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

INTENTIONS

BY
OSCAR WILDE

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

First Published, at 1s.
net, in 1913

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

CONTENTS

p. 1THE
DECAY OF LYING:
AN OBSERVATION

A DIALOGUE. 
Persons: Cyril and
Vivian.  Scene: the Library of a
country
house in Nottinghamshire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyril.  What is the
subject?

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

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

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

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

Vivian.  For the
Retrospective Review.  I think I told you that the
elect had revived it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyril.  You will find me all
attention.

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

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

Cyril.  My dear fellow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In der Beschränkung zeigt Fsich erst der
Meister,

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

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

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

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

Cyril.  My dear boy!

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

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

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

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

Cyril.  Ahem!  Another
cigarette, please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

p. 57PEN,
PENCIL AND POISON
A STUDY IN GREEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filling the far-seen ocean with a
voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

p. 95THE
CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE
IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING

A DIALOGUE.  Part
I.  Persons: Gilbert
and Ernest.  Scene: the library of a house
in
Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.

Gilbert (at the
Piano).  My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

Ernest (looking up). 
At a capital story that I have just come across in this volume of
Reminiscences that I have found on your table.

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  My dear fellow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilbert.  And was it?

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

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

Ernest.  I did not say
that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  Ah! now you are
flippant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilbert.  Why so?

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

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

Ernest.  Independent?

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

Ernest.  But is Criticism
really a creative art?

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

Ernest.  From the soul?

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

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

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

Ernest.  But is that really
so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

p. 151THE
CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE
IMPORTANCE
OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING

A DIALOGUE: Part
II.  Persons: the same.
Scene: the same.

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

Gilbert.  Ah! don’t let
us do that.  Conversation should touch everything, but
should concentrate itself on nothing.  Let us talk about
Moral Indignation, its Cause and Cure, a subject on
which I think of writing: or about The Survival of
Thersites, as shown by the English comic papers; or about any
topic that may turn up.

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  What, then, is the
result?

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

Ernest.  As many Hamlets as
there are melancholies?

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  Life then is a
failure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilbert.  All art is
immoral.

Ernest.  All art?

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

Ernest.  Contemplation?

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

Ernest.  We exist, then, to do
nothing?

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

Ernest.  What then do you
propose?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  A charming doctrine,
Gilbert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  The sphere of the
intellect?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilbert.  What would you say
they were?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  And what are
they?  Tell me yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  Do you really mean
that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  Ah! what an
antinomian you are!

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

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

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

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

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

Ernest.  His punishment?

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

p. 221THE
TRUTH OF MASKS
A NOTE ON ILLUSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constance’s

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

and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth—

Ah! cut my lace asunder!—

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

This feather stirs; she
lives!

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

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

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

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

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

As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the
aphorisms he makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age,
particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies’ bonnets,
and the many descriptions of the mundus muliebris, from
the long of Autolycus in the Winter’s Tale down to
the account of the Duchess of Milan’s gown in Much Ado
About Nothing, they are far too numerous to quote; though it
may be worth while to remind people that the whole of the
Philosophy of Clothes is to be found in Lear’s scene with
Edgar—a passage which has the advantage of brevity and
style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing metaphysics
of Sartor Resartus.  But I think that from what I
have already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very
much interested in costume.  I do not mean in that shallow
sense by which it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds
and daffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the
Elizabethan age; but that he saw that costume could be made at
once impressive of a certain effect on the audience and
expressive of certain types of character, and is one of the
essential factors of the means which a true illusionist has at
his disposal.  Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard
was of as much value as Juliet’s loveliness; he sets the
serge of the radical beside the silks of the lord, and sees the
stage effects to be got from each: he has as much delight in
Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth of gold,
and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         The
very casque
That did affright the air at Agincourt,

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

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

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

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

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

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

For we can still discern on the King’s robe his
favourite badge—the sun issuing from a cloud.  In
fact, in every age the social conditions are so exemplified in
costume, that to produce a sixteenth-century play in
fourteenth-century attire, or vice versa, would make the
performance seem unreal because untrue.  And, valuable as
beauty of effect on the stage is, the highest beauty is not
merely comparable with absolute accuracy of detail, but really
dependent on it.  To invent, an entirely new costume is
almost impossible except in burlesque or extravaganza, and as for
combining the dress of different centuries into one, the
experiment would be dangerous, and Shakespeare’s opinion of
the artistic value of such a medley may be gathered from his
incessant satire of the Elizabethan dandies for imagining that
they were well dressed because they got their doublets in Italy,
their hats in Germany, and their hose in France.  And it
should be noted that the most lovely scenes that have been
produced on our stage have been those that have been
characterised by perfect accuracy, such as Mr. and Mrs.
Bancroft’s eighteenth-century revivals at the Haymarket,
Mr. Irying’s superb production of Much Ado About
Nothing, and Mr. Barrett’s Claudian. 
Besides, and this is perhaps the most complete answer to Lord
Lytton’s theory, it must be remembered that neither in
costume nor in dialogue is beauty the dramatist’s primary
aim at all.  The true dramatist aims first at what is
characteristic, and no more desires that all his personages
should be beautifully attired than he desires that they should
all have beautiful natures or speak beautiful English.  The
true dramatist, in fact, shows us life under the conditions of
art, not art in the form of life.  The Greek dress was the
loveliest dress the world has ever seen, and the English dress of
the last century one of the most monstrous; yet we cannot costume
a play by Sheridan as we would costume a play by Sophokles. 
For, as Polonius says in his excellent lecture, a lecture to
which I am glad to have the opportunity of expressing my
obligations, one of the first qualities of apparel is its
expressiveness.  And the affected style of dress in the last
century was the natural characteristic of a society of affected
manners and affected conversation—a characteristic which
the realistic dramatist will highly value down to the smallest
detail of accuracy, and the materials for which he can get only
from archæology.

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

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

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

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

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