It is Literature that shows us the body in its
swiftness
and the soul in
its unrest.
its unrest.
Oscar Wilde
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. 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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT
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. '--_Pen, Pencil and Poison_.
WAINEWRIGHT AT HOBART TOWN
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. --_Pen, Pencil and
Poison_.
CARDINAL NEWMAN AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHERS
In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us in
the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert
and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sevigne. Whenever we come across it,
and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and
do not easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having
confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant
nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the
green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given
it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his
shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter
very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or
a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own
secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to
silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented--if that
can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual
problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot,
I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that
troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely
church at Littlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, and
worshippers are few,' will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the
yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of
that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower's sure recurrence a
prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his
days--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to
be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible. --_The Critic as
Artist_.
ROBERT BROWNING
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. --_The
Critic as Artist_.
THE TWO SUPREME AND HIGHEST ARTS
Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The
principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise
in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of the
latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can
hardly understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is that
which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated
the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material
of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of
reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying,
for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a
modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say,
with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they
were right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and the
fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower
classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to
appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is
really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek
to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even
the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of
English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of
mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the
true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect
that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have made writing a
definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate
design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a
method of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its
musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear
the critic. I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer's blindness
might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving
to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing
less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul,
but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music,
repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the
secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that are winged
with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his
blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England's great poet
owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later
verse. When Milton could no longer write he began to sing. --_The Critic
as Artist_.
THE SECRETS OF IMMORTALITY
On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green
bronze. The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the
empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on
the wine-surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text], 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. --_The Critic as Artist_.
THE CRITIC AND HIS MATERIAL
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 Critic as
Artist_.
DANTE THE LIVING GUIDE
There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who
have discovered her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are
going to be. We can choose our day and select our hour. We can say to
ourselves, 'To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through
the valley of the shadow of death,' and lo! the dawn finds us in the
obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through the
gate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the
horror of another world. The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces
and their cowls of gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless winds that drive
them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh,
and the glutton lashed by the rain. We break the withered branches from
the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig
bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries. Out
of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of
flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the
torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple
air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin,
and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body
into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner
of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry
and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of
clear water that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentine
hills. Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him. He smites him in
the face, and they wrangle. We are fascinated by their shame, and
loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by
giants where great Nimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in store
for us, and we go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart.
We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat
through the slimy waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. When we
hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the
bitterness of our scorn. We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, in
which traitors stick like straws in glass. Our foot strikes against the
head of Bocca. He will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in
handfuls from the screaming skull. Alberigo prays us to break the ice
upon his face that he may weep a little. We pledge our word to him, and
when he has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that we have
spoken, and pass from him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who
more base than he who has mercy for the condemned of God? In the jaws of
Lucifer we see the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the
men who slew Caesar. We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the
stars. --_The Critic as Artist_.
THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS
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 . . . 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. --_The Critic as Artist_.
WANTED A NEW BACKGROUND
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. --_The
Critic as Artist_.
WITHOUT FRONTIERS
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. --_The Critic as Artist_.
THE POETRY OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way
came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name 'Julia,
daughter of Claudius. ' On opening the coffer they found within its
marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age,
preserved by the embalmer's skill from corruption and the decay of time.
Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curling
gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet
departed. Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the centre of a
new cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at
the wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the
secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judaea's rough
and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by night,
and in secret buried. Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the
less valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the
antique world. Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the
antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of
antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new
wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn. From the
pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar,' and the
service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit
can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts--the arts
of arrested movement--but its influence was to be seen also in the great
Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts
of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the
citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that
chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so
important that large prints were made of them and published--a fact which
is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such
kind. --_The Truth of Masks_.
THE ART OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some
form of art. I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious
scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's Dictionary is
of far more value to us than Professor Max Muller's treatment of the same
mythology as a disease of language. Better _Endymion_ than any theory,
however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic
among adjectives! And who does not feel that the chief glory of
Piranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his
'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology
beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most
vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of
actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth
century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio
also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress
of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the
amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary. At
the beginning of the century the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, with its two
thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
was over seventeen editions were published of Munster's _Cosmography_.
Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of
Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well
illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the
hand of Titian.
Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their
knowledge. The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased
commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic
missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various
forms of contemporary dress. After the departure from England, for
instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of
Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the
strange attire of their visitors. Later on London saw, perhaps too
often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came
envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an
important influence on English costume. --_The Truth of Masks_.
HEROD SUPPLIANT
Non, non, vous ne voulez pas cela. Vous me dites cela seulement pour me
faire de la peine, parce que je vous ai regardee pendant toute la soiree.
Eh! bien, oui. Je vous ai regardee pendant toute la soiree. Votre
beaute m'a trouble. Votre beaute m'a terriblement trouble, et je vous ai
trop regardee. Mais je ne le ferai plus. Il ne faut regarder ni les
choses ni les personnes. Il ne faut regarder que dans les miroirs. Car
les miroirs ne nous montrent que des masques . . . Oh! Oh! du vin! j'ai
soif . . . Salome, Salome, soyons amis. Enfin, voyez . . . Qu'est-ce que
je voulais dire? Qu'est-ce que c'etait? Ah! je m'en souviens! . . .
Salome! Non, venez plus pres de moi. J'ai peur que vous ne m'entendiez
pas . . . Salome, vous connaissez mes paons blancs, mes beaux paons
blancs, qui se promenent dans le jardin entre les myrtes et les grands
cypres. Leurs becs sont dores, et les grains qu'ils mangent sont dores
aussi, et leurs pieds sont teints de pourpre. La pluie vient quand ils
crient, et quand ils se pavanent la lune se montre au ciel. Ils vont
deux a deux entre les cypres et les myrtes noirs et chacun a son esclave
pour le soigner. Quelquefois ils volent a travers les arbres, et
quelquefois ils couchent sur le gazon et autour de l'etang. Il n'y a pas
dans le monde d'oiseaux si merveilleux. Il n'y a aucun roi du monde qui
possede des oiseaux aussi merveilleux. Je suis sur que meme Cesar ne
possede pas d'oiseaux aussi beaux. Eh bien! je vous donnerai cinquante
de mes paons. Ils vous suivront partout, et au milieu d'eux vous serez
comme la lune dans un grand nuage blanc . . . Je vous les donnerai tous.
Je n'en ai que cent, et il n'y a aucun roi du monde qui possede des paons
comme les miens, mais je vous les donnerai tous. Seulement, il faut me
delier de ma parole et ne pas me demander ce que vous m'avez
demande. --_Salome_.
THE TETRARCH'S REMORSE
Salome, pensez a ce que vous faites. Cet homme vient peut-etre de Dieu.
Je suis sur qu'il vient de Dieu. C'est un saint homme. Le doigt de Dieu
l'a touche. Dieu a mis dans sa bouche des mots terribles. Dans le
palais, comme dans le desert, Dieu est toujours avec lui . . . Au moins,
c'est possible. On ne sait pas, mais il est possible que Dieu soit pour
lui et avec lui. Aussi peut-etre que s'il mourrait, il m'arriverait un
malheur.
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. 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. --_The Decay of Lying_.
THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT
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. '--_Pen, Pencil and Poison_.
WAINEWRIGHT AT HOBART TOWN
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. --_Pen, Pencil and
Poison_.
CARDINAL NEWMAN AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHERS
In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us in
the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert
and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sevigne. Whenever we come across it,
and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and
do not easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having
confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant
nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the
green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given
it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his
shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter
very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or
a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own
secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to
silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented--if that
can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual
problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot,
I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that
troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely
church at Littlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, and
worshippers are few,' will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the
yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of
that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower's sure recurrence a
prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his
days--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to
be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible. --_The Critic as
Artist_.
ROBERT BROWNING
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. --_The
Critic as Artist_.
THE TWO SUPREME AND HIGHEST ARTS
Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The
principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise
in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of the
latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can
hardly understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is that
which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated
the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material
of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of
reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying,
for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a
modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say,
with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they
were right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and the
fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower
classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to
appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is
really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek
to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even
the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of
English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of
mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the
true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect
that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have made writing a
definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate
design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a
method of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its
musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear
the critic. I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer's blindness
might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving
to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing
less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul,
but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music,
repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the
secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that are winged
with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his
blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England's great poet
owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later
verse. When Milton could no longer write he began to sing. --_The Critic
as Artist_.
THE SECRETS OF IMMORTALITY
On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green
bronze. The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the
empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on
the wine-surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text], 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. --_The Critic as Artist_.
THE CRITIC AND HIS MATERIAL
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 Critic as
Artist_.
DANTE THE LIVING GUIDE
There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who
have discovered her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are
going to be. We can choose our day and select our hour. We can say to
ourselves, 'To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through
the valley of the shadow of death,' and lo! the dawn finds us in the
obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through the
gate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the
horror of another world. The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces
and their cowls of gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless winds that drive
them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh,
and the glutton lashed by the rain. We break the withered branches from
the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig
bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries. Out
of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of
flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the
torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple
air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin,
and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body
into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner
of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry
and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of
clear water that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentine
hills. Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him. He smites him in
the face, and they wrangle. We are fascinated by their shame, and
loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by
giants where great Nimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in store
for us, and we go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart.
We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat
through the slimy waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. When we
hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the
bitterness of our scorn. We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, in
which traitors stick like straws in glass. Our foot strikes against the
head of Bocca. He will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in
handfuls from the screaming skull. Alberigo prays us to break the ice
upon his face that he may weep a little. We pledge our word to him, and
when he has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that we have
spoken, and pass from him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who
more base than he who has mercy for the condemned of God? In the jaws of
Lucifer we see the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the
men who slew Caesar. We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the
stars. --_The Critic as Artist_.
THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS
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 . . . 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. --_The Critic as Artist_.
WANTED A NEW BACKGROUND
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. --_The
Critic as Artist_.
WITHOUT FRONTIERS
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. --_The Critic as Artist_.
THE POETRY OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way
came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name 'Julia,
daughter of Claudius. ' On opening the coffer they found within its
marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age,
preserved by the embalmer's skill from corruption and the decay of time.
Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curling
gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet
departed. Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the centre of a
new cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at
the wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the
secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judaea's rough
and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by night,
and in secret buried. Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the
less valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the
antique world. Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the
antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of
antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new
wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn. From the
pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar,' and the
service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit
can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts--the arts
of arrested movement--but its influence was to be seen also in the great
Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts
of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the
citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that
chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so
important that large prints were made of them and published--a fact which
is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such
kind. --_The Truth of Masks_.
THE ART OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some
form of art. I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious
scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's Dictionary is
of far more value to us than Professor Max Muller's treatment of the same
mythology as a disease of language. Better _Endymion_ than any theory,
however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic
among adjectives! And who does not feel that the chief glory of
Piranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his
'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology
beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most
vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of
actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth
century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio
also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress
of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the
amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary. At
the beginning of the century the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, with its two
thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
was over seventeen editions were published of Munster's _Cosmography_.
Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of
Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well
illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the
hand of Titian.
Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their
knowledge. The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased
commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic
missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various
forms of contemporary dress. After the departure from England, for
instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of
Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the
strange attire of their visitors. Later on London saw, perhaps too
often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came
envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an
important influence on English costume. --_The Truth of Masks_.
HEROD SUPPLIANT
Non, non, vous ne voulez pas cela. Vous me dites cela seulement pour me
faire de la peine, parce que je vous ai regardee pendant toute la soiree.
Eh! bien, oui. Je vous ai regardee pendant toute la soiree. Votre
beaute m'a trouble. Votre beaute m'a terriblement trouble, et je vous ai
trop regardee. Mais je ne le ferai plus. Il ne faut regarder ni les
choses ni les personnes. Il ne faut regarder que dans les miroirs. Car
les miroirs ne nous montrent que des masques . . . Oh! Oh! du vin! j'ai
soif . . . Salome, Salome, soyons amis. Enfin, voyez . . . Qu'est-ce que
je voulais dire? Qu'est-ce que c'etait? Ah! je m'en souviens! . . .
Salome! Non, venez plus pres de moi. J'ai peur que vous ne m'entendiez
pas . . . Salome, vous connaissez mes paons blancs, mes beaux paons
blancs, qui se promenent dans le jardin entre les myrtes et les grands
cypres. Leurs becs sont dores, et les grains qu'ils mangent sont dores
aussi, et leurs pieds sont teints de pourpre. La pluie vient quand ils
crient, et quand ils se pavanent la lune se montre au ciel. Ils vont
deux a deux entre les cypres et les myrtes noirs et chacun a son esclave
pour le soigner. Quelquefois ils volent a travers les arbres, et
quelquefois ils couchent sur le gazon et autour de l'etang. Il n'y a pas
dans le monde d'oiseaux si merveilleux. Il n'y a aucun roi du monde qui
possede des oiseaux aussi merveilleux. Je suis sur que meme Cesar ne
possede pas d'oiseaux aussi beaux. Eh bien! je vous donnerai cinquante
de mes paons. Ils vous suivront partout, et au milieu d'eux vous serez
comme la lune dans un grand nuage blanc . . . Je vous les donnerai tous.
Je n'en ai que cent, et il n'y a aucun roi du monde qui possede des paons
comme les miens, mais je vous les donnerai tous. Seulement, il faut me
delier de ma parole et ne pas me demander ce que vous m'avez
demande. --_Salome_.
THE TETRARCH'S REMORSE
Salome, pensez a ce que vous faites. Cet homme vient peut-etre de Dieu.
Je suis sur qu'il vient de Dieu. C'est un saint homme. Le doigt de Dieu
l'a touche. Dieu a mis dans sa bouche des mots terribles. Dans le
palais, comme dans le desert, Dieu est toujours avec lui . . . Au moins,
c'est possible. On ne sait pas, mais il est possible que Dieu soit pour
lui et avec lui. Aussi peut-etre que s'il mourrait, il m'arriverait un
malheur.
