INTENTIONS
By
Oscar
Wilde
CONTENTS:
THE
DECAY OF LYING: AN OBSERVATION
PEN,
PENCIL AND POISON—A STUDY IN GREEN
THE
CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING
THE
CRITIC AS ARTIST—WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING
THE
TRUTH OF MASKS—A NOTE ON ILLUSION
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
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 modem 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
‘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
‘In
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
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 Caesar stalked through the
streets of risen
‘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
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 modem
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
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
‘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
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
Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course
accidental. In the following case the
imitation was self-conscious. In the
year 1879, just after I had left
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 Caesar.
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
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 aesthetics; 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
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 mediaeval stained glass, or in
mediaeval stone and wood carving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, or
illuminated MSS. They were probably very
ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in
their appearance. The Middle
Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style, and there is
no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be produced in the
nineteenth century. No great artist ever
sees things as they really are. If he
did, he would cease to be an artist.
Take an example from our own day.
I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese
people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese
art at all. The Japanese people are the
deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei,
or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady,
you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in
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
‘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 aesthetics.
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
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.
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
This remarkable man, so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and
poison,’ as a great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at
Chiswick, in 1794. His father was the
son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray’s Inn and
Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams of the romance and chivalry of a soldier’s life, and to have become a young guardsman. But the reckless dissipated life of his companions failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made for other things. In a short time he wearied of the service. ‘Art,’ he tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, ‘Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.’ But Art was not the only cause of the change. ‘The writings of Wordsworth,’ he goes on to say, ‘did much towards calming the confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations. I wept over them tears of happiness and gratitude.’ He accordingly left the army, with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, and returned to Linden House, full of this new-born enthusiasm for culture. A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was ‘broken like a vessel of clay,’ prostrated him for a time. His delicately strung organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain. He shrank from suffering as a thing that mars and maims human life, and seems to have wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged. But he was young—only twenty-five years of age—and he soon passed out of the ‘dead black waters,’ as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic culture. As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up literature as an art. ‘I said with John Woodvil,’ he cries, ‘it were a life of gods to dwell in such an element,’ to see and hear and write brave things:-
‘These high and gusty relishes of life
Have no allayings of mortality.’
It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance of a man who had a true passion for letters. ‘To see and hear and write brave things,’ this was his aim.
Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, struck by the young man’s genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonym he began to contribute to the literature of his day. Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These disguises intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time he seems to have made his mark. Charles Lamb speaks of ‘kind, light-hearted Wainewright,’ whose prose is ‘capital.’ We hear of him entertaining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and others, at a petit-dîner. Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others. There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. ‘Amongst the company, all literary men, sat a murderer,’ he tells us, and he goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman, and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table at the young writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on ‘what sudden growth of another interest’ would have changed his mood, had he known of what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even then guilty.
His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside his achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us hardly justifies his reputation.
But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work without interest. We hear of William Blake stopp