be noted that the most lovely scenes that have
been produced on our stage have been those that have been characterised
by perfect accuracy, such as Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft’s eighteenth-century
revivals at the Haymarket, Mr. Irying’s superb production of _Much Ado
About Nothing_, and Mr. Barrett’s _Claudian_.  Besides, and this is
perhaps the most complete answer to Lord Lytton’s theory, it must be
remembered that neither in costume nor in dialogue is beauty the
dramatist’s primary aim at all.  The true dramatist aims first at what is
characteristic, and no more desires that all his personages should be
beautifully attired than he desires that they should all have beautiful
natures or speak beautiful English.  The true dramatist, in fact, shows
us life under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life.  The
Greek dress was the loveliest dress the world has ever seen, and the
English dress of the last century one of the most monstrous; yet we
cannot costume a play by Sheridan as we would costume a play by
Sophokles.  For, as Polonius says in his excellent lecture, a lecture to
which I am glad to have the opportunity of expressing my obligations, one
of the first qualities of apparel is its expressiveness.  And the
affected style of dress in the last century was the natural
characteristic of a society of affected manners and affected
conversation—a characteristic which the realistic dramatist will highly
value down to the smallest detail of accuracy, and the materials for
which he can get only from archæology.

But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate; it must be also
appropriate to the stature and appearance of the actor, and to his
supposed condition, as well as to his necessary action in the play.  In
Mr. Hare’s production of _As You Like It_ at the St. James’s Theatre, for
instance, the whole point of Orlando’s complaint that he is brought up
like a peasant, and not like a gentleman, was spoiled by the gorgeousness
of his dress, and the splendid apparel worn by the banished Duke and his
friends was quite out of place.  Mr. Lewis Wingfield’s explanation that
the sumptuary laws of the period necessitated their doing so, is, I am
afraid, hardly sufficient.  Outlaws, lurking in a forest and living by
the chase, are not very likely to care much about ordinances of dress.
They were probably attired like Robin Hood’s men, to whom, indeed, they
are compared in the course of the play.  And that their dress was not
that of wealthy noblemen may be seen by Orlando’s words when he breaks in
upon them.  He mistakes them for robbers, and is amazed to find that they
answer him in courteous and gentle terms.  Lady Archibald Campbell’s
production, under Mr. E. W. Godwin’s direction, of the same play in
Coombe Wood was, as regards mounting, far more artistic.  At least it
seemed so to me.  The Duke and his companions were dressed in serge
tunics, leathern jerkins, high boots and gauntlets, and wore bycocket
hats and hoods.  And as they were playing in a real forest, they found, I
am sure, their dresses extremely convenient.  To every character in the
play was given a perfectly appropriate attire, and the brown and green of
their costumes harmonised exquisitely with the ferns through which they
wandered, the trees beneath which they lay, and the lovely English
landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players.  The perfect naturalness
of the scene was due to the absolute accuracy and appropriateness of
everything that was worn.  Nor could archæology have been put to a
severer test, or come out of it more triumphantly.  The whole production
showed once for all that, unless a dress is archæologically correct, and
artistically appropriate, it always looks unreal, unnatural, and
theatrical in the sense of artificial.

Nor, again, is it enough that there should be accurate and appropriate
costumes of beautiful colours; there must be also beauty of colour on the
stage as a whole, and as long as the background is painted by one artist,
and the foreground figures independently designed by another, there is
the danger of a want of harmony in the scene as a picture.  For each
scene the colour-scheme should be settled as absolutely as for the
decoration of a room, and the textures which it is proposed to use should
be mixed and re-mixed in every possible combination, and what is
discordant removed.  Then, as regards the particular kinds of colours,
the stage is often too glaring, partly through the excessive use of hot,
violent reds, and partly through the costumes looking too new.
Shabbiness, which in modern life is merely the tendency of the lower
orders towards tone, is not without its artistic value, and modern
colours are often much improved by being a little faded.  Blue also is
too frequently used: it is not merely a dangerous colour to wear by
gaslight, but it is really difficult in England to get a thoroughly good
blue.  The fine Chinese blue, which we all so much admire, takes two
years to dye, and the English public will not wait so long for a colour.
Peacock blue, of course, has been employed on the stage, notably at the
Lyceum, with great advantage; but all attempts at a good light blue, or
good dark blue, which I have seen have been failures.  The value of black
is hardly appreciated; it was used effectively by Mr. Irving in _Hamlet_
as the central note of a composition, but as a tone-giving neutral its
importance is not recognised.  And this is curious, considering the
general colour of the dress of a century in which, as Baudelaire says,
‘Nous célébrons tous quelque enterrement.’  The archæologist of the
future will probably point to this age as the time when the beauty of
black was understood; but I hardly think that, as regards stage-mounting
or house decoration, it really is.  Its decorative value is, of course,
the same as that of white or gold; it can separate and harmonise colours.
In modern plays the black frock-coat of the hero becomes important in
itself, and should be given a suitable background.  But it rarely is.
Indeed the only good background for a play in modern dress which I have
ever seen was the dark grey and cream-white scene of the first act of the
_Princesse Georges_ in Mrs. Langtry’s production.  As a rule, the hero is
smothered in _bric-à-brac_ and palm-trees, lost in the gilded abyss of
Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to a mere midge in the midst of
marqueterie; whereas the background should always be kept as a
background, and colour subordinated to effect.  This, of course, can only
be done when there is one single mind directing the whole production.
The facts of art are diverse, but the essence of artistic effect is
unity.  Monarchy, Anarchy, and Republicanism may contend for the
government of nations; but a theatre should be in the power of a cultured
despot.  There may be division of labour, but there must be no division
of mind.  Whoever understands the costume of an age understands of
necessity its architecture and its surroundings also, and it is easy to
see from the chairs of a century whether it was a century of crinolines
or not.  In fact, in art there is no specialism, and a really artistic
production should bear the impress of one master, and one master only,
who not merely should design and arrange everything, but should have
complete control over the way in which each dress is to be worn.

Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of _Hernani_, absolutely
refused to call her lover ‘_Mon Lion_!’ unless she was allowed to wear a
little fashionable _toque_ then much in vogue on the Boulevards; and many
young ladies on our own stage insist to the present day on wearing stiff
starched petticoats under Greek dresses, to the entire ruin of all
delicacy of line and fold; but these wicked things should not be allowed.
And there should be far more dress rehearsals than there are now.  Actors
such as Mr. Forbes-Robertson, Mr. Conway, Mr. George Alexander, and
others, not to mention older artists, can move with ease and elegance in
the attire of any century; but there are not a few who seem dreadfully
embarrassed about their hands if they have no side pockets, and who
always wear their dresses as if they were costumes.  Costumes, of course,
they are to the designer; but dresses they should be to those that wear
them.  And it is time that a stop should be put to the idea, very
prevalent on the stage, that the Greeks and Romans always went about
bareheaded in the open air—a mistake the Elizabethan managers did not
fall into, for they gave hoods as well as gowns to their Roman senators.

More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining to the actors
that there is a form of gesture and movement that is not merely
appropriate to each style of dress, but really conditioned by it.  The
extravagant use of the arms in the eighteenth century, for instance, was
the necessary result of the large hoop, and the solemn dignity of
Burleigh owed as much to his ruff as to his reason.  Besides until an
actor is at home in his dress, he is not at home in his part.

Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistic temperament in
the audience, and producing that joy in beauty for beauty’s sake without
which the great masterpieces of art can never be understood, I will not
here speak; though it is worth while to notice how Shakespeare
appreciated that side of the question in the production of his tragedies,
acting them always by artificial light, and in a theatre hung with black;
but what I have tried to point out is that archæology is not a pedantic
method, but a method of artistic illusion, and that costume is a means of
displaying character without description, and of producing dramatic
situations and dramatic effects.  And I think it is a pity that so many
critics should have set themselves to attack one of the most important
movements on the modern stage before that movement has at all reached its
proper perfection.  That it will do so, however, I feel as certain as
that we shall require from our dramatic critics in the future higher
qualification than that they can remember Macready or have seen Benjamin
Webster; we shall require of them, indeed, that they cultivate a sense of
beauty.  _Pour être plus difficile_, _la tâche n’en est que plus
glorieuse_.  And if they will not encourage, at least they must not
oppose, a movement of which Shakespeare of all dramatists would have most
approved, for it has the illusion of truth for its method, and the
illusion of beauty for its result.  Not that I agree with everything that
I have said in this essay.  There is much with which I entirely disagree.
The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in æsthetic
criticism attitude is everything.  For in art there is no such thing as a
universal truth.  A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also
true.  And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we
can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in
art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of
contraries.  The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.






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