Intentions
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