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 mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stone
and wood carving, or on mediaeval 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 {3} 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.--_The Decay of Lying_.