Intentions
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old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date.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