Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen and Co edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
INTENTIONS
BY
OSCAR WILDE
* * * * *
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
* * * * *
_First Published_, _at 1s. net_, _in 1913_
* * * * *
_This Book was First Published_ _1891_
_Second Edition_ _1894_
_First Published_ (_Third Edition_) _by Methuen _1908_
and Co._
_Fourth Edition_ _1909_
_Fifth Edition_ _1911_
* * * * *
DEDICATED
TO
MRS. CAREW
BY
THE AUTHOR’S LITERARY EXECUTOR
* * * * *
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE DECAY OF LYING 1
PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 57
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 95
THE TRUTH OF MASKS 221
THE DECAY OF LYING:
AN OBSERVATION
_A DIALOGUE_. _Persons_: _Cyril and_
_Vivian_. _Scene_: _the Library of a country_
_house in Nottinghamshire_.
CYRIL (_coming in through the open window from the terrace_). My dear
Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly
lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods,
like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass and
smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.
VIVIAN. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that
faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved
her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful
study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our
observation. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less
we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of
design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely
unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as
Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at a
landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us,
however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art
at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature
her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure
myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the
imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at
her.
CYRIL. Well, you need not look at the landscape. You can lie on the
grass and smoke and talk.
VIVIAN. But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and
damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even Morris’s poorest
workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature
can. Nature pales before the furniture of ‘the street which from Oxford
has borrowed its name,’ as the poet you love so much once vilely phrased
it. I don’t complain. If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would
never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.
In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is
subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism
itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is
entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract
and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one. And then
Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in
the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle
that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch.
Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind. Thinking is the
most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die
of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is
not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our
national stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep this great
historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid
that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is
incapable of learning has taken to teaching—that is really what our
enthusiasm for education has come to. In the meantime, you had better go
back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave me to correct my
proofs.
CYRIL. Writing an article! That is not very consistent after what you
have just said.
VIVIAN. Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire,
the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of
action, to the _reductio ad absurdum_ of practice. Not I. Like Emerson,
I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’ Besides, my article
is really a most salutary and valuable warning. If it is attended to,
there may be a new Renaissance of Art.
CYRIL. What is the subject?
VIVIAN. I intend to call it ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest.’
CYRIL. Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that
habit.
VIVIAN. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level
of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to
argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank,
fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural
disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply
that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative
to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the
truth at once. No, the politicians won’t do. Something may, perhaps, be
urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its
members. Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful. They
can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh
from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries
triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those
clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakeably innocent. But
they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to
precedent. In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out.
Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied
upon. One feels it as one wades through their columns. It is always the
unreadable that occurs. I am afraid that there is not much to be said in
favour of either the lawyer or the journalist. Besides, what I am
pleading for is Lying in art. Shall I read you what I have written? It
might do you a great deal of good.
CYRIL. Certainly, if you give me a cigarette. Thanks. By the way, what
magazine do you intend it for?
VIVIAN. For the _Retrospective Review_. I think I told you that the
elect had revived it.
CYRIL. Whom do you mean by ‘the elect’?
VIVIAN. Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course. It is a club to which I
belong. We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we
meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian. I am afraid you are not
eligible. You are too fond of simple pleasures.
CYRIL. I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits, I
suppose?
VIVIAN. Probably. Besides, you are a little too old. We don’t admit
anybody who is of the usual age.
CYRIL. Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with each
other.
VIVIAN. We are. This is one of the objects of the club. Now, if you
promise not to interrupt too often, I will read you my article.
CYRIL. You will find me all attention.
VIVIAN (_reading in a very clear_, _musical voice_). THE DECAY OF LYING:
A PROTEST.—One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously
commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly
the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The
ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the
modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner.
He has his tedious _document humain_, his miserable little _coin de la
création_, into which he peers with his microscope. He is to be found at
the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up
his subject. He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but
insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between
encyclopædias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having
drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman,
and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never,
even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself.
‘The lose that results to literature in general from this false ideal of
our time can hardly be overestimated. People have a careless way of
talking about a “born liar,” just as they talk about a “born poet.” But
in both cases they are wrong. Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Pinto
saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the most careful
study, the most disinterested devotion. Indeed, they have their
technique, just as the more material arts of painting and sculpture have,
their subtle secrets of form and colour, their craft-mysteries, their
deliberate artistic methods. As one knows the poet by his fine music, so
one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither
case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as
elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection. But in modern days while
the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if
possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into
disrepute. Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for
exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic
surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into
something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to
nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy—’
CYRIL. My dear fellow!
VIVIAN. Please don’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence. ‘He either
falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the
society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal
to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of
anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty
of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence,
has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than
himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no
one can possibly believe in their probability. This is no isolated
instance that we are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and
if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our
monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass
away from the land.
‘Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and
fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively
no other name for it. There is such a thing as robbing a story of its
reality by trying to make it too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so
inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the
transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of
the _Lancet_. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the
makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being
suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he
feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a
footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other
novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a
painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of
view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and
caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but
then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot
bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing
what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm
of a short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense
of the author becomes almost unbearable. The horses of Mr. William
Black’s phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the
sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects. On seeing them
approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles
pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other
wearisome things. Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the
altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the French comedy who
keeps talking about “le beau ciel d’Italie.” Besides, he has fallen into
the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. He is always telling us that
to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times
he is almost edifying. _Robert Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece—a
masterpiece of the “genre ennuyeux,” the one form of literature that the
English people seems thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of
ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that
goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and
we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book
could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas. As for that great
and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in
the East-End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they
find life crude, and leave it raw.
‘In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as _Robert Elsmere_
has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy de Maupassant,
with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the
few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering
wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is
ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears. M.
Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his
pronunciamientos on literature, “L’homme de génie n’a jamais d’esprit,”
is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be
dull. And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed at
times, as in _Germinal_, there is something almost epic in his work. But
his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the
ground of morals, but on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint
it is just what it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and
describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist
desire? We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our
time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being
exposed. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of
the author of _L’Assommoir_, _Nana_ and _Pot-Bouille_? Nothing. Mr.
Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being
like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola’s characters are
much worse. They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues.
The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what
happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and
imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an
account of the doings of the lower orders. M. Daudet is better. He has
wit, a light touch and an amusing style. But he has lately committed
literary suicide. Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle with his “Il
faut lutter pour l’art,” or for Valmajour with his eternal refrain about
the nightingale, or for the poet in _Jack_ with his “mots cruels,” now
that we have learned from _Vingt Ans de ma Vie littéraire_ that these
characters were taken directly from life. To us they seem to have
suddenly lost all their vitality, all the few qualities they ever
possessed. The only real people are the people who never existed, and if
a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at
least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.
The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are
what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is
not a work of art. As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the _roman
psychologique_, he commits the error of imagining that the men and women
of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for an
innumerable series of chapters. In point of fact what is interesting
about people in good society—and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the
Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,—is the mask that each one
of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a
humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.
In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little
of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young
prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is
purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious
opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like. The more
one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner
or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too
well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most
depressing and humiliating reality; and if a writer insists upon
analysing the upper classes, he might just as well write of match-girls
and costermongers at once.’ However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain
you any further just here. I quite admit that modern novels have many
good points. All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite
unreadable.
CYRIL. That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I must say that
I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures. I like _The
Deemster_, and _The Daughter of Heth_, and _Le Disciple_, and _Mr.
Isaacs_, and as for _Robert Elsmere_, I am quite devoted to it. Not that
I can look upon it as a serious work. As a statement of the problems
that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated. It
is simply Arnold’s _Literature and Dogma_ with the literature left out.
It is as much behind the age as Paley’s _Evidences_, or Colenso’s method
of Biblical exegesis. Nor could anything be less impressive than the
unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so
completely missing its true significance that he proposes to carry on the
business of the old firm under the new name. On the other hand, it
contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful quotations,
and Green’s philosophy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitter pill of
the author’s fiction. I also cannot help expressing my surprise that you
have said nothing about the two novelists whom you are always reading,
Balzac and George Meredith. Surely they are realists, both of them?
VIVIAN. Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos
illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered
everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except
tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody
in Shakespeare—Touchstone, I think—talks about a man who is always
breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might
serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith’s method. But whatever he
is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of
realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate
choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee
to Baal, and after all, even if the man’s fine spirit did not revolt
against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite
sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means
he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with
wonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of
the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he
bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The
difference between such a book as M. Zola’s _L’Assommoir_ and Balzac’s
_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and
imaginative reality. ‘All Balzac’s characters;’ said Baudelaire, ‘are
gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his
fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded
to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.’ A steady
course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of
fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism.
One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de
Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to
rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when
I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created
life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a
value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of
his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbô_ or
_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de
Bragelonne_.
CYRIL. Do you object to modernity of form, then?
VIVIAN. Yes. It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result. Pure
modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising. It cannot help being
so. 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 unsuitable subjects 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. To art’s subject-matter we
should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no
preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind. It is
exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an
admirable motive for a tragedy. I do not know anything in the whole
history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade.
He wrote one beautiful book, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, a book as
much above _Romola_ as _Romola_ is above _Daniel Deronda_, and wasted the
rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public
attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our
private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all
conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the
poor-law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man
with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of
contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist,
is really a sight for the angels to weep over. Believe me, my dear
Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and
absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the
vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and
hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside
with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our
birthright for a mess of facts.
CYRIL. There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt that
whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely model novel, we have
rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it. And this is perhaps the
best rough test of what is literature and what is not. If one cannot
enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at
all. But what do you say about the return to Life and Nature? This is
the panacea that is always being recommended to us.
VIVIAN. I will read you what I say on that subject. The passage comes
later on in the article, but I may as well give it to you now:—
‘The popular cry of our time is “Let us return to Life and Nature; they
will recreate Art for us, and send the red blood coursing through her
veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong.”
But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meaning efforts.
Nature is always behind the age. And as for Life, she is the solvent
that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.’
CYRIL. What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind the age?
VIVIAN. Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic. What I mean is this. If
we take Nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to
self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always
old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. One touch of Nature may make
the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of
Art. If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of
phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to
her. She has no suggestions of her own. Wordsworth went to the lakes,
but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had
already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his
good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry.
Poetry gave him ‘Laodamia,’ and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such
as it is. Nature gave him ‘Martha Ray’ and ‘Peter Bell,’ and the address
to Mr. Wilkinson’s spade.
CYRIL. I think that view might be questioned. I am rather inclined to
believe in ‘the impulse from a vernal wood,’ though of course the
artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of
temperament that receives it, so that the return to Nature would come to
mean simply the advance to a great personality. You would agree with
that, I fancy. However, proceed with your article.
VIVIAN (_reading_). ‘Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely
imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and
non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated
with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle.
Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and
refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents,
imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable
barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. The third
stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the
wilderness. That is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are
now suffering.
‘Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks
Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological. Then she
enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life’s external forms,
she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more
terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than
lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods,
who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.
To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language
full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence,
or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and
enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange raiment
and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its
marble tomb. A new Cæsar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and
with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river
to Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.
History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the
dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple
truth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself
is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare
we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual
breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance
given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation.
The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the language is
uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due
to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the
intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be
suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless
artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s
natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative
medium she surrenders everything. Goethe says, somewhere—
In der Beschränkung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,
“It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,” and the
limitation, the very condition of any art is style. However, we need not
linger any longer over Shakespeare’s realism. _The Tempest_ is the most
perfect of palinodes. All that we desired to point out was, that the
magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within
itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its
strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from
using life as an artistic method. As the inevitable result of this
substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an
imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama. The characters
in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they
have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life
and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the
gait, manner, costume and accent of real people; they would pass
unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage. And yet how wearisome the
plays are! They do not succeed in producing even that impression of
reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing.
As a method, realism is a complete failure.
‘What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those
arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history of these arts
in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its
frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its
dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own
imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in
Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe
by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative
work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic
conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned
for her delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Modern
tapestry, with its aërial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad
expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty
whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We
are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we
have returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets
of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane
worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have
become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured
Mahomedan once remarked to us, “You Christians are so occupied in
misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of
making an artistic application of the second.” He was perfectly right,
and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art
in is not Life but Art.’
And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the
question very completely.
‘It was not always thus. We need not say anything about the poets, for
they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have been really
faithful to their high mission, and are universally recognised as being
absolutely unreliable. But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of
the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modern sciolists to verify his
history, may justly be called the “Father of Lies”; in the published
speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his
best; in Pliny’s _Natural History_; in Hanno’s _Periplus_; in all the
early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas
Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus,
and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent _Prodigiorum et Ostentorum
Chronicon_; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of
Casanova; in Defoe’s _History of the Plague_; in Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_; in Napoleon’s despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle,
whose _French Revolution_ is one of the most fascinating historical
novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate
position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness.
Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing-place
in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded
the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They
are vulgarising mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its
materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things,
and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely
due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who,
according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it
is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the
cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any
other moral tale in the whole of literature.’
CYRIL. My dear boy!
VIVIAN. I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole
thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute myth. However,
you must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic future
either of America or of our own country. Listen to this:—
‘That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its
close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving
conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the
genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences
are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by
probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the
merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must
return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. Who he was
who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the
wandering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the
purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat
and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of our
modern anthropologists, for all their much-boasted science, has had the
ordinary courage to tell us. Whatever was his name or race, he certainly
was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is
simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of
civilised society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions
of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate
at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand’s farcical comedies.
‘Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the
prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false,
beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great
secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and
absolutely a matter of style; while Life—poor, probable, uninteresting
human life—tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert
Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in
general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own
simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.
‘No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer in the
_Saturday Review_, will gravely censure the teller of fairy tales for his
defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work
by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and will hold up their
ink-stained hands in horror if some honest gentleman, who has never been
farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book of
travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole
history of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past.
To excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of him
who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his
servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs
of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood
near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty
Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters. They
will call upon Shakespeare—they always do—and will quote that hackneyed
passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the
mirror up to Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince
the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.’
CYRIL. Ahem! Another cigarette, please.
VIVIAN. My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic
utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare’s real views upon art than
the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals. But let me
get to the end of the passage:
‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She
is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a
veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of,
birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and
can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the “forms
more real than living man,” and hers the great archetypes of which things
that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes,
no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she
calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the almond-tree
blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield. At her
word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of June, and
the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills. The
dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile
strangely at her when she comes near them. She has hawk-faced gods that
worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.’
CYRIL. I like that. I can see it. Is that the end?
VIVIAN. No. There is one more passage, but it is purely practical. It
simply suggests some methods by which we could revive this lost art of
Lying.
CYRIL. Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you a
question. What do you mean by saying that life, ‘poor, probable,
uninteresting human life,’ will try to reproduce the marvels of art? I
can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror.
You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked
looking-glass. But you don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that
Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?
VIVIAN. Certainly I do. Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are
always dangerous things—it is none the less true that Life imitates art
far more than Art imitates life. 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.
As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The most
obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of
the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick
Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into
sweet-shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from
the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and
unloaded revolvers. This interesting phenomenon, which always occurs
after the appearance of a new edition of either of the books I have
alluded to, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the
imagination. But this is a mistake. The imagination is essentially
creative, and always seeks for a new form. The boy-burglar is simply the
inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as
Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him
is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.
Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern
thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a
puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no
faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he
does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by
Tourgénieff, and completed by Dostoieffski. Robespierre came out of the
pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the
_débris_ of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not
copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we
know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempré, our
Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of
the _Comédie Humaine_. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and
unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great
novelist. I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he
had had any model for Becky Sharp. She told me that Becky was an
invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested
by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and
was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman. I inquired what
became of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years
after the appearance of _Vanity Fair_, she ran away with the nephew of
the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great
splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s style, and entirely by
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared
to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and
other gambling places. The noble gentleman from whom the same great
sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few months after _The
Newcomer_ had reached a fourth edition, with the word ‘Adsum’ on his
lips. Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious psychological
story of transformation, a friend of mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the
north of London, and being anxious to get to a railway station, took what
he thought would be a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a
network of mean, evil-looking streets. Feeling rather nervous he began
to walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right
between his legs. It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and
trampled upon it. Being of course very much frightened and a little
hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole street was full
of rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants. They
surrounded him, and asked him his name. He was just about to give it
when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson’s
story. He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own person
that terrible and well-written scene, and at having done accidentally,
though in fact, what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate
intent, that he ran away as hard as he could go. He was, however, very
closely followed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door of
which happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant, who
happened to be there, exactly what had occurred. The humanitarian crowd
were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and as
soon as the coast was clear he left. As he passed out, the name on the
brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye. It was ‘Jekyll.’ At
least it should have been.