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.--_The Decay of Lying_.