following case the imitation was self-conscious. In the year 1879, just
after I had left Oxford, I met at a reception at the house of one of the
Foreign Ministers a woman of very curious exotic beauty. We became great
friends, and were constantly together. And yet what interested me most
in her was not her beauty, but her character, her entire vagueness of
character. She seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the
possibility of many types. Sometimes she would give herself up entirely
to art, turn her drawing-room into a studio, and spend two or three days
a week at picture galleries or museums. Then she would take to attending
race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, and talk about nothing but
betting. She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics,
and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy. In fact,
she was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all her
transformations as was that wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of
him. One day a serial began in one of the French magazines. At that
time I used to read serial stories, and I well remember the shock of
surprise I felt when I came to the description of the heroine. She was
so like my friend that I brought her the magazine, and she recognised
herself in it immediately, and seemed fascinated by the resemblance. I
should tell you, by the way, that the story was translated from some dead
Russian writer, so that the author had not taken his type from my friend.
Well, to put the matter briefly, some months afterwards I was in Venice,
and finding the magazine in the reading-room of the hotel, I took it up
casually to see what had become of the heroine. It was a most piteous
tale, as the girl had ended by running away with a man absolutely
inferior to her, not merely in social station, but in character and
intellect also. I wrote to my friend that evening about my views on John
Bellini, and the admirable ices at Florian’s, and the artistic value of
gondolas, but added a postscript to the effect that her double in the
story had behaved in a very silly manner. I don’t know why I added that,
but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same
thing. Before my letter had reached her, she had run away with a man who
deserted her in six months. I saw her in 1884 in Paris, where she was
living with her mother, and I asked her whether the story had had
anything to do with her action. She told me that she had felt an
absolutely irresistible impulse to follow the heroine step by step in her
strange and fatal progress, and that it was with a feeling of real terror
that she had looked forward to the last few chapters of the story. When
they appeared, it seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them
in life, and she did so. It was a most clear example of this imitative
instinct of which I was speaking, and an extremely tragic one.
However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual instances.
Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle. All that I
desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far
more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously
about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the mirror up to Art,
and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor,
or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically
speaking, the basis of life—the energy of life, as Aristotle would call
it—is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting
various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes
on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have
committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand
because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the
imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Cæsar.
CYRIL. The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make it
complete you must show that Nature, no less than Life, is an imitation of
Art. Are you prepared to prove that?
VIVIAN. My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.
CYRIL. Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her effects
from him?
VIVIAN. Certainly. Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get
those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring
the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom,
if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that
brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved
bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place
in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a
particular school of Art. You smile. Consider the matter from a
scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am
right. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us.
She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it,
depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very
different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees
its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At
present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets
and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.
There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were.
But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They 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.
Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold. And so,
let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.
She has done so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one
sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless
violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces
it quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she
gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pissaros. Indeed there are
moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time,
when Nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to be
relied upon. The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position. Art
creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on
to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation
can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect
until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real
culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.
Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was
the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism
of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs.
Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious
sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of
those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what
was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad
period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and
over-emphasised. Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very
often commits the same error. She produces her false Renés and her sham
Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on
another a more than questionable Rousseau. Still, Nature irritates one
more when she does things of that kind. It seems so stupid, so obvious,
so unnecessary. A false Vautrin might be delightful. A doubtful Cuyp is
unbearable. However, I don’t want to be too hard on Nature. I wish the
Channel, especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry
Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied,
Nature will, no doubt, be more varied also. That she imitates Art, I
don’t think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one thing
that keeps her in touch with civilised man. But have I proved my theory
to your satisfaction?
CYRIL. You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better. But
even admitting this strange imitative instinct in Life and Nature, surely
you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper of its age, the
spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and
under whose influence it is produced.
VIVIAN. Certainly not! Art never expresses anything but itself. This
is the principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, more than that
vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells,
that makes music the type of all the arts. Of course, nations and
individuals, with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of
existence, are always under the impression that it is of them that the
Muses are talking, always trying to find in the calm dignity of
imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always
forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo but Marsyas. Remote
from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave,
Art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the
opening of the marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own
history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding
expression in a new form. But it is not so. The highest art rejects the
burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh
material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty
passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She
develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is
the ages that are her symbols.
Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place and
people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less
it represents to us the spirit of its age. The evil faces of the Roman
emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in
which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work, and we fancy
that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of
the ruin of the Empire. But it was not so. The vices of Tiberius could
not destroy that supreme civilisation, any more than the virtues of the
Antonines could save it. It fell for other, for less interesting
reasons. The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to
interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call
the Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of
Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? The more abstract,
the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its
age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look
at its architecture or its music.
CYRIL. I quite agree with you there. The spirit of an age may be best
expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract
and ideal. Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of an age, for
its look, as the phrase goes, we must of course go to the arts of
imitation.
VIVIAN. I don’t think so. 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 mediæval
stained glass, or in mediæval stone and wood carving, or on mediæval
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
only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to
give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire
now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism
is always in front of Life.
The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates
Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from
the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and
that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise
that energy. It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but
it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the
history of Art.
It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates
Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have
already seen through poetry, or in paintings. This is the secret of
Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature’s weakness.
The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
things, is the proper aim of Art. But of this I think I have spoken at
sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace, where ‘droops
the milk-white peacock like a ghost,’ while the evening star ‘washes the
dusk with silver.’ At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive
effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to
illustrate quotations from the poets. Come! We have talked long enough.
PEN, PENCIL AND POISON
A STUDY IN GREEN
IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men
of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.
As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision
and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic
temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are
preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much
importance. Yet there are many exceptions to this rule. Rubens served
as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin
secretary to Cromwell. Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the
humourists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire
nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their
country; and Charles Lamb’s friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the
subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic
temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a
poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose,
an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful,
but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle
and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.