Intentions
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