gentleman called Vivian reads aloud an article on that subject to a
slightly older and rather incredulous young gentleman called Cyril,
commenting as he reads, answering objections, and sometimes laying the
manuscript on his knees as he follows the swift-flying swallow of his
thought through the airy mazes of her joyous exercise. Vivian holds a
brief for the artist against the nature that he is supposed to imitate.
He behaves like a lawyer, first picking his opponent to pieces, lest the
jury should be prejudiced in his favour, and then proving his own case
in so far as it is possible to prove it. The dialogue is a delightful
thing in itself: it is also of the first importance to the student of
Wilde's theories of art. Under its insouciance and extravagance lie many
of the ideas that dictated his attitude as writer and as critic. Vivian
begins by opposing the comfort of a Morris chair to the discomfort of
nature's insect-ridden grass, and complains that nature is as
indifferent to her cultured critic as to cow or burdock--which is not to
be borne. He then, a little more seriously, envisages the history of art
as a long warfare between the simian instinct of imitation and the
God-like instinct of self-expression. He needs to show that fine art
does not imitate, and points out that Japanese painting, of which, at
that time, everybody was talking, does not concern itself with Japan,
and that the Japan we imagine for ourselves with the help of
willow-pattern plates and the drawings of Hokusai is no more real in one
sense and no less real in another than the slit-eyed girl of Gautier's
"Chinoiserie," who lives in a porcelain tower above the Yellow River and
the long-necked cormorants. Our ideal Japan has existed only in the
minds of the artists who saw it, and when we cross the seas to look for
it, we find nothing but a few fans and coloured lanterns. But that is
not enough. We continually see lovely things in nature, strangely like
the things we see in books and pictures. There is plagiary here, on one
side or on the other, and, with almost ecstatic courage, Vivian
announces that, so far from art holding the mirror to nature (a view
advanced by Hamlet as a proof of his insanity), nature imitates art. He
may have taken the hint from Musset, for Fortunio, in the comedy of that
name, exclaims with melancholy criticism: "Comme ce soleil couchant est
manque ce soir. Regarde moi un pen ce vallee la-bas, ces quatre ou cinq
mechants nuages qui grimpent sur cette montagne. Je faisais des paysages
comme celui-la, quand j'avais douze ans, sur la couverture de mes livres
de classe." But he made the statement in no spirit of extravagance. It
seemed to him that we observe in nature what art has taught us to see,
and he chose that way of saying so. He elaborates it delightfully, so
that people may forget he has spoken the truth. Fogs, for example, 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." Then he runs on for a few pages, illustrating these wise
saws with modern and ingenious instances of life hurrying after fiction,
reproducing the opening of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," setting an unreal
Becky Sharp beside Thackeray's creation, and going so far, indeed, as to
trip up the heels of a serial story with the sordid actuality of fact.
He discusses Zola and his no less heavy-footed disciples, who stand for
the failure of imitation and are the best proofs that the mirror cracks
when the artist holds it up to anything except himself. Cyril suggests
that Balzac was a realist, and Vivian quotes Baudelaire's saying, that
"his very scullions have genius," compares him to Holbein, and points
out that he is far more real than life. "A steady course of Balzac
reduces our living friends to shadows and our acquaintances to the
shadows of shades."
Then comes an objection to modernity of form, and some reasons for that
objection that suggest a very interesting speculation. He thinks that
Balzac's love for modernity of form prevented him from producing any
single book that can rank with the masterpieces of romantic art. And
then:--"The public imagine that, because they are interested in their
immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and
should take them as her subject matter. But the mere fact that they are
interested in these things makes them an unsuitable subject for Art. The
only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not
concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects
us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to
our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live,
it is outside the proper sphere of Art." These words seemed, in 1889, to
be both daring and precarious. The influence of philosophy is not so
immediate as is sometimes supposed. It is not extravagant to find in
those few words a reflection, direct or indirect, of Immanuel Kant, who,
writing in 1790, said that what is called beautiful is the object of a
delight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate
reference to our own circumstances or possible circumstances, so far
from being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our
judgment. In the Preface to _Dorian Gray_, that little flaunting
compendium of Wilde's aesthetics, it is easy to trace the ideas of Kant,
divested of their technical phrasing, freed from their background of
reasoning and their foreground of accurate explanation. For
example:--"No artist desires to prove anything." This balances Kant's
banishment of concepts from the beautiful. For another:--"All art is
quite useless." This balances Kant's distinction between the beautiful
and the good. This is not the place for any worthy discussion of the
relation between the theory and the practice of art; but it is
interesting to notice that what was temperamentally true for Wilde, and
therefore peculiarly his own, had been logically true for a philosopher
a hundred years before. Coleridge, whose originality there is no more
need to question than Wilde's, gave Kant's ideas a different colouring.
Is it that the philosopher is unable to apply in detail what the artist
is unable to conceive as a whole?
It is important to remember that throughout this dialogue, Wilde is
speaking of pure art, a thing which possibly does not exist, and,
recognising it as an ideal towards which all artists should aspire, is
engaged in pointing out the more obvious means of falling short of it.
He achieves a triumph, of a kind in which he delighted, by making
people read of such a subject. Not wishing to be laughed at by the
British intellect, and wishing to be listened to, he laughs at it
instead, and, near the end of the dialogue, is so daring as to present
it with a picture of what is occurring, confident that the individual
will disclaim the general, and smile without annoyance at the
caricature. "The stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like
the Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, _La Chimere_,
dances round it and calls to it with her false flute-toned voice." And
the individual reader did not understand, and Wilde danced away until he
felt inclined again to make him listen to the flute-toned enunciation of
unfamiliar truths.
'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' the essay on Wainewright, not in dialogue,
has some of the hard angular outlines of the set article on book or
public character. It fills these outlines, however, with picturesque
detail and half-ironic speculation. It is impossible not to notice the
resemblance between the subject of this essay and its author. It is
difficult not to suspect that Wilde, in setting in clear perspective
Wainewright's poisoning and writing, in estimating the possible power of
crime to intensify a personality, was analysing himself, and expressing
through a psychological account of another man the results of that
analysis. Perhaps, in that essay we have less analysis than hypothesis.
Wilde may have happened on the Life of Wainewright, and taken it, among
all the books he had read, as a kind of Virgilian omen. My metaphor, as
Dr. Chasuble would say, is drawn from Virgil. It used to be customary
among those who wished to look into the future to open the works of that
poet and to observe the lines covered by the thumb: "which lines, if in
any way applicable to one's condition, were accounted prophetic." I
think it possible that Wilde looked upon the little account of
Wainewright that gave him a basis for his article as just such a
prophetic intimation. He may have written the article to taste his
future before the fact. Anyhow, he foreshadows the line of defence to be
taken by his own apologists when he exclaims that "the fact of a man
being a poisoner is nothing against his prose." In any discussion of the
influence that Wilde's disease or crime exerted on his art, this essay
would be a valuable piece of evidence. But in other things than the
engaging in a secret activity, Wainewright offered Wilde a curious
parallel with himself. He too introduced a new manner in writing by a
new manner in dress, and Wilde was able to use his own emotions in the
presence of blue china to vitalize the piece of Dutch painting, a
Gabriel Metsu or a Jan van Eyck, in which he paints Wainewright with his
cats, his curiosities, his crucifixes, his rare books, his cameos, and
his "brown-biscuit tea-pots, filigree worked," against a background in
which green predominates. "He had that curious love of green, which in
individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in
nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals." Wilde
also was fond of green. I have not counted occasions, but I have the
impression that green is the colour most often mentioned alike in his
verse and in his prose. Green and jade: these are his keynotes in
colour, unless I am mistaken, and in these matters impressions are less
likely to err than mathematics.
But the most striking and beautiful thing in _Intentions_ is that
dialogue between the two young men in a library whose windows look over
the kaleidoscopic swirl of Piccadilly to the trees and lawns of the
Green Park. They talk through the summer night, supping delicately on
ortolans and Chambertin, and, in the early morning, draw the curtains,
see the silver ribbon of the road, the purple mist among the trees, and
walk down to Covent Garden to look at the roses that have come in from
the country. There is something of Boccaccio in that setting,
something, too, of Landor in the lucid sentences of their talk, and
something of Walter Pater in the choice of the fruit they so idly pluck
from the tree of knowledge. But Pater could not have let their
conversation change so easily from smooth to ripple and from ripple to
smooth; Landor would have caught the ripples and carved them in
transparent moonstone, and Boccaccio would have given them girls to talk
of, instead of "The Critic as Artist."
That would seem to be a question for the learned and not for two young
exquisites with a taste for music and books and an aesthetic dislike of
the German language. But the only critical dialogue in English
literature that is at all comparable with Wilde's is "The Impartial
Critick" of John Dennis, who was ready to prove that choruses were
unnecessary in tragedy, that Wycherley excelled Plautus, and that
Shakespeare himself was not so bad as Thomas Rymer had painted him. And
there too we have young men, not themselves authors, talking for
pleasure's sake, drinking with discretion, now in their lodgings, now at
The Old Devil and now at The Cock, reading aloud to each other and
commenting verse by verse on Mr. Waller, whom they admit to be "a great
Genius and a gallant Writer." There is a delightful savour about that
dialogue, dry as some of the questions were that those two young sparks
discussed with such wet throats. There is a suggestion of the town
outside and the country beyond, of stage-coaches passing through the
Haymarket, and of Hampshire gentlemen "being forbid by the perpetual
Rains to follow the daily labour of their Country Sports," handing about
their Brimmers within doors, "as fast as if they had done it for
Exercise." And those young men talk with just the fine superiority of
Ernest and Gilbert to the authordom whose rules and persons they amuse
themselves by discussing.
Ernest and Gilbert are, however, better talkers. In fact, their talk is
far too good really to have been heard. They set their excellence as a
barrier between themselves and life. Not for a moment will they forget
that they are the creatures of art: not for a moment will they leave
that calm air for the dust and turmoil of human argument. Wilde was
never so sure of his art as in this dialogue, where Ernest, that
ethereal Sancho Panza, and Gilbert, that rather languid Don Quixote,
tilt for their hearer's joy. They share the power of visualization that
made Wilde's own talk like a continuous fairy tale. They turn their
ideas into a coloured pageantry, and all the gods of Greece and
characters of art are ready to grace by their visible presence the
exposition, whether of the ideas that are to be confuted or of those
that are to take their place. "In the best days of art," says Ernest,
"there were no art critics," and four pages follow in which the sculptor
releases the sleeping figures from the marble, Phaedrus bathes his feet
in the nymph-haunted meadow, the little figures of Tanagra are shaped
with bone or wooden tool from river clay, Artemis and her hounds are cut
upon a veined sardonyx, the wanderings of Odysseus are stained upon the
plaster, and round the earthen wine-jar Bacchus dances and Silenus
sprawls.
"But no," says Gilbert, "the Greeks were a nation of art-critics." He
balances with a sequence of ideas his friend's pageant of pictures. The
Greeks criticized language, and "Words have not merely music as sweet as
that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely
for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no
less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in
bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are
theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticized nothing but language,
they would still have been the great art-critics of the world. To know
the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the
arts." And so the talk goes on. There is but one defect in this
panoramic method of presenting ideas. Each time that Wilde empties, or
seems to spill before us, his wonderful cornucopia of coloured imagery,
he seems to build a wave that towers like the blue and silver billow of
Hokusai's print. Now, surely, it will break, we say, and are tempted to
echo Cyril in 'The Decay of Lying,' when, at the close of one of these
miraculous paragraphs, he remarks, "I like that. I can see it. Is that
the end?" Too many of Wilde's paragraphs are perorations.
It is easy, in remembering the colour and rhythm of this dialogue, to
forget the subtlety of its construction, the richness of its matter, and
the care that Wilde brought to the consideration of his subject. I have
pleased myself by working out a scheme of its contents, such as Wilde
may have used in building it. Perhaps I could have found no better
method of illustrating the qualities I have mentioned.
He begins with a story in the memoirs of an Academician, and, without
telling it, goes on to praise autobiographies and biographies and
egotism, in order to induce a frame of mind in the reader that shall
make him ready to consider without too much hostility a peculiarly
subjective form of art. He winds into his subject like a serpent, as
Goldsmith said of Burke, by way of music, returning to the story told by
the Academician, which is allowed to suggest a remark on the uselessness
of art-criticism. The ideas follow in some such order as this. Bad
Criticism. The Browning Society as an example. Browning. A swift and
skilful return to the point at issue. The Greeks not art critics. The
Greeks a nation of art critics. Life and Literature the highest arts.
Walter Pater. Greek criticism of language and the test of the spoken
word. Blind Milton writing by ear alone. Example of Greek criticism in
Aristotle's "Poetics." Identification of the creative and critical
faculties. All fine art is self-conscious. Criticism as such more
difficult than creation. Action and reverie. Sin an element of progress,
because it intensifies the individuality. The world made by the singer
for the dreamer. Criticism itself art, a form of autobiography concerned
with thoughts not events. Criticism purely subjective, and so
independent of obvious subject. For examples, Ruskin's prose independent
of his views on Turner; Pater's description of Mona Lisa independent of
the intention of Leonardo. "The meaning of a beautiful created thing is
as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who
wrought it." Music. "Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods." The
highest criticism "criticizes not merely the individual work of art, but
Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form which the artist may have
left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely." A work of art
is to the critic a suggestion for a new work of his own. Modern
painting. Too intelligible pictures do not challenge the critic.
Imitation and suggestion. "The aesthetic critic rejects those obvious
modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered
it become dumb and sterile." At this point, supper, with a promise to
discuss the critic as interpreter. Part II picks up the discussion and
continues. Works of art need interpretation. A true appreciation of
Milton, for example, impossible without scholarship. But the truth of a
critic's interpretation depends on the intensity of his own personality.
All arts have their critics. The actor a critic of the drama. The
executant a critic of the composer. Critics "will be always showing us
the work of art in some new relation to our age." Tendency towards
finding experience in art rather than in life. Life a failure from the
artistic point of view, if only because a moment of life can never be
lived again, whereas in literature, one can be sure of finding the
particular emotion for which one looks. A pageantry of the things that
have been happening in Dante for six hundred years. Baudelaire and
others. The transference of emotion. Not through life but through art
can we realize perfection. The immorality of art. "For emotion for the
sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is
the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call
society." A further comparison between action and contemplation. Ernest
asks, "We exist, then, to do nothing," and Gilbert answers, "It is to do
nothing that the elect exist." There follows one of the few passages
that contains any outspoken mention of a decadence. (This word was
freely used as a label in England and France at this time.) "But we who
are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and
too critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite
pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life
itself." "In the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to
realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race."
Heredity, "the only one of the gods whose real name we know," brings
gifts of strange temperaments and impossible desires, and the power of
living a thousand lives. Imagination is "concentrated race-experience."
Being and becoming compared with doing. Defence of egotism. "The sure
way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful."
Schoolmasters. Self-culture, not the culture of others, the proper aim
of man. The idea is dangerous: so are all ideas. Ernest suggests that
the fact that a critical work is subjective places it below the greatest
work, which is impersonal and objective. Gilbert replies that "the
difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form
merely. It is accidental, not essential. All artistic creation is
absolutely subjective." Critics not even limited to the more obviously
subjective forms of expression, but may use drama, dialogues, narrative,
or poetry. He then turns more particularly to the critic's
qualifications. He must not be fair, not be rational, not be sincere,
except in his devotion to the principle of beauty, Journalism,
reviewing, and prurience. Intrusion of morals into art. Further
consideration of the critic's qualifications. Temperament, its
cultivation through decorative art. A digression on modern painting,
returning to the subject of decorative art. The influence of the critic
should be the mere fact of his existence. "You must not ask of him to
have any aim other than the perfecting of himself." It is not his
business to reform bad artists, who are probably quite irreclaimable.
Remembering, but not alluding to Whistler's attack, he lets Ernest ask,
"But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry, and the
painter of painting?" Gilbert replies, "The appeal of all art is simply
to the artistic temperament." Great artists unable to recognize the
beauty of work different from their own. Examples:--Wordsworth on Keats,
Shelley on Wordsworth, Byron on all three, Sophocles on Euripides,
Milton on Shakespeare, Reynolds on Gainsborough. The future belongs to
criticism. "The subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always
diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily." The
use of criticism. It makes culture possible, makes the mind a fine
instrument, "takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it
into a finer essence." It recreates the past. It makes us cosmopolitan.
Goethe could not hate France even during her invasion of Germany.
Comparison between ethics and aesthetics. "To discern the beauty of a
thing is the finest point to which we can arrive." "Creation is always
behind the age. It is Criticism that leads us." A swift summary, with a
graceful transition to the dawn and opening windows over Piccadilly.
Such is the skeleton of thought that connects all that is said, and,
disguised by a wonderful skill, makes even the transitions delightful,
and remembers the main purpose again and again without ever wearying us
by allowing us to be conscious of repetition.
But, forgetting these mechanics and listening to that light-hearted
conversation, we become aware that we are enjoying the exposition of a
point of view without an understanding of which Wilde would be
unintelligible as either man or writer. It does not represent him
completely; a man's points of views are as various as his moods. But,
with 'The Decay of Lying,' it does represent what was, perhaps, the
dominant mood of his life. The dialogues overlap, but do not contradict
each other. It can hardly have been chance that divided them in
_Intentions_, by 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' that reflects the mood
directly opposite, the mood in which he delighted to see a personality
express itself in clothes, in vice, in action of any kind other than the
vivid inaction of art. It is more likely to have been self-knowledge.
For the mood that dictated the study of Wainewright was akin to that in
which he found it an astounding adventure to entertain poisonous things.
"It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the
excitement." Wilde's tragedy may be traced to the conflict between these
moods, the one inviting him to life, the other to art. In either case,
life or art matched its colours to seduce his temperament. The mood of
the dialogues was that in which he turned, not necessarily always to
writing, but to seek experience in art. In this mood he preferred, if
you like to put it so, to take life at second-hand, and was happier to
speak of Corot than of twilight, of Turner than of sunset. In this mood,
like Vivian, he did not seek in Japanese art to know Japan, but rather
to learn a new country "anywhere out of the world." Ancient Greece did
not mean to him the Peloponnesian War, but the candour of Grecian
statuary and the small figures of Tanagra, in the folds of whose dancing
dresses, that seem always to have caught the tint of the evening sky in
their terra-cotta, he found the secret of quite another country than the
Greece of the historian. It was always his pleasure to begin where
others had ended, and criticism rather than creation came to mean for
him the delicate adventures of the intellect, such a life as was the
best part of his own. And so criticism became creation for him, building
its impressions into things beautiful in themselves, and transforming
the life of the critic into something no less delightful than the
subjects of his contemplation.