Intentions
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