The
resulting
faults and weakness of what he left are obvious.
Oscar Wilde
SELECTED PROSE OF OSCAR WILDE
Contents:
Preface by Robert Ross
How They Struck a Contemporary
The Quality of George Meredith
Life in the Fallacious Model
Life the Disciple
Life the Plagiarist
The Indispensable East
The Influence of the Impressionists on Climate
An Exposure to Naturalism
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright
Wainewright at Hobart Town
Cardinal Newman and the Autobiographers
Robert Browning
The Two Supreme and Highest Arts
The Secrets of Immortality
The Critic and his Material
Dante the Living Guide
The Limitations of Genius
Wanted A New Background
Without Frontiers
The Poetry of Archaeology
The Art of Archaeology
Herod Suppliant
The Tetrarch's Remorse
The Tetrarch's Treasure
Salome anticipates Dr. Strauss
The Young King
A Coronation
The King of Spain
A Bull Fight
The Throne Room
A Protected Country
The Blackmailing of the Emperor
Covent Garden
A Letter from Miss Jane Percy to her Aunt
The Triumph of American 'Humor'
The Garden of Death
An Eton Kit-cat
Mrs. Erlynne Exercises the Prerogative of a Grandmother
Motherhood more than Marriage
The Damnable Ideal
From a Rejected Prize-essay
The Possibilities of the Useful
The Artist
The Doer of Good
The Disciple
The Master
The House of Judgment
The Teacher of Wisdom
Wilde gives directions about 'De Profundis'
Carey Street
Sorrow wears no mask
Vita Nuova
The Grand Romantic
Clapham Junction
The Broken Resolution
Domesticity at Berneval
A visit to the Pope
DEDICATION
This anthology is dedicated to Michael Lykiardopulos as a little token of
his services to English Literature in the great Russian Empire.
PREFACE
With the possible exceptions of the Greek Anthology, the "Golden
Treasury" and those which bear the name of E. V. Lucas, no selections of
poetry or prose have ever given complete satisfaction to anyone except
the compiler. But critics derive great satisfaction from pointing out
errors of omission and inclusion on the part of the anthologist, and all
of us have putatively re-arranged and re-edited even the "Golden
Treasury" in our leisure moments. In an age when "Art for Art's sake" is
an exploded doctrine, anthologies, like everything else, must have a
purpose. The purpose or object of the present volume is to afford
admirers of Wilde's work the same innocent pleasure obtainable from
similar compilations, namely that of reconstructing a selection of their
own in their mind's eye--for copyright considerations would interfere
with the materialisation of their dream.
A stray observation in an esteemed weekly periodical determined the plan
of this anthology and the choice of particular passages. The writer,
whose name has escaped me, opined that the reason the works of Pater and
Wilde were no longer read was owing to both authors having treated
English as a dead language. By a singular coincidence I had purchased
simultaneously with the newspaper a shilling copy of Pater's
"Renaissance," published by Messrs. Macmillan; and a few days afterwards
Messrs. Methuen issued at a shilling the twenty-eighth edition of "De
Profundis. " Obviously either Messrs. Macmillan and Messrs. Methuen or
the authority on dead languages must have been suffering from
hallucinations. It occurred to me that a selection of Wilde's prose
might at least rehabilitate the notorious reputation for common sense
enjoyed by all publishers, who rarely issue shilling editions of deceased
authors for mere aesthetic considerations. And I confess to a hope that
this volume may reach the eye or ear of those who have not read Wilde's
books, or of those, such as Mr. Sydney Grundy, who are irritated by the
revival of his plays and the praise accorded to his works throughout the
Continent.
Wilde's prose is distinguished by its extraordinary ease and clarity, and
by the absence--very singular in his case--of the preciosity which he
admired too much in other writers, and advocated with over-emphasis.
Perhaps that is why many of his stories and essays and plays are used as
English text-books in Russian and Scandinavian and Hungarian schools.
Artifice and affectation, often assumed to be recurrent defects in his
writings by those unacquainted with them, are comparatively rare. Wilde
once boasted in an interview that only Flaubert, Pater, Keats, and
Maeterlinck had influenced him, and then added in a characteristic way:
"But I had already gone more than half-way to meet them. " Anyone curious
as to the origin of Wilde's style and development should consult the
learned treatise {1} of Dr. Ernst Bendz, whose comprehensive treatment of
the subject renders any elucidation of mine superfluous; while nothing
can be added to Mr. Holbrook Jackson's masterly criticism {2} of Wilde
and his position in literature.
In making this selection, with the valuable assistance of Mr. Stuart
Mason, I have endeavoured to illustrate and to justify the critical
appreciations of both Dr. Bendz and Mr. Holbrook Jackson, as well as to
afford the general reader a fair idea of Wilde's variety as a prose
writer. He is more various than almost any author of the last century,
though the act of writing was always a burden to him. Some critic
acutely pointed out that poetry and prose were almost side-issues for
him. The resulting faults and weakness of what he left are obvious.
Except in the plays he has no sustained scheme of thought. Even "De
Profundis" is too desultory.
For the purpose of convenient reference I have exercised the prerogative
of a literary executor and editor by endowing with special titles some of
the pieces quoted in these pages. Though unlike one of Wilde's other
friends I cannot claim to have collaborated with him or to have assisted
him in any of his plays, I was sometimes permitted, as Wilde acknowledges
in different letters, to act in the capacity of godfather by suggesting
the actual titles by which some of his books are known to the world. I
mention the circumstance only as a precedent for my present temerity. To
compensate those who disapprove of my choice, I have included two
unpublished letters. The examples of Wilde's epistolary style, published
since his death, have been generally associated with disagreeable
subjects. Those included here will, I hope, prove a pleasant contrast.
ROBERT ROSS
HOW THEY STRUCK A CONTEMPORARY
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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
THE QUALITY OF GEORGE MEREDITH
Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by
flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except
language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an
artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in
Shakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talks about a man who is always
breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might
serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he
is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of
realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate
choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee
to Baal, and after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt
against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite
sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means
he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
wonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of
the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he
bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The
difference between such a book as M. Zola's _L'Assommoir_ and Balzac's
_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and
imaginative reality. 'All Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are
gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his
fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded
to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius. ' A steady
course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of
fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism.
One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de
Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to
rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when
I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created
life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a
value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of
his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbo_ or
_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de
Bragelonne_. --_The Decay of Lying_.
LIFE THE FALLACIOUS MODEL
Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and
pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is
the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and
asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of
her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is
absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps
between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style,
of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the
upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. That is the true
decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.
Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks
Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological. Then she
enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's external forms,
she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more
terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than
lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods,
who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.
To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language
full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence,
or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and
enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange raiment
and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its
marble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and
with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river
to Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.
History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the
dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple
truth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself
is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare
we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual
breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance
given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation.
The passages in Shakespeare--and they are many--where the language is
uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due
to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the
intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be
suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless
artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life's
natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative
medium she surrenders everything. --_The Decay of Lying_.
LIFE THE DISCIPLE
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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
LIFE THE PLAGIARIST
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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
THE INDISPENSABLE EAST
What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those
arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history of these arts
in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its
frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its
dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own
imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in
Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe
by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative
work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic
conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned
for her delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Modern
tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad
expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty
whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We
are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we
have returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets
of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane
worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have
become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured
Mahomedan once remarked to us, "You Christians are so occupied in
misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of
making an artistic application of the second. " He was perfectly right,
and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art
in is not Life but Art. --_The Decay of Lying_.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON CLIMATE
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.
The resulting faults and weakness of what he left are obvious.
Except in the plays he has no sustained scheme of thought. Even "De
Profundis" is too desultory.
For the purpose of convenient reference I have exercised the prerogative
of a literary executor and editor by endowing with special titles some of
the pieces quoted in these pages. Though unlike one of Wilde's other
friends I cannot claim to have collaborated with him or to have assisted
him in any of his plays, I was sometimes permitted, as Wilde acknowledges
in different letters, to act in the capacity of godfather by suggesting
the actual titles by which some of his books are known to the world. I
mention the circumstance only as a precedent for my present temerity. To
compensate those who disapprove of my choice, I have included two
unpublished letters. The examples of Wilde's epistolary style, published
since his death, have been generally associated with disagreeable
subjects. Those included here will, I hope, prove a pleasant contrast.
ROBERT ROSS
HOW THEY STRUCK A CONTEMPORARY
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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
THE QUALITY OF GEORGE MEREDITH
Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by
flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except
language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an
artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in
Shakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talks about a man who is always
breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might
serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he
is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of
realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate
choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee
to Baal, and after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt
against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite
sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means
he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
wonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of
the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he
bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The
difference between such a book as M. Zola's _L'Assommoir_ and Balzac's
_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and
imaginative reality. 'All Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are
gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his
fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded
to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius. ' A steady
course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of
fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism.
One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de
Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to
rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when
I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created
life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a
value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of
his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbo_ or
_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de
Bragelonne_. --_The Decay of Lying_.
LIFE THE FALLACIOUS MODEL
Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and
pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is
the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and
asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of
her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is
absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps
between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style,
of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the
upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. That is the true
decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.
Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks
Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological. Then she
enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's external forms,
she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more
terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than
lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods,
who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.
To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language
full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence,
or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and
enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange raiment
and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its
marble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and
with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river
to Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.
History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the
dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple
truth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself
is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare
we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual
breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance
given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation.
The passages in Shakespeare--and they are many--where the language is
uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due
to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the
intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be
suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless
artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life's
natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative
medium she surrenders everything. --_The Decay of Lying_.
LIFE THE DISCIPLE
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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
LIFE THE PLAGIARIST
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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
THE INDISPENSABLE EAST
What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those
arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history of these arts
in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its
frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its
dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own
imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in
Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe
by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative
work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic
conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned
for her delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Modern
tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad
expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty
whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We
are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we
have returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets
of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane
worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have
become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured
Mahomedan once remarked to us, "You Christians are so occupied in
misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of
making an artistic application of the second. " He was perfectly right,
and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art
in is not Life but Art. --_The Decay of Lying_.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON CLIMATE
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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
AN EXPOSURE OF NATURALISM
After all, what the imitative arts really give us are merely the various
styles of particular artists, or of certain schools of artists. Surely
you don't imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance
at all to the figures on mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stone
and wood carving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, or
illuminated MSS. They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with
nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance. The
Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style,
and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be
produced in the nineteenth century. No great artist ever sees things as
they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an
example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things.
Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are
presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never
understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate
self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a
picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters,
beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not
the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in
Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say,
they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary
about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no
such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming
painters {3} 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.
