INTENTIONS

Contents

The Decay of LyingPen, Pencil, and PoisonThe Critic as ArtistThe Truth of Masks

THE DECAY OF LYING: AN OBSERVATION

A DIALOGUE. Persons: Cyril and Vivian. Scene: the Library of acountry house in Nottinghamshire. 

CYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace). Mydear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all day in the library. It isa perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is amist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us goand lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature. 

VIVIAN. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lostthat faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature morethan we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; andthat after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things inher that had escaped our observation. My own experience is thatthe more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Artreally reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curiouscrudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinishedcondition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, asAristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at alandscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunatefor us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise weshould have no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, ourgallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for theinfinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to befound 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 onthe grass and smoke and talk. 

VIVIAN. But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpyand damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even Morris'spoorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than thewhole of Nature can. Nature pales before the furniture of 'thestreet which from Oxford has borrowed its name, ' as the poet youlove so much once vilely phrased it. I don't complain. If Naturehad been comfortable, mankind would never have inventedarchitecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house weall feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated tous, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, whichis so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely theresult of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract andimpersonal. One's individuality absolutely leaves one. And thenNature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walkingin the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than thecattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in theditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people dieof it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, inEngland at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendidphysique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. Ionly hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark ofour happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we arebeginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapableof learning has taken to teaching--that is really what ourenthusiasm for education has come to. In the meantime, you hadbetter go back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave meto correct my proofs. 

CYRIL. Writing an article! That is not very consistent after whatyou have just said. 

VIVIAN. Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and thedoctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles tothe 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 valuablewarning. If it is attended to, there may be a new Renaissance ofArt. 

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 upthat habit. 

VIVIAN. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond thelevel of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, todiscuss, 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, whatis a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man issufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicianswon't do. Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members. Their feignedardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful. They can make theworse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh fromLeontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctantjuries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, evenwhen those clients, as often happens, were clearly andunmistakeably innocent. But they are briefed by the prosaic, andare not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of theirendeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, havedegenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. One feels itas one wades through their columns. It is always the unreadablethat occurs. I am afraid that there is not much to be said infavour of either the lawyer or the journalist. Besides, what I ampleading for is Lying in art. Shall I read you what I havewritten? It might do you a great deal of good. 

CYRIL. Certainly, if you give me a cigarette. Thanks. By theway, what magazine do you intend it for?

VIVIAN. For the Retrospective Review. I think I told you that theelect had revived it. 

CYRIL. Whom do you mean by 'the elect'?

VIVIAN. Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course. It is a club to whichI belong. We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holeswhen we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian. I am afraidyou are not eligible. You are too fond of simple pleasures. 

CYRIL. I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits, Isuppose?

VIVIAN. Probably. Besides, you are a little too old. We don'tadmit anybody who is of the usual age. 

CYRIL. Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored witheach other. 

VIVIAN. We are. This is one of the objects of the club. Now, ifyou 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 OFLYING: A PROTEST. --One of the chief causes that can be assignedfor the curiously commonplace character of most of the literatureof our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightfulfiction in the form of fact; the modem novelist presents us withdull facts under the guise of fiction. The Blue-Book is rapidlybecoming his ideal both for method and manner. He has his tediousdocument humain, his miserable little coin de la creation, intowhich he peers with his microscope. He is to be found at theLibrairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly readingup his subject. He has not even the courage of other people'sideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything, andultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, hecomes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circleor from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount ofuseful information from which never, even in his most meditativemoments, can he thoroughly free himself. 

'The lose that results to literature in general from this falseideal of our time can hardly be overestimated. People have acareless way of talking about a "born liar, " just as they talkabout a "born poet. " But in both cases they are wrong. Lying andpoetry are arts--arts, as Pinto saw, not unconnected with eachother--and they require the most careful study, the mostdisinterested devotion. Indeed, they have their technique, just asthe more material arts of painting and sculpture have, their subtlesecrets of form and colour, their craft-mysteries, their deliberateartistic methods. As one knows the poet by his fine music, so onecan recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and inneither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection. But inmodern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far toocommon, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion oflying has almost fallen into disrepute. Many a young man starts inlife with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured incongenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of thebest models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into carelesshabits of accuracy--'

CYRIL. My dear fellow!

VIVIAN. Please don't interrupt in the middle of a sentence. 'Heeither falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes tofrequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Boththings are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they wouldbe fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time hedevelops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins toverify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation incontradicting people who are much younger than himself, and oftenends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one canpossibly believe in their probability. This is no isolatedinstance 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 beautywill pass away from the land. 

'Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master ofdelicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, forwe know positively no other name for it. There is such a thing asrobbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, andThe Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a singleanachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyllreads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of aperfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspectedof genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feelsbound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into afootnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our othernovelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if itwere 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 atthe grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He isso loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is anadept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He huntsdown the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomesalmost unbearable. The horses of Mr. William Black's phaeton donot soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at eveninginto violent chromolithographic effects. On seeing them approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattlespleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, andother wearisome things. Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himselfupon the altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the Frenchcomedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel d'Italie. " Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. Heis always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to bebad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying. RobertElsmere is of course a masterpiece--a masterpiece of the "genreennuyeux, " the one form of literature that the English people seemsthoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once toldus that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on ata meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and wecan quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such abook could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas. As forthat great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom thesun always rises in the East-End, the only thing that can be saidabout them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw. 

'In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as RobertElsmere has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy deMaupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows usfoul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies inwhich everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannotlaugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that helays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme degenie n'a jamais d'esprit, " is determined to show that, if he hasnot 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 issomething almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrongfrom beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, buton the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint it is just whatit should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and describesthings exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire?We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our timeagainst M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on beingexposed. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said infavour of the author of L'Assommoir, Nana and Pot-Bouille?Nothing. Mr. Ruskin once described the characters in GeorgeEliot's novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonvilleomnibus, but M. Zola's characters are much worse. They have theirdreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of theirlives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens tothem? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty andimaginative power. We don't want to be harrowed and disgusted withan 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 latelycommitted literary suicide. Nobody can possibly care for Delobellewith his "Il faut lutter pour l'art, " or for Valmajour with hiseternal refrain about the nightingale, or for the poet in Jack withhis "mots cruels, " now that we have learned from Vingt Ans de maVie litteraire that these characters were taken directly from life. To us they seem to have suddenly lost all their vitality, all thefew qualities they ever possessed. The only real people are thepeople who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go tolife for his personages he should at least pretend that they arecreations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of acharacter 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 awork of art. As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the romanpsychologique, he commits the error of imagining that the men andwomen of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed foran innumerable series of chapters. In point of fact what isinteresting about people in good society--and M. Bourget rarelymoves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London, --is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that liesbehind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all ofus made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something ofHamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fatknight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince hismoments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other ispurely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religiousopinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like. Themore one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysisdisappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universalthing called human nature. Indeed, as any one who has ever workedamong the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is nomere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality;and if a writer insists upon analysing the upper classes, he mightjust as well write of match-girls and costermongers at once. 'However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain you any further justhere. I quite admit that modern novels have many good points. AllI insist on is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable. 

CYRIL. That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I mustsay that I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures. I like The Deemster, and The Daughter of Heth, and Le Disciple, andMr. 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 ofthe problems that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculousand antiquated. It is simply Arnold's Literature and Dogma withthe literature left out. It is as much behind the age as Paley'sEvidences, or Colenso's method of Biblical exegesis. Nor couldanything be less impressive than the unfortunate hero gravelyheralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so completely missing itstrue significance that he proposes to carry on the business of theold firm under the new name. On the other hand, it containsseveral clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful quotations, and Green's philosophy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitterpill of the author's fiction. I also cannot help expressing mysurprise that you have said nothing about the two novelists whomyou are always reading, Balzac and George Meredith. Surely theyare realists, both of them?

VIVIAN. Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaosillumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has masteredeverything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything exceptarticulate. Somebody in Shakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talksabout a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, andit seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticismof Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist. Orrather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not onspeaking terms with his father. By deliberate choice he has madehimself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, andafter all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt against thenoisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite sufficient ofitself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means he hasplanted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red withwonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkablecombination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirelyhis own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola'sL'Assommoir and Balzac's Illusions Perdues is the differencebetween unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. 'AllBalzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the sameardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are asdeeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to themuzzle with will. The very scullions have genius. ' A steadycourse of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and ouracquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kindof fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defyscepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the deathof Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never beenable completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments ofpleasure. I remember it when I laugh. But Balzac is no more arealist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it. Iadmit, however, that he set far too high a value on modernity ofform, and that, consequently, there is no book of his that, as anartistic masterpiece, can rank with Salammbo or Esmond, or TheCloister 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 cannothelp being so. The public imagine that, because they areinterested in their immediate surroundings, Art should beinterested in them also, and should take them as her subject-matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these thingsmakes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. Aslong as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in anyway, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to oursympathies, 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 weshould be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, haveno preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind. Itis exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows aresuch an admirable motive for a tragedy. I do not know anything inthe whole history of literature sadder than the artistic career ofCharles Reade. He wrote one beautiful book, The Cloister and theHearth, a book as much above Romola as Romola is above DanielDeronda, and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to bemodern, to draw public attention to the state of our convictprisons, and the management of our private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when hetried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor-lawadministration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man witha true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses ofcontemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensationaljournalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over. Believeme, my dear Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and absolutely wrong. We have mistaken thecommon livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spendour days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vilecities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright fora mess of facts. 

CYRIL. There is something in what you say, and there is no doubtthat whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely modelnovel, we have rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it. Andthis is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and whatis 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 thereturn to Life and Nature? This is the panacea that is alwaysbeing recommended to us. 

VIVIAN. I will read you what I say on that subject. The passagecomes later on in the article, but I may as well give it to younow:-

'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 coursingthrough her veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and makeher hand strong. " But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable andwell-meaning efforts. Nature is always behind the age. And as forLife, she is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that layswaste her house. '

CYRIL. What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind theage?

VIVIAN. Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic. What I mean isthis. If we take Nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposedto self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influenceis always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. One touch ofNature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature willdestroy any work of Art. If, on the other hand, we regard Natureas the collection of phenomena external to man, people onlydiscover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions ofher own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lakepoet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his good work wasproduced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetrygave him 'Laodamia, ' and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, suchas it is. Nature gave him 'Martha Ray' and 'Peter Bell, ' and theaddress to Mr. Wilkinson's spade. 

CYRIL. I think that view might be questioned. I am ratherinclined to believe in 'the impulse from a vernal wood, ' though ofcourse the artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely onthe kind of temperament that receives it, so that the return toNature would come to mean simply the advance to a greatpersonality. You would agree with that, I fancy. However, proceedwith your article. 

VIVIAN (reading). 'Art begins with abstract decoration, withpurely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unrealand non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomesfascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into thecharmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutelyindifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps betweenherself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, ofdecorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life getsthe upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. That isthe 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 themonks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological. Thenshe enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's externalforms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrowswere more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joyswere keener than lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans andthe calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them she gave a languagedifferent from that of actual use, a language full of resonantmusic and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or madedelicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, andenriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strangeraiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique worldrose from its marble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through thestreets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and flute-led oarsanother Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch. Old myth andlegend and dream took shape and substance. History was entirelyre-written, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did notrecognise that the object of Art is not simple truth but complexbeauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself is really aform of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit ofart, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis. 

'But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even inShakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itselfby the gradual breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importanceassigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare--andthey are many--where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for anecho of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautifulstyle, through which alone should life be suffered to findexpression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. Heis too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life's naturalutterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginativemedium she surrenders everything. Goethe says, somewhere -

In der Beschrankung 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 desiredto point out was, that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan andJacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its owndissolution, and that, if it drew some of its strength from usinglife as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life asan artistic method. As the inevitable result of this substitutionof an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of animaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama. Thecharacters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they wouldtalk off it; they have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they aretaken directly from life and reproduce its vulgarity down to thesmallest detail; they present the gait, manner, costume and accentof real people; they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railwaycarriage. And yet how wearisome the plays are! They do notsucceed in producing even that impression of reality at which theyaim, 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 aboutthose arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history ofthese arts in Europe is the record of the struggle betweenOrientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation, its love ofartistic convention, its dislike to the actual representation ofany object in Nature, and our own imitative spirit. Wherever theformer has been paramount, as in Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, byactual contact, or in the rest of Europe by the influence of theCrusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative work in which thevisible things of life are transmuted into artistic conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned for herdelight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, ourwork has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Moderntapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, itsbroad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany isabsolutely detestable. We are beginning to weave possible carpetsin England, but only because we have returned to the method andspirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets of twenty years ago, withtheir solemn depressing truths, their inane worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have become, even tothe Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured Mahomedan onceremarked to us, "You Christians are so occupied in misinterpretingthe fourth commandment that you have never thought of making anartistic application of the second. " He was perfectly right, andthe whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learnart in is not Life but Art. '

And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle thequestion very completely. 

'It was not always thus. We need not say anything about the poets, for they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, havebeen really faithful to their high mission, and are universallyrecognised as being absolutely unreliable. But in the works ofHerodotus, who, in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts ofmodem sciolists to verify his history, may justly be called the"Father of Lies"; in the published speeches of Cicero and thebiographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny'sNatural History; in Hanno's Periplus; in all the early chronicles;in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; inthe travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, andConrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent Prodigiorum et OstentorumChronicon; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in thememoirs of Casanova; in Defoe's History of the Plague; in Boswell'sLife of Johnson; in Napoleon's despatches, and in the works of ourown Carlyle, whose French Revolution is one of the most fascinatinghistorical novels ever written, facts are either kept in theirproper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on thegeneral ground of dulness. Now, everything is changed. Facts arenot merely finding a footing-place in history, but they areusurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom ofRomance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They arevulgarising mankind. The crude commercialism of America, itsmaterialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side ofthings, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainableideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for itsnational hero a man who, according to his own confession, wasincapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that thestory of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in thewhole of literature. '

CYRIL. My dear boy!

VIVIAN. I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of thewhole thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolutemyth. However, you must not think that I am too despondent aboutthe artistic future either of America or of our own country. Listen to this:-

'That some change will take place before this century has drawn toits close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious andimproving conversation of those who have neither the wit toexaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligentperson whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whosestatements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at anytime liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happensto be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lostleader, the cultured and fascinating liar. Who he was who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the wanderingcavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from thepurple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the Mammoth in singlecombat and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and notone of our modern anthropologists, for all their much-boastedscience, has had the ordinary courage to tell us. Whatever was hisname or race, he certainly was the true founder of socialintercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, todelight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilisedsociety, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions ofthe great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or adebate at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand'sfarcical comedies. 

'Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from theprison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss hisfalse, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession ofthe great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truthis entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life--poor, probable, uninteresting human life--tired of repeating herself forthe benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and thecompilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some ofthe marvels of which he talks. 

'No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writerin the Saturday Review, will gravely censure the teller of fairytales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who willmeasure imaginative work by their own lack of any imaginativefaculty, and will hold up their ink-stained hands in horror if somehonest gentleman, who has never been farther than the yew-trees ofhis own garden, pens a fascinating book of travels like Sir JohnMandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole history of theworld, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past. Toexcuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of himwho made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel ashis servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round thecoral reefs of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to eachother in a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dimprocession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in acave with the weird sisters. They will call upon Shakespeare--theyalways do--and will quote that hackneyed passage forgetting thatthis unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up toNature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince thebystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters. '

CYRIL. Ahem! Another cigarette, please. 

VIVIAN. My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely adramatic utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare's real viewsupon art than the speeches of Iago represent his real views uponmorals. 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 noforests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes andunmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with ascarlet thread. Hers are the "forms more real than living man, "and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existenceare but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, nouniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she callsmonsters from the deep they come. She can bid the almond-treeblossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield. Ather word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth ofJune, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydianhills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and thebrown fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them. Shehas hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop ather side. '

CYRIL. I like that. I can see it. Is that the end?

VIVIAN. No. There is one more passage, but it is purelypractical. It simply suggests some methods by which we couldrevive this lost art of Lying. 

CYRIL. Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you aquestion. What do you mean by saying that life, 'poor, probable, uninteresting human life, ' will try to reproduce the marvels ofart? I can quite understand your objection to art being treated asa mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of acracked looking-glass. But you don't mean to say that youseriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is themirror, and Art the reality?

VIVIAN. Certainly I do. Paradox though it may seem--and paradoxesare always dangerous things--it is none the less true that Lifeimitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen inour own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating typeof beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, hasso influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or toan artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti'sdream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, theloosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweetmaidenhood of 'The Golden Stair, ' the blossom-like mouth and wearyloveliness of the 'Laus Amoris, ' the passion-pale face ofAndromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in'Merlin's Dream. ' And it has always been so. A great artistinvents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in apopular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein norVandyck found in England what they have given us. They broughttheir types with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty setherself to supply the master with models. The Greeks, with theirquick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride'schamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bearchildren as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in herrapture or her pain. They knew that Life gains from art not merelyspirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and coloursof art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as thegrace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection to realism. Theydisliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitablymakes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We try toimprove the conditions of the race by means of good air, freesunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for thebetter housing of the lower orders. But these things merelyproduce health, they do not produce beauty. For this, Art isrequired, and the true disciples of the great artist are not hisstudio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, bethey plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; ina word, Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil. 

As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The mostobvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in thecase of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of JackSheppard or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate apple-women, break into sweet-shops at night, and alarm old gentlemen whoare returning home from the city by leaping out on them in suburbanlanes, with black masks and unloaded revolvers. This interestingphenomenon, which always occurs after the appearance of a newedition of either of the books I have alluded to, is usuallyattributed to the influence of literature on the imagination. Butthis is a mistake. The imagination is essentially creative, andalways seeks for a new form. The boy-burglar is simply theinevitable result of life's imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, andwhat we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout thewhole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism thatcharacterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The worldhas become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake withoutenthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purelyliterary product. He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed byDostoieffski. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau assurely as the People's Palace rose out of the debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, butmoulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempre, ourRastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stageof the Comedie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotesand unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision ofa great novelist. I once asked a lady, who knew Thackerayintimately, whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp. She toldme that Becky was an invention, but that the idea of the characterhad been partly suggested by a governess who lived in theneighbourhood of Kensington Square, and was the companion of a veryselfish and rich old woman. I inquired what became of thegoverness, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after theappearance of Vanity Fair, she ran away with the nephew of the ladywith whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splashin society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's style, and entirely byMrs. Rawdon Crawley's methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen atMonte Carlo and other gambling places. The noble gentleman fromwhom the same great sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a fewmonths after The Newcomer had reached a fourth edition, with theword 'Adsum' on his lips. Shortly after Mr. Stevenson publishedhis curious psychological story of transformation, a friend ofmine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the north of London, and beinganxious to get to a railway station, took what he thought would bea short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a network of mean, evil-looking streets. Feeling rather nervous he began to walkextremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child rightbetween his legs. It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, andtrampled upon it. Being of course very much frightened and alittle hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the wholestreet was full of rough people who came pouring out of the houseslike ants. They surrounded him, and asked him his name. He wasjust about to give it when he suddenly remembered the openingincident in Mr. Stevenson's story. He was so filled with horror athaving realised in his own person that terrible and well-writtenscene, and at having done accidentally, though in fact, what theMr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate intent, that he ranaway as hard as he could go. He was, however, very closelyfollowed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door ofwhich happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant, who happened to be there, exactly what had occurred. Thehumanitarian crowd were induced to go away on his giving them asmall sum of money, and as soon as the coast was clear he left. Ashe passed out, the name on the brass door-plate of the surgerycaught his eye. It was 'Jekyll. ' At least it should have been. 

Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course accidental. In the following case the imitation was self-conscious. In theyear 1879, just after I had left Oxford, I met at a reception atthe house of one of the Foreign Ministers a woman of very curiousexotic beauty. We became great friends, and were constantlytogether. And yet what interested me most in her was not herbeauty, but her character, her entire vagueness of character. Sheseemed to have no personality at all, but simply the possibility ofmany types. Sometimes she would give herself up entirely to art, turn her drawing-room into a studio, and spend two or three days aweek at picture galleries or museums. Then she would take toattending race-meetings, wear the most horsey clothes, and talkabout nothing but betting. She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics, and politics for the melodramaticexcitements of philanthropy. In fact, she was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all her transformations as was thatwondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of him. One day a serialbegan in one of the French magazines. At that time I used to readserial stories, and I well remember the shock of surprise I feltwhen I came to the description of the heroine. She was so like myfriend that I brought her the magazine, and she recognised herselfin it immediately, and seemed fascinated by the resemblance. Ishould tell you, by the way, that the story was translated fromsome dead Russian writer, so that the author had not taken his typefrom my friend. Well, to put the matter briefly, some monthsafterwards I was in Venice, and finding the magazine in thereading-room of the hotel, I took it up casually to see what hadbecome of the heroine. It was a most piteous tale, as the girl hadended by running away with a man absolutely inferior to her, notmerely in social station, but in character and intellect also. Iwrote to my friend that evening about my views on John Bellini, andthe admirable ices at Florian's, and the artistic value ofgondolas, but added a postscript to the effect that her double inthe story had behaved in a very silly manner. I don't know why Iadded that, but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that shemight do the same thing. Before my letter had reached her, she hadrun away with a man who deserted her in six months. I saw her in1884 in Paris, where she was living with her mother, and I askedher whether the story had had anything to do with her action. Shetold me that she had felt an absolutely irresistible impulse tofollow the heroine step by step in her strange and fatal progress, and that it was with a feeling of real terror that she had lookedforward 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 imitativeinstinct of which I was speaking, and an extremely tragic one. 

However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individualinstances. Personal experience is a most vicious and limitedcircle. All that I desire to point out is the general principlethat Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and I feelsure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it istrue. Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces somestrange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in factwhat has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, thebasis of life--the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it--issimply the desire for expression, and Art is always presentingvarious forms through which this expression can be attained. Lifeseizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died bytheir own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of whatwe owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitationof Caesar. 

CYRIL. The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make itcomplete you must show that Nature, no less than Life, is animitation 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 hereffects from him?

VIVIAN. Certainly. Where, if not from the Impressionists, do weget those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrousshadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe thelovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faintforms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? Theextraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of Londonduring the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school ofArt. You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or ametaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. Forwhat is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. Sheis 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 isvery different from seeing a thing. One does not see anythinguntil one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come intoexistence. At present, people see fogs, not because there arefogs, but because poets and painters have taught them themysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogsfor centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one sawthem, and so we do not know anything about them. They did notexist till Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogsare carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of aclique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dullpeople bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, theuncultured catch cold. And so, let us be humane, and invite Art toturn 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 violetshadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproducesit quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots andDaubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancingPissaros. Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still tobe observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutelymodern. Of course she is not always to be relied upon. The factis that she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates anincomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on toother things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting thatimitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps onrepeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays aboutthe beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. Theybelong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admirethem is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon theother hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted onmy going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as shecalled it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of thoseabsurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And whatwas it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a badperiod, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised. Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life veryoften commits the same error. She produces her false Renes and hersham Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, and on another a more than questionable Rousseau. Still, Natureirritates one more when she does things of that kind. It seems sostupid, so obvious, so unnecessary. A false Vautrin might bedelightful. A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable. However, I don't wantto be too hard on Nature. I wish the Channel, especially atHastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry Moore, greypearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied, Naturewill, no doubt, be more varied also. That she imitates Art, Idon't think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the onething that keeps her in touch with civilised man. But have Iproved 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 andNature, surely you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temperof its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditionsthat 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, morethan that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts. Ofcourse, nations and individuals, with that healthy natural vanitywhich is the secret of existence, are always under the impressionthat it is of them that the Muses are talking, always trying tofind in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of theirown turbid passions, always forgetting that the singer of life isnot Apollo but Marsyas. Remote from reality, and with her eyesturned away from the shadows of the cave, Art reveals her ownperfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of themarvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own historythat is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expressionin a new form. But it is not so. The highest art rejects theburden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or afresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or fromany lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the humanconsciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is notsymbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols. 

Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and placeand people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less it represents to us the spirit of its age. The evil facesof the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry andspotted jasper in which the realistic artists of the day delightedto work, and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensualjaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire. But it wasnot so. The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supremecivilisation, any more than the virtues of the Antonines could saveit. It fell for other, for less interesting reasons. The sibylsand prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for somethat new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call theRenaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants ofDutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? The moreabstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us thetemper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means ofits art, let us look at its architecture or its music. 

CYRIL. I quite agree with you there. The spirit of an age may bebest expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself isabstract and ideal. Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect ofan age, for its look, as the phrase goes, we must of course go tothe arts of imitation. 

VIVIAN. I don't think so. After all, what the imitative artsreally give us are merely the various styles of particular artists, or of certain schools of artists. Surely you don't imagine thatthe people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to thefigures on mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stone and woodcarving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminatedMSS. They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with nothinggrotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance. TheMiddle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form ofstyle, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this styleshould not be produced in the nineteenth century. No great artistever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease tobe an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that youare fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that theJapanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have anyexistence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art atall. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-consciouscreation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture byHokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside areal Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not theslightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live inJapan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is tosay, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious orextraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pureinvention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of theChrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All hesaw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns andsome fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as hisdelightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery showed onlytoo well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I havesaid, 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 atourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at homeand steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, andthen, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caughttheir imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon andsit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see anabsolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere. Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance theancient Greeks. Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what theGreek people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian womenwere like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, orlike those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pedimentsof the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainlywere 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 theirfaces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallencreature of our own day. The fact is that we look back on the agesentirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, hasnever 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 fromnow no one will believe in them. The only portraits in which onebelieves are portraits where there is very little of the sitter, and a very great deal of the artist. Holbein's drawings of the menand women of his time impress us with a sense of their absolutereality. But this is simply because Holbein compelled life toaccept his conditions, to restrain itself within his limitations, to reproduce his type, and to appear as he wished it to appear. Itis style that makes us believe in a thing--nothing but style. Mostof 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 ofyour article. 

VIVIAN. With pleasure. Whether it will do any good I reallycannot say. Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic centurypossible. Why, even Sleep has played us false, and has closed upthe gates of ivory, and opened the gates of horn. The dreams ofthe great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr. Myers's two bulky volumes on the subject, and in the Transactionsof the Psychical Society, are the most depressing things that Ihave ever read. There is not even a fine nightmare among them. They are commonplace, sordid and tedious. As for the Church, Icannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country thanthe presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe inthe supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive thatmythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination. Butin the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity forbelief, but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the onlyChurch where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomasis regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a worthy clergyman, whopasses his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives anddies unnoticed and unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallowuneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpitand express his doubts about Noah's ark, or Balaam's ass, or Jonahand the whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sitopen-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. Thegrowth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very muchto be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low formof realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignoranceof psychology. Man can believe the impossible, but man can neverbelieve the improbable. However, I must read the end of myarticle:-

'What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is torevive this old art of Lying. Much of course may be done, in theway of educating the public, by amateurs in the domestic circle, atliterary lunches, and at afternoon teas. But this is merely thelight and graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard atCretan dinner-parties. There are many other forms. Lying for thesake of gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance--lying with a moral purpose, as it is usually called--though of lateit has been rather looked down upon, was extremely popular with theantique world. Athena laughs when Odysseus tells her "his words ofsly devising, " as Mr. William Morris phrases it, and the glory ofmendacity illumines the pale brow of the stainless hero ofEuripidean tragedy, and sets among the noble women of the past theyoung bride of one of Horace's most exquisite odes. Later on, whatat first had been merely a natural instinct was elevated into aself-conscious science. Elaborate rules were laid down for theguidance of mankind, and an important school of literature grew upround the subject. Indeed, when one remembers the excellentphilosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question, one cannothelp regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheapand condensed edition of the works of that great casuist. A shortprimer, "When to Lie and How, " if brought out in an attractive andnot too expensive a form, would no doubt command a large sale, andwould prove of real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people. Lying for the sake of the improvement of theyoung, which is the basis of home education, still lingers amongstus, and its advantages are so admirably set forth in the earlybooks of Plato's Republic that it is unnecessary to dwell upon themhere. It is a mode of lying for which all good mothers havepeculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still furtherdevelopment, and has been sadly overlooked by the School Board. Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known inFleet Street, and the profession of a political leader-writer isnot without its advantages. But it is said to be a somewhat dulloccupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind ofostentatious obscurity. The only form of lying that is absolutelybeyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highestdevelopment of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying inArt. Just as those who do not love Plato more than Truth cannotpass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not loveBeauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art. Thesolid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like theSphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, La Chimere, 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 boredto death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it willhearken to her and try to borrow her wings. 

'And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shallall be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will befound mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper ofwonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world willchange to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth andLeviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do onthe delightful maps of those ages when books on geography wereactually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, andthe phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shalllay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad'shead. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in ourstalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing ofbeautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and thatnever happen, of things that are not and that should be. Butbefore this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying. '

CYRIL. Then we must entirely cultivate it at once. But in orderto avoid making any error I want you to tell me briefly thedoctrines of the new aesthetics. 

VIVIAN. Briefly, then, they are these. Art never expressesanything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thoughthas, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarilyrealistic 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 directopposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us isthe history of its own progress. Sometimes it returns upon itsfootsteps, and revives some antique form, as happened in thearchaistic movement of late Greek Art, and in the pre-Raphaelitemovement of our own day. At other times it entirely anticipatesits age, and produces in one century work that it takes anothercentury to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy. In no case doesit reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the timeitself is the great mistake that all historians commit. 

The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning toLife and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Naturemay sometimes be used as part of Art's rough material, but beforethey are of any real service to art they must be translated intoartistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginativemedium it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a completefailure, and the two things that every artist should avoid aremodernity of form and modernity of subject-matter. To us, who livein the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject forart except our own. The only beautiful things are the things thatdo not concern us. It is, to have the pleasure of quoting myself, exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are sosuitable a motive for a tragedy. Besides, it is only the modernthat ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us apicture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now?It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticismis always in front of Life. 

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Artimitates Life. This results not merely from Life's imitativeinstinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life isto find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful formsthrough which it may realise that energy. It is a theory that hasnever been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, andthrows an entirely new light upon the history of Art. 

It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature alsoimitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are effectsthat we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings. This isthe secret of Nature's charm, as well as the explanation ofNature's weakness. 

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untruethings, is the proper aim of Art. But of this I think I havespoken at sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace, where 'droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost, ' while theevening star 'washes the dusk with silver. ' At twilight naturebecomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not withoutloveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustratequotations 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 artistsand men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness andcompleteness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which isthe characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a modeof limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty ofform nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are manyexceptions to this rule. Rubens served as ambassador, and Goetheas 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 nothingbetter than to become the diplomatic representatives of theircountry; and Charles Lamb's friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistictemperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merelya poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writerof prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante ofthings delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinarycapabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost withoutrival in this or any age. 

This remarkable man, so powerful with 'pen, pencil and poison, ' asa great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born atChiswick, in 1794. His father was the son of a distinguishedsolicitor of Gray's Inn and Hatton Garden. His mother was thedaughter of the celebrated Dr. Griffiths, the editor and founder ofthe Monthly Review, the partner in another literary speculation ofThomas Davis, that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that hewas not a bookseller, but 'a gentleman who dealt in books, ' thefriend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the most well-knownmen of his day. Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him birth, at theearly age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the Gentleman'sMagazine tells us of her 'amiable disposition and numerousaccomplishments, ' and adds somewhat quaintly that 'she is supposedto have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps anyperson of either sex now living. ' His father did not long survivehis young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought upby his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by hisuncle George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned. Hisboyhood was passed at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of thosemany fine Georgian mansions that have unfortunately disappearedbefore the inroads of the suburban builder, and to its lovelygardens and well-timbered park he owed that simple and impassionedlove of nature which never left him all through his life, and whichmade him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual influences ofWordsworth's poetry. He went to school at Charles Burney's academyat Hammersmith. Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of music, and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turnout his most remarkable pupil. He seems to have been a man of agood deal of culture, and in after years Mr. Wainewright oftenspoke of him with much affection as a philosopher, anarchaeologist, and an admirable teacher who, while he valued theintellectual side of education, did not forget the importance ofearly moral training. It was under Mr. Burney that he firstdeveloped his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us that adrawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displaysgreat talent and natural feeling. Indeed, painting was the firstart that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he soughtto find expression by pen or poison. 

Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyishdreams of the romance and chivalry of a soldier's life, and to havebecome a young guardsman. But the reckless dissipated life of hiscompanions failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament ofone who was made for other things. In a short time he wearied ofthe service. 'Art, ' he tells us, in words that still move many bytheir ardent sincerity and strange fervour, 'Art touched herrenegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists werepurged; my feelings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovatedwith cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted. 'But Art was not the only cause of the change. 'The writings ofWordsworth, ' he goes on to say, 'did much towards calming theconfusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations. I weptover them tears of happiness and gratitude. ' He accordingly leftthe army, with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, and returned to Linden House, full of this new-bornenthusiasm for culture. A severe illness, in which, to use his ownwords, he was 'broken like a vessel of clay, ' prostrated him for atime. His delicately strung organisation, however indifferent itmight have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself mostkeenly sensitive to pain. He shrank from suffering as a thing thatmars and maims human life, and seems to have wandered through thatterrible valley of melancholia from which so many great, perhapsgreater, spirits have never emerged. But he was young--onlytwenty-five years of age--and he soon passed out of the 'dead blackwaters, ' as he called them, into the larger air of humanisticculture. As he was recovering from the illness that had led himalmost to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking upliterature as an art. 'I said with John Woodvil, ' he cries, 'itwere a life of gods to dwell in such an element, ' to see and hearand write brave things:-

'These high and gusty relishes of lifeHave no allayings of mortality. '

It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have theutterance of a man who had a true passion for letters. 'To see andhear and write brave things, ' this was his aim. 

Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, struck by the young man'sgenius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that heexercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a seriesof articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fancifulpseudonym he began to contribute to the literature of his day. Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some ofthe grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousnessor to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. Thesedisguises intensified his personality. In an incredibly short timehe seems to have made his mark. Charles Lamb speaks of 'kind, light-hearted Wainewright, ' whose prose is 'capital. ' We hear ofhim entertaining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, SirWentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and others, at a petit-diner. Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, andhis beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his palelemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed wereregarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner inliterature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisitewhite hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction ofbeing different from others. There was something in him ofBalzac's Lucien de Rubempre. At times he reminds us of JulienSorel. De Quincey saw him once. It was at a dinner at CharlesLamb'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 beenill, and had hated the face of man and woman, and yet found himselflooking with intellectual interest across the table at the youngwriter beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to him tolie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on 'what suddengrowth of another interest' would have changed his mood, had heknown of what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so muchattention was even then guilty. 

His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested byMr. Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set asidehis achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually leftto us hardly justifies his reputation. 

But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate apersonality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandysought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognisedthat Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less thanthe arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work withoutinterest. We hear of William Blake stopping in the Royal Academybefore one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be 'very fine. 'His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised. He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modernculture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writesabout La Gioconda, and early French poets and the ItalianRenaissance. He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, andElizabethan translations of Cupid and Psyche, and theHypnerotomachia, and book-binding and early editions, and wide-margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautifulsurroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the rooms inwhich he lived, or would have liked to live. He had that curiouslove of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtleartistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, ifnot a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fondof cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that 'sweet marblemonster' of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in theLouvre. 

There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestionsfor decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himselffrom the false taste of his time. But it is clear that he was oneof the first to recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote ofaesthetic eclecticism, I mean the true harmony of all reallybeautiful things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner. He saw that in decorating a room, which is to be, not a room forshow, but a room to live in, we should never aim at anyarchaeological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselveswith any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In thisartistic perception he was perfectly right. All beautiful thingsbelong to the same age. 

And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find thedelicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely paintedfigures and the faint [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving ofthe 'Delphic Sibyl' of Michael Angelo, or of the 'Pastoral' ofGiorgione. Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rudelamp from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, 'cased in a cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devicesand studded with small brilliants and rubies, ' and close by it'squats a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunnyfields of corn-bearing Sicily. ' Some dark antique bronzes contrastwith the pale gleam of two noble Christi Crucifixi, one carved inivory, the other moulded in wax. ' He has his trays of Tassie'sgems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze bonbonniere with a miniature byPetitot, his highly prized 'brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked, ' his citron morocco letter-case, and his 'pomona-green'chair. 

One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and castsand engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning overhis fine collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner's 'LiberStudiorum, ' of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with amagnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, 'the head ofAlexander on an onyx of two strata, ' or 'that superb altissimorelievo on cornelian, Jupiter AEgiochus. ' He was always a greatamateur of engravings, and gives some very useful suggestions as tothe best means of forming a collection. Indeed, while fullyappreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance ofreproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all thathe says about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable. 

As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the compleximpressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first stepin aesthetic criticism is to realise one's own impressions. Hecared nothing for abstract discussions on the nature of theBeautiful, and the historical method, which has since yielded suchrich fruit, did not belong to his day, but he never lost sight ofthe great truth that Art's first appeal is neither to the intellectnor to the emotions, but purely to the artistic temperament, and hemore than once points out that this temperament, this 'taste, ' ashe calls it, being unconsciously guided and made perfect byfrequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a form ofright judgment. Of course there are fashions in art just as thereare fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite freeourselves from the influence of custom and the influence ofnovelty. He certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges howdifficult it is to form any fair estimate of contemporary work. But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound. He admired Turnerand Constable at a time when they were not so much thought of asthey are now, and saw that for the highest landscape art we requiremore than 'mere industry and accurate transcription. ' Of Crome's'Heath Scene near Norwich' he remarks that it shows 'how much asubtle observation of the elements, in their wild moods, does for amost uninteresting flat, ' and of the popular type of landscape ofhis day he says that it is 'simply an enumeration of hill and dale, stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses;little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in whichrainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting throughrifted clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials ofthe real painter, are not. ' He had a thorough dislike of what isobvious or commonplace in art, and while he was charmed toentertain Wilkie at dinner, he cared as little for Sir David'spictures as he did for Mr. Crabbe's poems. With the imitative andrealistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy and he tells usfrankly that his great admiration for Fuseli was largely due to thefact that the little Swiss did not consider it necessary that anartist should paint only what he sees. The qualities that hesought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity ofline, richness of colour, and imaginative power. Upon the otherhand, he was not a doctrinaire. 'I hold that no work of art can betried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or notit be consistent with itself is the question. ' This is one of hisexcellent aphorisms. And in criticising painters so different asLandseer and Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use aphrase now classical, he is trying 'to see the object as in itselfit really is. '

However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his easein his criticisms of contemporary work. 'The present, ' he says, 'is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the firstperusal. . . . Modern things dazzle me. I must look at themthrough Time's telescope. Elia complains that to him the merit ofa MS. Poem is uncertain; "print, " as he excellently says, "settlesit. " Fifty years' toning does the same thing to a picture. ' He ishappier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubensand Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and Michael Angelo;happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things. What isGothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art ofthe Renaissance were always dear to him. He saw what our Englishschool could gain from a study of Greek models, and never weariesof pointing out to the young student the artistic possibilitiesthat lie dormant in Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work. In his judgments on the great Italian Masters, says De Quincey, 'there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as inone who spoke for himself, and was not merely a copier from books. 'The highest praise that we can give to him is that he tried torevive style as a conscious tradition. But he saw that no amountof art lectures or art congresses, or 'plans for advancing the finearts, ' will ever produce this result. The people, he says verywisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have'the best models constantly before their eyes. '

As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is oftenextremely technical in his art criticisms. Of Tintoret's 'St. George delivering the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon, ' heremarks:-

The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relievedfrom the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and thefull hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lowerkey by the purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour ofthe saint, besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery onthe foreground in the indigo shades of the wild wood surroundingthe castle. 

And elsewhere he talks learnedly of 'a delicate Schiavone, variousas a tulip-bed, with rich broken tints, ' of 'a glowing portrait, remarkable for morbidezza, by the scarce Moroni, ' and of anotherpicture being 'pulpy in the carnations. '

But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as anartistic whole, and tries to translate those impressions intowords, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for theimaginative and mental effect. He was one of the first to developwhat has been called the art-literature of the nineteenth century, that form of literature which has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning, its two most perfect exponents. His description ofLancret's Repas Italien, in which 'a dark-haired girl, "amorous ofmischief, " lies on the daisy-powdered grass, ' is in some respectsvery charming. Here is his account of 'The Crucifixion, ' byRembrandt. It is extremely characteristic of his style:-

Darkness--sooty, portentous darkness--shrouds the whole scene:only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in themurky ceiling, a rainy deluge--'sleety-flaw, discoloured water'--streams down amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even morehorrible than that palpable night. Already the Earth pants thickand fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt--the airis stagnant--a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, andsome of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. Thehorses snuff the coming terror, and become unmanageable throughfear. The moment rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder byHis own weight, fainting with loss of blood, which now runs innarrower rivulets from His slit veins, His temples and breastdrowned in sweat, and His black tongue parched with the fierydeath-fever, Jesus cries, 'I thirst. ' The deadly vinegar iselevated to Him. 

His head sinks, and the sacred corpse 'swings senseless of thecross. ' A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the airand vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; thesea rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves. Earthyawns, and the graves give up their dwellers. The dead and theliving are mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurrythrough the holy city. New prodigies await them there. The veilof the temple--the unpierceable veil--is rent asunder from top tobottom, and that dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries--the fatal ark with the tables and seven-branched candelabrum--isdisclosed by the light of unearthly flames to the God-desertedmultitude. 

Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right. Itwould have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexingveil of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein thedoubting imagination may speculate. At present it is like a thingin another world. A dark gulf is betwixt us. It is not tangibleby the body. We can only approach it in the spirit. 

In this passage, written, the author tells us, 'in awe andreverence, ' there is much that is terrible, and very much that isquite horrible, but it is not without a certain crude form ofpower, or, at any rate, a certain crude violence of words, aquality which this age should highly appreciate, as it is its chiefdefect. It is pleasanter, however, to pass to this description ofGiulio Romano's 'Cephalus and Procris':-

We should read Moschus's lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before looking at this picture, or study the picture as apreparation for the lament. We have nearly the same images inboth. For either victim the high groves and forest dells murmur;the flowers exhale sad perfume from their buds; the nightingalemourns on the craggy lands, and the swallow in the long-windingvales; 'the satyrs, too, and fauns dark-veiled groan, ' and thefountain nymphs within the wood melt into tearful waters. Thesheep and goats leave their pasture; and oreads, 'who love to scalethe most inaccessible tops of all uprightest rocks, ' hurry downfrom the song of their wind-courting pines; while the dryads bendfrom the branches of the meeting trees, and the rivers moan forwhite Procris, 'with many-sobbing streams, '

Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice. 

The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knellinghorn of Aurora's love no more shall scatter away the cold twilighton the top of Hymettus. The foreground of our subject is a grassysunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort ofland-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping rootsand stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are againthrowing out light-green shoots. This bank rises rather suddenlyon the right to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at theentrance of which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding betweenhis knees that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone, parting the rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treadingalike on thorns and flowers with jealousy-stung foot--now helpless, heavy, void of all motion, save when the breeze lifts her thickhair in mockery. 

From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs pressforward with loud cries -

And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;And put strange pity in their horned countenance. 

Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace ofdeath. On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with 'vansdejected' holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvanpeople, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressingtheir children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry alongfrom the left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rockywall, on whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn hergrief-telling waters. Above and more remote than the Ephidryad, another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festoonedpillars of an unshorn grove. The centre of the picture is filledby shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is 'thevast strength of the ocean stream, ' from whose floor theextinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-washed steeds to behold the death-pangs of her rival. 

Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quiteadmirable. The conception of making a prose poem out of paint isexcellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from thesame aim. In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, notfrom life, but from each other. 

His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everythingconnected with the stage, for instance, he was always extremelyinterested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archaeologicalaccuracy in costume and scene-painting. 'In art, ' he says in oneof his essays, 'whatever is worth doing at all is worth doingwell'; and he points out that once we allow the intrusion ofanachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to bedrawn. In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famousoccasion, he was 'on the side of the angels. ' He was one of thefirst to admire Keats and Shelley--'the tremulously-sensitive andpoetical Shelley, ' as he calls him. His admiration for Wordsworthwas sincere and profound. He thoroughly appreciated William Blake. One of the best copies of the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'that is now in existence was wrought specially for him. He lovedAlain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, andChaucer and Chapman, and Petrarch. And to him all the arts wereone. 'Our critics, ' he remarks with much wisdom, 'seem hardlyaware of the identity of the primal seeds of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the serious study of one art co-generates a proportionate perfection in the other'; and he sayselsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo talks ofhis love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or hislisteners. To his fellow-contributors in the London Magazine hewas always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, AllanCunningham, Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of themalice of a friend. Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb areadmirable in their way, and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their subject:-

What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst thegaiety of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart asever sent tears to the eyes. 

How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceitmost seasonably out of season. His talk without affectation wascompressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity. Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into wholesheets. He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a causticobservation on the FASHION FOR MEN OF GENIUS was a standing dish. Sir Thomas Browne was a 'bosom cronie' of his; so was Burton, andold Fuller. In his amorous vein he dallied with that peerlessDuchess of many-folio odour; and with the heyday comedies ofBeaumont and Fletcher he induced light dreams. He would delivercritical touches on these, like one inspired, but it was good tolet him choose his own game; if another began even on theacknowledged pets he was liable to interrupt, or rather append, ina mode difficult to define whether as misapprehensive ormischievous. One night at C-'s, the above dramatic partners werethe temporary subject of chat. Mr. X. Commended the passion andhaughty style of a tragedy (I don't know which of them), but wasinstantly taken up by Elia, who told him 'THAT was nothing; thelyrics were the high things--the lyrics!'

One side of his literary career deserves especial notice. Modernjournalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any manof the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiaticprose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompousexaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals thesubject is one of the highest achievements of an important and muchadmired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this schoolJanus Weathercock may be said to have invented. He also saw thatit was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the publicinterested in his own personality, and in his purely journalisticarticles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he hadfor dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and inwhat state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notesfor some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the leastvaluable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obviousinfluence. A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the communitywith the details of the illegalities of his private life. 

Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature. 'Ihold three things in high estimation, ' he says somewhere: 'to sitlazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowedby thick trees while the sun shines around me; and to enjoysolitude with the consciousness of neighbourhood. The countrygives them all to me. ' He writes about his wandering over fragrantfurze and heath repeating Collins's 'Ode to Evening, ' just to catchthe fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face 'in awatery bed of cowslips, wet with May dews'; and about the pleasureof seeing the sweet-breathed kine 'pass slowly homeward through thetwilight, ' and hearing 'the distant clank of the sheep-bell. ' Onephrase of his, 'the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel, ' iscuriously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage israther pretty in its way:-

The short tender grass was covered with marguerites--'such that mencalled DAISIES in our town'--thick as stars on a summer's night. The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from ahigh dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals washeard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sownseeds. The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine;not a cloud streaked the calm aether; only round the horizon's edgestreamed a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the nearvillage with its ancient stone church showed sharply out withblinding whiteness. I thought of Wordsworth's 'Lines written inMarch. '

However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man whopenned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthianinfluences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tellus, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of histerrible experiments and the methods that he adopted, hasunfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days, too, he wasalways reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about 'TheExcursion, ' and the 'Poems founded on the Affections. ' There is nodoubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine. Inone of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and whichserved to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry crystals of the Indian nux vomica, a poison, oneof his biographers tells us, 'nearly tasteless, difficult ofdiscovery, and capable of almost infinite dilution. ' His murders, says De Quincey, were more than were ever made known judicially. This is no doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention. Hisfirst victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths. He poisoned himin 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he hadalways been very much attached. In the August of the next year hepoisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife's mother, and in the followingDecember he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his sister-in-law. Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained. It mayhave been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of powerthat was in him, or because she suspected something, or for noreason. But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out byhimself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about 18, 000 pounds, for which they had insured her life in various offices. Thecircumstances were as follows. On the 12th of December, he and hiswife and child came up to London from Linden House, and tooklodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street. With them werethe two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie. On the eveningof the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that nightHelen sickened. The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in to attend her. She livedtill Monday, the 20th, when, after the doctor's morning visit, Mr. And Mrs. Wainewright brought her some poisoned jelly, and then wentout for a walk. When they returned Helen Abercrombie was dead. She was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fairhair. A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as anartist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whosework he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey saysthat Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let ushope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have noaccomplices. 

The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined to pay the policy on the technical ground ofmisrepresentation and want of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in the Court of Chancery against theImperial, it being agreed that one decision should govern all thecases. The trial, however, did not come on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately given in thecompanies' favour. The judge on the occasion was Lord Abinger. Egomet Bonmot was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for theother side. The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be presentat either of the trials. The refusal of the companies to give himthe 18, 000 pounds had placed him in a position of most painfulpecuniary embarrassment. Indeed, a few months after the murder ofHelen Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in thestreets of London while he was serenading the pretty daughter ofone of his friends. This difficulty was got over at the time, butshortly afterwards he thought it better to go abroad till he couldcome to some practical arrangement with his creditors. Heaccordingly went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of the younglady in question, and while he was there induced him to insure hislife with the Pelican Company for 3000 pounds. As soon as thenecessary formalities had been gone through and the policyexecuted, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee asthey sat together one evening after dinner. He himself did notgain any monetary advantage by doing this. His aim was simply torevenge himself on the first office that had refused to pay him theprice of his sin. His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at once for a sketching tour through the mostpicturesque parts of Brittany, and was for some time the guest ofan old French gentleman, who had a beautiful country house at St. Omer. From this he moved to Paris, where he remained for severalyears, living in luxury, some say, while others talk of his'skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all whoknew him. ' In 1837 he returned to England privately. Some strangemad fascination brought him back. He followed a woman whom heloved. 

It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotelsin Covent Garden. His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and heprudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen. Thirteenyears before, when he was making his fine collection of majolicaand Marc Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to apower of attorney, which enabled him to get possession of some ofthe money which he had inherited from his mother, and had broughtinto marriage settlement. He knew that this forgery had beendiscovered, and that by returning to England he was imperilling hislife. Yet he returned. Should one wonder? It was said that thewoman was very beautiful. Besides, she did not love him. 

It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. A noise in thestreet attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest inmodern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment. Some oneoutside called out, 'That's Wainewright, the Bank-forger. ' It wasForrester, the Bow Street runner. 

On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey. Thefollowing report of the proceedings appeared in the Times:-

Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas GriffithsWainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certainpower of attorney for 2259 pounds, with intent to defraud theGovernor and Company of the Bank of England. 

There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of whichhe pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. SerjeantArabin in the course of the morning. On being brought before thejudges, however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the formerplea, and then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which werenot of a capital nature. 

The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were threeother indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and theprisoner at the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder totransportation for life. 

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to thecolonies. In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he hadfancied himself 'lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death'for having been unable to resist the temptation of stealing someMarc Antonios from the British Museum in order to complete hiscollection. The sentence now passed on him was to a man of hisculture a form of death. He complained bitterly of it to hisfriends, and pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some peoplemay fancy, that the money was practically his own, having come tohim from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had beencommitted thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase, wasat least a circonstance attenuante. The permanence of personalityis a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the Englishlaw solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavypunishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatalinfluence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly not theworst of all his sins. 

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne cameacross him by chance. They had been going over the prisons ofLondon, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate theysuddenly caught sight of Wainewright. He met them with a defiantstare, Forster tells us, but Macready was 'horrified to recognise aman familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table hehad dined. '

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind offashionable lounge. Many men of letters went down to visit theirold literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light-heartedJanus whom Charles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quitecynical. 

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him oneafternoon, and thought he would improve the occasion by pointingout that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied:'Sir, you City men enter on your speculations, and take the chancesof them. Some of your speculations succeed, some fail. Minehappen to have failed, yours happen to have succeeded. That is theonly difference, sir, between my visitor and me. But, sir, I willtell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last. I havebeen determined through life to hold the position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is the custom of thisplace that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning'sturn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and asweep, but they never offer me the broom!' When a friendreproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged hisshoulders and said, 'Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but shehad very thick ankles. '

From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sentfrom there in the Susan to Van Diemen's Land along with threehundred other convicts. The voyage seems to have been mostdistasteful to him, and in a letter written to a friend he spokebitterly about the ignominy of 'the companion of poets and artists'being compelled to associate with 'country bumpkins. ' The phrasethat he applies to his companions need not surprise us. Crime inEngland is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always theresult of starvation. There was probably no one on board in whomhe would have found a sympathetic listener, or even apsychologically interesting nature. 

His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town hestarted a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm. Nor did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two caseson record in which he tried to make away with people who hadoffended him. But his hand seems to have lost its cunning. Bothof his attempts were complete failures, and in 1844, beingthoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he presented amemorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir John EardleyWilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave. In it he speaks of himselfas being 'tormented by ideas struggling for outward form andrealisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived ofthe exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech. ' Hisrequest, however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridgeconsoled himself by making those marvellous Paradis Artificielswhose secret is only known to the eaters of opium. In 1852 he diedof apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for which hehad evinced at extraordinary affection. 

His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. Theygave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his earlywork certainly lacked. In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forstermentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oilportrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that'he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness intothe portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl. ' M. Zola, in one of hisnovels, tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits ofperfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curiousresemblance to his victim. The development of Mr. Wainewright'sstyle seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can fancy anintense personality being created out of sin. 

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzledliterary London, and made so brilliant a debut in life and letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, hislatest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the factscontained in this memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quiteinvaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art andnature was a mere pretence and assumption, and others have deniedto him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or at leasta mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothingagainst his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis ofart, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement forsecond-rate artists. It is possible that De Quincey exaggeratedhis critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there ismuch in his published works that is too familiar, too common, toojournalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word. Here and there heis distinctly vulgar in expression, and he is always lacking in theself-restraint of the true artist. But for some of his faults wemust blame the time in which he lived, and, after all, prose thatCharles Lamb thought 'capital' has no small historic interest. That he had a sincere love of art and nature seems to me quitecertain. There is no essential incongruity between crime andculture. We cannot re-write the whole of history for the purposeof gratifying our moral sense of what should be. 

Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able toform any purely artistic judgment about him. It is impossible notto feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisonedLord Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol. But hadthe man worn a costume and spoken a language different from ourown, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the ItalianRenaissance, or in Spain in the seventeenth century, or in any landor any century but this century and this land, we would be quiteable to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his positionand value. I know that there are many historians, or at leastwriters on historical subjects, who still think it necessary toapply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praiseor blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moralinstinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it willmake its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with thetrue historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scoldingTiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia. These personages have becomelike the puppets of a play. They may fill us with terror, orhorror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not inimmediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them. Theyhave passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art norscience knows anything of moral approval or disapproval. And so itmay be some day with Charles Lamb's friend. At present I feel thathe is just a little too modern to be treated in that fine spirit ofdisinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming studies ofthe great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr. John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee, and other distinguished writers. However, Art has not forgottenhim. He is the hero of Dickens's Hunted Down, the Varney ofBulwer's Lucretia; and it is gratifying to note that fiction haspaid some homage to one who was so powerful with 'pen, pencil andpoison. ' To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importancethan a fact. 

THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OFDOING NOTHING

A DIALOGUE. Part I. Persons: Gilbert and Ernest. Scene: thelibrary of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park. 

GILBERT (at the Piano). My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

ERNEST (looking up). At a capital story that I have just comeacross in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on yourtable. 

GILBERT. What is the book? Ah! I see. I have not read it yet. Is it good?

ERNEST. Well, while you have been playing, I have been turningover the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislikemodern memoirs. They are generally written by people who haveeither entirely lost their memories, or have never done anythingworth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the trueexplanation of their popularity, as the English public always feelsperfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it. 

GILBERT. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgiveseverything except genius. But I must confess that I like allmemoirs. I like them for their form, just as much as for theirmatter. In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is whatfascinates us in the letters of personalities so different asCicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame deSevigne. Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it israther rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant nymphs thatCellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the greenand gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence showsthe moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have notgiven it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which thesupreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of hissplendour and his shame. The opinions, the character, theachievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a scepticlike the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter sonof Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charmour ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode of thoughtthat Cardinal Newman represented--if that can be called a mode ofthought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial ofthe supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot, I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul inits progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely church atLittlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, andworshippers are few, ' will always be dear to it, and whenever mensee the yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity theywill think of that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower'ssure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide for ever with theBenign Mother of his days--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom orher folly, suffered not to be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography isirresistible. Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys haschattered his way into the circle of the Immortals, and, consciousthat indiscretion is the better part of valour, bustles about amongthem in that 'shaggy purple gown with gold buttons and looped lace'which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, andprattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian bluepetticoat that he bought for his wife, of the 'good hog's hars-let, ' and the 'pleasant French fricassee of veal' that he loved toeat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his 'gadding afterbeauties, ' and his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday, and his playingof the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things. Evenin actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When peopletalk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk tous about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if onecould shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as onecan shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would beperfect absolutely. 

ERNEST. There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say. But do you seriously propose that every man should become his ownBoswell? What would become of our industrious compilers of Livesand Recollections in that case?

GILBERT. What has become of them? They are the pest of the age, nothing more and nothing less. Every great man nowadays has hisdisciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. 

ERNEST. My dear fellow!

GILBERT. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise ourheroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions ofgreat books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men areabsolutely detestable. 

ERNEST. May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?

GILBERT. Oh! to all our second-rate litterateurs. We are overrunby a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive atthe house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one dutyis to behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them. They are themere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is given to one, andthe ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach. And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I play you a fantasyby Dvorak? He writes passionate, curiously-coloured things. 

ERNEST. No; I don't want music just at present. It is far tooindefinite. Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinnerlast night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect, she insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written inthe German language. Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad tosay that it does not sound in the smallest degree like German. There are forms of patriotism that are really quite degrading. No;Gilbert, don't play any more. Turn round and talk to me. Talk tome till the white-horned day comes into the room. There issomething in your voice that is wonderful. 

GILBERT (rising from the piano). I am not in a mood for talkingto-night. I really am not. How horrid of you to smile! Where arethe cigarettes? Thanks. How exquisite these single daffodils are!They seem to be made of amber and cool ivory. They are like Greekthings of the best period. What was the story in the confessionsof the remorseful Academician that made you laugh? Tell it to me. After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sinsthat I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that werenot my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. Itcreates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fillsone with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearingby chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discoveringthat his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passedthrough terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wildromantic loves, or great renunciations. And so tell me this story, Ernest. I want to be amused. 

ERNEST. Oh! I don't know that it is of any importance. But Ithought it a really admirable illustration of the true value ofordinary art-criticism. It seems that a lady once gravely askedthe remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his celebratedpicture of 'A Spring-Day at Whiteley's, ' or, 'Waiting for the LastOmnibus, ' or some subject of that kind, was all painted by hand?

GILBERT. And was it?

ERNEST. You are quite incorrigible. But, seriously speaking, whatis the use of art-criticism? Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forththe world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we wouldeach one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choiceand delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify itfor us, and give to it a momentary perfection. It seems to me thatthe imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it, and works best in silence and in isolation. Why should the artistbe troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism? Why should thosewho cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value ofcreative work? What can they know about it? If a man's work iseasy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . . 

GILBERT. And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation iswicked. 

ERNEST. I did not say that. 

GILBERT. Ah! but you should have. Nowadays, we have so fewmysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one ofthem. The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians ofthe Broad Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott's GreatWriters Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to explaintheir divinity away. Where one had hoped that Browning was amystic they have sought to show that he was simply inarticulate. Where one had fancied that he had something to conceal, they haveproved that he had but little to reveal. But I speak merely of hisincoherent work. Taken as a whole the man was great. He did notbelong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of theTitan. He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he couldsing. His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and hepassed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly aman who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it wasnot thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by whichthought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machinemakes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was asdear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despisedlanguage, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument ofexpression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollowhill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the handsof the real artist becomes not merely a material element ofmetrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passionalso, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train ofideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound somegolden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain;rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in RobertBrowning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times madehim masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus toooften with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when hewounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music bybreaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap indiscord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulouswings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, orthe interval less harsh. Yet, he was great: and though he turnedlanguage into ignoble clay, he made from it men and women thatlive. He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare. IfShakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammerthrough a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, andspeaking not against him but for him, there glides through the roomthe pageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with hischeeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, standsdread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's. Thespawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippapass by, looks on Ottima's haggard face, and loathes her and hisown sin, and himself. Pale as the white satin of his doublet, themelancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyalStrafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hearsthe cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife godown. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered?As a poet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writerof fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, thatwe have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least putproblems forth, and what more should an artist do? Considered fromthe point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to himwho made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have sat besidehim. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is GeorgeMeredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. Heused poetry as a medium for writing in prose. 

ERNEST. There is something in what you say, but there is noteverything in what you say. In many points you are unjust. 

GILBERT. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. Butlet us return to the particular point at issue. What was it thatyou said?

ERNEST. Simply this: that in the best days of art there were noart-critics. 

GILBERT. I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest. Ithas all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an oldfriend. 

ERNEST. It is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing your headin that petulant manner. It is quite true. In the best days ofart there were no art-critics. The sculptor hewed from the marbleblock the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within it. Thewaxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to the statue, and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb. He pouredthe glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the river of redmetal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body ofa god. With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to thesightless eyes. The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath hisgraver. And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlitportico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those whopassed by, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], becameconscious of a new influence that had come across their lives, anddreamily, or with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went totheir homes or daily labour, or wandered, it may be, through thecity gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young Phaedrus bathedhis feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tallwind--whispering planes and flowering agnus castus, began to thinkof the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe. Inthose days the artist was free. From the river valley he took thefine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone, fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them tothe dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dustytombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold andthe fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment. On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixedwith milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with tired feet thepurple white-starred fields of asphodel, one 'in whose eyelids laythe whole of the Trojan War, ' Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; orfigured Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords to themast-step, that he might listen without hurt to the singing of theSirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron, where theghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persianin trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or thegalleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay. He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and preparedcedar. Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted withwax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heatedirons making it firm. Panel and marble and linen canvas becamewonderful as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her ownimage, was still, and dared not speak. All life, indeed, was his, from the merchants seated in the market-place to the cloakedshepherd lying on the hill; from the nymph hidden in the laurelsand the faun that pipes at noon, to the king whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon oil-bright shoulders, and fannedwith peacock fans. Men and women, with pleasure or sorrow in theirfaces, passed before him. He watched them, and their secret becamehis. Through form and colour he re-created a world. 

All subtle arts belonged to him also. He held the gem against therevolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch forAdonis, and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with herhounds. He beat out the gold into roses, and strung them togetherfor necklace or armlet. He beat out the gold into wreaths for theconqueror's helmet, or into palmates for the Tyrian robe, or intomasks for the royal dead. On the back of the silver mirror hegraved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or love-sick Phaedra with hernurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting poppies in her hair. The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from the silent wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands. He decorated the base and stemand ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated acanthus, or curved and crested wave. Then in black or red he painted ladswrestling, or in the race: knights in full armour, with strangeheraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shapedchariot over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast orworking their miracles: the heroes in their victory or in theirpain. Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon aground of white the languid bridegroom and his bride, with Eroshovering round them--an Eros like one of Donatello's angels, alittle laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings. On thecurved side he would write the name of his friend. [Greek textwhich cannot be reproduced] or [Greek text which cannot bereproduced] tells us the story of his days. Again, on the rim ofthe wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion atrest, as his fancy willed it. From the tiny perfume-bottle laughedAphrodite at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Maenads in histrain, Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stainedfeet, while, satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloatedskins, or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a frettedfir-cone, and wreathed with dark ivy. And no one came to troublethe artist at his work. No irresponsible chatter disturbed him. He was not worried by opinions. By the Ilyssus, says Arnoldsomewhere, there was no Higginbotham. By the Ilyssus, my dearGilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing provincialismto the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By theIlyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which theindustrious prattle of what they do not understand. On the reed-grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalismmonopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising inthe dock. The Greeks had no art-critics. 

GILBERT. Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views areterribly unsound. I am afraid that you have been listening to theconversation of some one older than yourself. That is always adangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into ahabit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectualdevelopment. As for modern journalism, it is not my business todefend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinianprinciple of the survival of the vulgarest. I have merely to dowith literature. 

ERNEST. But what is the difference between literature andjournalism?

GILBERT. Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read. That is all. But with regard to your statement that the Greeks hadno art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It would bemore just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics. 

ERNEST. Really?

GILBERT. Yes, a nation of art-critics. But I don't wish todestroy the delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of therelation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of hisage. To give an accurate description of what has never occurred isnot merely the proper occupation of the historian, but theinalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. Still lessdo I desire to talk learnedly. Learned conversation is either theaffectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentallyunemployed. And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolishphilanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of thecriminal classes. No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thingby Dvorak. The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, and the heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep. Don't let us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious ofthe fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treatedseriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don'tdegrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember fromtime to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like aclipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster roundher. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into thenight. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderfulstill. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, andhear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

ERNEST. You are horribly wilful. I insist on your discussing thismatter with me. You have said that the Greeks were a nation ofart-critics. What art-criticism have they left us?

GILBERT. My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, itwould be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they invented the criticism of art just as theyinvented the criticism of everything else. For, after all, what isour primary debt to the Greeks? Simply the critical spirit. And, this spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion andscience, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education, theyexercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supremeand highest arts, they have left us the most flawless system ofcriticism that the world has ever seen. 

ERNEST. But what are the two supreme and highest arts?

GILBERT. Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression oflife. The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, wemay not realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in manycases, so subtle that we can hardly understand them. Recognisingthat the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man inall his infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism oflanguage, considered in the light of the mere material of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable oremotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, forinstance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as amodern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I needhardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they wereright, as they were right in all things. Since the introduction ofprinting, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongstthe middle and lower classes of this country, there has been atendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and lessand less to the ear which is really the sense which, from thestandpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whosecanons of pleasure it should abide always. Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of Englishprose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece ofmosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lackthe true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richnessof effect that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, havemade writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it asa form of elaborate design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a method of chronicling. Their test wasalways the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations. Thevoice was the medium, and the ear the critic. I have sometimesthought that the story of Homer's blindness might be really anartistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less withthe eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, butthat he is a true singer also, building his song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself till he hascaught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the wordsthat are winged with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, thatEngland's great poet owed much of the majestic movement andsonorous splendour of his later verse. When Milton could no longerwrite he began to sing. Who would match the measures of Comus withthe measures of Samson Agonistes, or of Paradise Lost or Regained?When Milton became blind he composed, as every one should compose, with the voice purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier daysbecame that mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant musichas all the stateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to haveits swiftness, and is the one imperishable inheritance of Englishliterature sweeping through all the ages, because above them, andabiding with us ever, being immortal in its form. Yes: writinghas done much harm to writers. We must return to the voice. Thatmust be our test, and perhaps then we shall be able to appreciatesome of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism. 

As it now is, we cannot do so. Sometimes, when I have written apiece of prose that I have been modest enough to considerabsolutely free from fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that Imay have been guilty of the immoral effeminacy of using trochaicand tribrachic movements, a crime for which a learned critic of theAugustan age censures with most just severity the brilliant ifsomewhat paradoxical Hegesias. I grow cold when I think of it, andwonder to myself if the admirable ethical effect of the prose ofthat charming writer, who once in a spirit of reckless generositytowards the uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed themonstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life, will notsome day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the paeonshave been wrongly placed. 

ERNEST. Ah! now you are flippant. 

GILBERT. Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told thatthe Greeks had no art-critics? I can understand it being said thatthe constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, butnot that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did notcriticise. You will not ask me to give you a survey of Greek artcriticism from Plato to Plotinus. The night is too lovely forthat, and the moon, if she heard us, would put more ashes on herface than are there already. But think merely of one perfectlittle work of aesthetic criticism, Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry. It is not perfect in form, for it is badly written, consistingperhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or of isolatedfragments destined for some larger book, but in temper andtreatment it is perfect, absolutely. The ethical effect of art, its importance to culture, and its place in the formation ofcharacter, had been done once for all by Plato; but here we haveart treated, not from the moral, but from the purely aestheticpoint of view. Plato had, of course, dealt with many definitelyartistic subjects, such as the importance of unity in a work ofart, the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic value ofappearances, the relation of the visible arts to the externalworld, and the relation of fiction to fact. He first perhapsstirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yetsatisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty andTruth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual orderof the Kosmos. The problems of idealism and realism, as he setsthem forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in themetaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, buttransfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they arestill vital and full of meaning. It may be that it is as a criticof Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering thename of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a newphilosophy. But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarilyin its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, andinvestigating the material it uses, which is language, its subject-matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which isaction, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which arethose of theatric presentation, its logical structure, which isplot, and its final aesthetic appeal, which is to the sense ofbeauty realised through the passions of pity and awe. Thatpurification and spiritualising of the nature which he calls [Greektext which cannot be reproduced] is, as Goethe saw, essentiallyaesthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied. Concerninghimself primarily with the impression that the work of artproduces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, toinvestigate its source, to see how it is engendered. As aphysiologist and psychologist, he knows that the health of afunction resides in energy. To have a capacity for a passion andnot to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and limited. Themimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom ofmuch 'perilous stuff, ' and by presenting high and worthy objectsfor the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises theman; nay, not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates himalso into noble feelings of which he might else have known nothing, the word [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] having, it hassometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite ofinitiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted tofancy, its true and only meaning here. This is of course a mereoutline of the book. But you see what a perfect piece of aestheticcriticism it is. Who indeed but a Greek could have analysed art sowell? After reading it, one does not wonder any longer thatAlexandria devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and that wefind the artistic temperaments of the day investigating everyquestion of style and manner, discussing the great Academic schoolsof painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, thatsought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, orthe realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducingactual life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or theartistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, orthe proper subject-matter for the artist. Indeed, I fear that theinartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also inmatters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarismwere endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thincolourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of thosewho, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain areputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed. And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered aboutpainters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had their privateviews, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, andPre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, andlectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced theirart-historians, and their archaeologists, and all the rest of it. Why, even the theatrical managers of travelling companies broughttheir dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paidthem very handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices. Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism. It is theGreeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism, and howfine their critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact thatthe material they criticised with most care was, as I have alreadysaid, language. For the material that painter or sculptor uses ismeagre in comparison with that of words. Words have not merelymusic as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vividas any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or theSpaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that whichreveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion andspirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If theGreeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still havebeen the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles ofthe highest art is to know the principles of all the arts. 

But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud. Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion's eye. She isafraid that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, ofQuinctilian and Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, ofall those who in the antique world wrote or lectured upon artmatters. She need not be afraid. I am tired of my expedition intothe dim, dull abyss of facts. There is nothing left for me now butthe divine [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of anothercigarette. Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving oneunsatisfied. 

ERNEST. Try one of mine. They are rather good. I get them directfrom Cairo. The only use of our attaches is that they supply theirfriends with excellent tobacco. And as the moon has hiddenherself, let us talk a little longer. I am quite ready to admitthat I was wrong in what I said about the Greeks. They were, asyou have pointed out, a nation of art-critics. I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them. For the creative faculty ishigher than the critical. There is really no comparison betweenthem. 

GILBERT. The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary. Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name. You spoke a little while ago of that finespirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which theartist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentaryperfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact ofomission, is really the critical faculty in one of its mostcharacteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this criticalfaculty can create anything at all in art. Arnold's definition ofliterature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form, but it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of thecritical element in all creative work. 

ERNEST. I should have said that great artists work unconsciously, that they were 'wiser than they knew, ' as, I think, Emerson remarkssomewhere. 

GILBERT. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative workis self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he mustsing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because hechooses to sing. It is so now, and it has always been so. We aresometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn ofpoetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and thatthe world which the early poets looked at, and through which theywalked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almostwithout changing could pass into song. The snow lies thick nowupon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, butonce, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew fromthe anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing tothe shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending toother ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Ourhistorical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetryis, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us tobe the most natural and simple product of its time is always theresult of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one. 

ERNEST. I see what you mean, and there is much in it. But surelyyou would admit that the great poems of the early world, theprimitive, anonymous collective poems, were the result of theimagination of races, rather than of the imagination ofindividuals?

GILBERT. Not when they became poetry. Not when they received abeautiful form. For there is no art where there is no style, andno style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual. No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, asShakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work, but they were merely his rough material. He took them, and shapedthem into song. They become his, because he made them lovely. They were built out of music, And so not built at all, And therefore built for ever. 

The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly onefeels that behind everything that is wonderful stands theindividual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, butthe man who creates the age. Indeed, I am inclined to think thateach myth and legend that seems to us to spring out of the wonder, or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was in its origin theinvention of one single mind. The curiously limited number of themyths seems to me to point to this conclusion. But we must not gooff into questions of comparative mythology. We must keep tocriticism. And what I want to point out is this. An age that hasno criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age thatpossesses no art at all. There have been critical ages that havenot been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in whichthe spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of histreasure-house, to separate the gold from the silver, and thesilver from the lead, to count over the jewels, and to give namesto the pearls. But there has never been a creative age that hasnot been critical also. For it is the critical faculty thatinvents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school thatsprings up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand. Thereis really not a single form that art now uses that does not come tous from the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms wereeither stereotyped or invented or made perfect. I say Alexandria, not merely because it was there that the Greek spirit became mostself-conscious, and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism andtheology, but because it was to that city, and not to Athens, thatRome turned for her models, and it was through the survival, suchas it was, of the Latin language that culture lived at all. When, at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned upon Europe, the soilhad been in some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of thedetails of history, which are always wearisome and usuallyinaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have beendue to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, thelyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, includingburlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for whichperhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all thewide meaning of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, exceptthe sonnet, to which, however, some curious parallels of thought-movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism, towhich no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in shamScotch dialect, which one of our most industrious writers hasrecently proposed should be made the basis for a final andunanimous effort on the part of our second-rate poets to makethemselves really romantic. Each new school, as it appears, criesout against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in manthat it owes its origin. The mere creative instinct does notinnovate, but reproduces. 

ERNEST. You have been talking of criticism as an essential part ofthe creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory. But whatof criticism outside creation? I have a foolish habit of readingperiodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism isperfectly valueless. 

GILBERT. So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrityweighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding itsbrother--that is the spectacle which the artistic activity ofEngland affords us from time to time. And yet, I feel I am alittle unfair in this matter. As a rule, the critics--I speak, ofcourse, of the higher class, of those in fact who write for thesixpenny papers--are far more cultured than the people whose workthey are called upon to review. This is, indeed, only what onewould expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivationthan creation does. 

ERNEST. Really?

GILBERT. Certainly. Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. Itmerely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is thedifficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style astandard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparentlyreduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, thechroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art. It issometimes said of them that they do not read all through the worksthey are called upon to criticise. They do not. Or at least theyshould not. If they did so, they would become confirmedmisanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase from one of the prettyNewnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the rest of theirlives. Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and quality of awine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easyin half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worthnothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has theinstinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? Onetastes it, and that is quite enough--more than enough, I shouldimagine. I am aware that there are many honest workers in paintingas well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. Theyare quite right. Their work stands in no intellectual relation totheir age. It brings us no new element of pleasure. It suggestsno fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty. It shouldnot be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion that itdeserves. 

ERNEST. But, my dear fellow--excuse me for interrupting you--youseem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you agreat deal too far. For, after all, even you must admit that it ismuch more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it. 

GILBERT. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Notat all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much moredifficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere ofactual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no formof emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It isonly by language that we rise above them, or above each other--bylanguage, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought. Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in itsmost aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to bethat of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who havenothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don't talk about action. Itis a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by animpulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thingincomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, andignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource ofthose who know not how to dream. 

ERNEST. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball. You hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy. You do nothing but re-write history. 

GILBERT. The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it. Thatis not the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit. When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise that the one person who has more illusions thanthe dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither theorigin of his deeds nor their results. From the field in which hethought that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our vintage, andthe fig-tree that he planted for our pleasure is as barren as thethistle, and more bitter. It is because Humanity has never knownwhere it was going that it has been able to find its way. 

ERNEST. You think, then, that in the sphere of action a consciousaim is a delusion?

GILBERT. It is worse than a delusion. If we lived long enough tosee the results of our actions it may be that those who callthemselves good would be sickened with a dull remorse, and thosewhom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each littlething that we do passes into the great machine of life which maygrind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transformour sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous andmore splendid than any that has gone before. But men are theslaves of words. They rage against Materialism, as they call it, forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has notspiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties inbarren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammellingcreeds. What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or becomecolourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of therace. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it savesus from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notionsabout morality, it is one with the higher ethics. And as for thevirtues! What are the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, careslittle about chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of theMagdalen, and not to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modernlife owe their freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whosereligion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are soignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It mustbe merged in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simplya method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice asurvival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worshipof pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altarsin the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you. Not I. Not any one. It is well for our vanity that we slay thecriminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what wehad gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saintgoes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of hisharvest. 

ERNEST. Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note. Let us go back tothe more gracious fields of literature. What was it you said?That it was more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it?

GILBERT (after a pause). Yes: I believe I ventured upon thatsimple truth. Surely you see now that I am right? When man actshe is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet. The whole secretlies in that. It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windyIlion to send the notched arrow from the painted bow, or to hurlagainst the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ash-handledspear. It was easy for the adulterous queen to spread the Tyriancarpets for her lord, and then, as he lay couched in the marblebath, to throw over his head the purple net, and call to hersmooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the heart thatshould have broken at Aulis. For Antigone even, with Death waitingfor her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the taintedair at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth thewretched naked corse that had no tomb. But what of those who wroteabout these things? What of those who gave them reality, and madethem live for ever? Are they not greater than the men and womenthey sing of? 'Hector that sweet knight is dead, ' and Lucian tellsus how in the dim under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull ofHelen, and marvelled that it was for so grim a favour that allthose horned ships were launched, those beautiful mailed men laidlow, those towered cities brought to dust. Yet, every day theswanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the battlements, and looksdown at the tide of war. The greybeards wonder at her loveliness, and she stands by the side of the king. In his chamber of stainedivory lies her leman. He is polishing his dainty armour, andcombing the scarlet plume. With squire and page, her husbandpasses from tent to tent. She can see his bright hair, and hears, or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice. In the courtyardbelow, the son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass. Thewhite arms of Andromache are around his neck. He sets his helmeton the ground, lest their babe should be frightened. Behind theembroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles, in perfumedraiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his soularrays himself to go forth to the fight. From a curiously carvenchest that his mother Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lordof the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that the lip of manhad never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and with freshwater cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black wineits burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon theground in honour of Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophetsworshipped, and prays to Him, and knows not that he prays in vain, and that by the hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous' son, Euphorbus, whose love-locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid, the lion-hearted, Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet hisdoom. Phantoms, are they? Heroes of mist and mountain? Shadowsin a song? No: they are real. Action! What is action? It diesat the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. Theworld is made by the singer for the dreamer. 

ERNEST. While you talk it seems to me to be so. 

GILBERT. It is so in truth. On the mouldering citadel of Troylies the lizard like a thing of green bronze. The owl has builther nest in the palace of Priam. Over the empty plain wandershepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], asHomer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, thegreat galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, thelonely tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbingcorks of his net. Yet, every morning the doors of the city arethrown open, and on foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriorsgo forth to battle, and mock their enemies from behind their ironmasks. All day long the fight rages, and when night comes thetorches gleam by the tents, and the cresset burns in the hall. Those who live in marble or on painted panel, know of life but asingle exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its beauty, but limitedto one note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poetmakes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courageand despair, of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and goin glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet theyears pass by before them. They have their youth and theirmanhood, they are children, and they grow old. It is always dawnfor St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the window. Through thestill morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God's pain. The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from herbrow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where thelovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slimnaked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clearglass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon thechords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corotset free among the silver poplars of France. In eternal twilightthey move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous whitefeet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on. Butthose who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through thelabouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the nightfrom evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsettingcan note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment fortheir pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment ofperfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses nospiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing ofdeath, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets oflife and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequenceof time affects, and who possess not merely the present but thefuture, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realisedby Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body inits swiftness and the soul in its unrest. 

ERNEST. Yes; I see now what you mean. But, surely, the higher youplace the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank. 

GILBERT. Why so?

ERNEST. Because the best that he can give us will be but an echoof rich music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form. It may, indeed, be that life is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that itsmartyrdoms are mean and its heroisms ignoble; and that it is thefunction of Literature to create, from the rough material of actualexistence, a new world that will be more marvellous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, andthrough which common natures seek to realise their perfection. Butsurely, if this new world has been made by the spirit and touch ofa great artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect thatthere will be nothing left for the critic to do. I quiteunderstand now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far moredifficult to talk about a thing than to do it. But it seems to methat this sound and sensible maxim, which is really extremelysoothing to one's feelings, and should be adopted as its motto byevery Academy of Literature all over the world, applies only to therelations that exist between Art and Life, and not to any relationsthat there may be between Art and Criticism. 

GILBERT. But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. And just asartistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism isreally creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, infact, both creative and independent. 

ERNEST. Independent?

GILBERT. Yes; independent. Criticism is no more to be judged byany low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work ofpoet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to thework of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visibleworld of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and ofthought. He does not even require for the perfection of his artthe finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose. And justas out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of asmall country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l'Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a classic, and makea masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or of noimportance, such as the pictures in this year's Royal Academy, orin any year's Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris'spoems, M. Ohnet's novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or wastehis faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless inbeauty and instinct with intellectual subtlety. Why not? Dulnessis always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidityis the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave. To an artist so creative as the critic, what does subject-mattersignify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist and thepainter. Like them, he can find his motives everywhere. Treatmentis the test. There is nothing that has not in it suggestion orchallenge. 

ERNEST. But is Criticism really a creative art?

GILBERT. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and putsthem into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more canone say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creationwithin a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer andAEschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly tolife for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, andlegend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials thatothers have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginativeform and colour have been already added. Nay, more, I would saythat the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personalimpression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it hasleast reference to any standard external to itself, and is, infact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is nevertrammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignobleconsiderations of probability, that cowardly concession to thetedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever. One may appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the soul there isno appeal. 

ERNEST. From the soul?

GILBERT. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticismreally is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinatingthan history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is moredelightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and notabstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form ofautobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with thethoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deedor circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginativepassions of the mind. I am always amused by the silly vanity ofthose writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that theprimary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate work. The best that one can say of most modern creative artis that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so thecritic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct ofdelicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror orthrough the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaosand clamour of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished andthe veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his ownimpressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, bookswritten, and marble hewn into form. 

ERNEST. I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism. 

GILBERT. Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory weall revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina fromher Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not invain, the Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is tosee the object as in itself it really is. But this is a veryserious error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism's most perfectform, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks toreveal its own secret and not the secret of another. For thehighest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but asimpressive purely. 

ERNEST. But is that really so?

GILBERT. Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views onTurner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty andmajestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its nobleeloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure andcertain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is atleast as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets thatbleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery;greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely becauseits equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fullervariety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadencedlines, not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual andemotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I alwaysthink, even as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, careswhether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa somethingthat Lionardo never dreamed of? The painter may have been merelythe slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever Ipass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and standbefore that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirqueof fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea, ' I murmur tomyself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like thevampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets ofthe grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps theirfallen day about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Easternmerchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, asSt. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but asthe sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy withwhich it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged theeyelids and the hands. ' And I say to my friend, 'The presence thatthus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what inthe ways of a thousand years man had come to desire'; and heanswers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the worldare come, " and the eyelids are a little weary. '

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as wasthat flute-player's music that lent to the lips of La Giocondathose subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardowould have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all thethoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded thereinthat which they had of power to refine and make expressive theoutward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, thereverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition andimaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of theBorgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplatednone of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certainarrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious colour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason thatthe criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a newcreation. It does not confine itself--let us at least suppose sofor the moment--to discovering the real intention of the artist andaccepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaningof any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul ofhim who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, itis rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriadmeanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some newrelation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of ourlives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, havingprayed for, we fear that we may receive. The longer I study, Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible artsis, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it maybe marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectualintention on the part of the artist. For when the work is finishedit has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may delivera message far other than that which was put into its lips to say. Sometimes, when I listen to the overture to Tannhauser, I seemindeed to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass, and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him fromthe caverned hill. But at other times it speaks to me of athousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life, or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary ofloving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passionsthat man has not known, and so has sought for. To-night it mayfill one with that ??OS ?O? ??????O?, that Amour de l'Impossible, which falls like a madness on many who think they live securely andout of reach of harm, so that they sicken suddenly with the poisonof unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of what they maynot obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. To-morrow, like themusic of which Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian musicof the Greek, it may perform the office of a physician, and give usan anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and'bring the soul into harmony with all right things. ' And what istrue about music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as manymeanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When itshows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world. 

ERNEST. But is such work as you have talked about reallycriticism?

GILBERT. It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merelythe individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills withwonder a form which the artist may have left void, or notunderstood, or understood incompletely. 

ERNEST. The highest Criticism, then, is more creative thancreation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object asin itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe?

GILBERT. Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art issimply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need notnecessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing itcriticises. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that onecan put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever onechooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation itsuniversal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in histurn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were notpresent in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted thepanel or graved the gem. 

It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature ofthe highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that thepictures that the critic loves most to write about are those thatbelong to the anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenestaken out of literature or history. But this is not so. Indeed, pictures of this kind are far too intelligible. As a class, theyrank with illustrations, and, even considered from this point ofview are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but setdefinite bounds to it. For the domain of the painter is, as Isuggested before, widely different from that of the poet. To thelatter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not merelythe beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen toalso; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transientgladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfectcycle of thought. The painter is so far limited that it is onlythrough the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of thesoul; only through conventional images that he can handle ideas;only through its physical equivalents that he can deal withpsychology. And how inadequately does he do it then, asking us toaccept the torn turban of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of Lear! Yet it seemsas if nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly English paintersspend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain ofthe poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and strivingto render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what isinvisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degradedthe invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing notworth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet andpainter may not treat of the same subject. They have always doneso and will always do so. But while the poet can be pictorial ornot, as he chooses, the painter must be pictorial always. For apainter is limited, not to what he sees in nature, but to what uponcanvas may be seen. 

And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not reallyfascinate the critic. He will turn from them to such works as makehim brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtlequality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from themthere is an escape into a wider world. It is sometimes said thatthe tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise hisideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists isthat they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the idealis realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, andbecomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other thanitself. This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is theexplanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptorgladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actualdimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able toavoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mereimitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which wouldbe too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompletenessthat art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, notto the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but tothe aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason andrecognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to apure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, usestheir very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may beadded to the ultimate impression itself. You see, then, how it isthat the aesthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art thathave but one message to deliver, and having delivered it becomedumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggestreverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make allinterpretations true, and no interpretation final. Someresemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will have tothe work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be suchresemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that thepainter of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between Nature and the work of the decorative artist. Just ason the flowerless carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeedand are lovely to look on, though they are not reproduced invisible shape or line; just as the pearl and purple of the sea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at Venice; just as thevaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made gorgeousby the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail, thoughthe birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces thework that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and partof whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also themystery of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the problem of Art's unity. 

But I see it is time for supper. After we have discussed someChambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question ofthe critic considered in the light of the interpreter. 

ERNEST. Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally beallowed to see the object as in itself it really is. 

GILBERT. I am not quite sure. Perhaps I may admit it aftersupper. There is a subtle influence in supper. 

THE CRITIC AS ARTIST--WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OFDISCUSSING EVERYTHING

A DIALOGUE: Part II. Persons: the same. Scene: the same. 

ERNEST. The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect, and now let us return to the point at issue. 

GILBERT. Ah! don't let us do that. Conversation should toucheverything, but should concentrate itself on nothing. Let us talkabout Moral Indignation, its Cause and Cure, a subject on which Ithink of writing: or about The Survival of Thersites, as shown bythe English comic papers; or about any topic that may turn up. 

ERNEST. No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism. You havetold me that the highest criticism deals with art, not asexpressive, but as impressive purely, and is consequently bothcreative and independent, is in fact an art by itself, occupyingthe same relation to creative work that creative work does to thevisible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passionand of thought. Well, now, tell me, will not the critic besometimes a real interpreter?

GILBERT. Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses. He can pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as awhole, to an analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in thislower sphere, as I hold it to be, there are many delightful thingsto be said and done. Yet his object will not always be to explainthe work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, toraise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which isdear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are'terribly at ease in Zion. ' They propose to walk arm in arm withthe poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, 'Why should weread what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read theplays and the poems. That is enough. ' But an appreciation ofMilton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the rewardof consummate scholarship. And he who desires to understandShakespeare truly must understand the relations in whichShakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to theage of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with thehistory of the struggle for supremacy between the old classicalforms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe'sgreater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare'sdisposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditionsof theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and theliterary criticism of Shakespeare's day, its aims and modes andcanons; he must study the English language in its progress, andblank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must studythe Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creatorof the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens ofPericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the historyof European drama and the drama of the world. The critic willcertainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as ariddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealedby one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his provinceto intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make moremarvellous in the eyes of men. 

And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens. The critic willindeed be an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in thesense of one who simply repeats in another form a message that hasbeen put into his lips to say. For, just as it is only by contactwith the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gainsthat individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, bycurious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personalitythat the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into theinterpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the moresatisfying, the more convincing, and the more true. 

ERNEST. I would have said that personality would have been adisturbing element. 

GILBERT. No; it is an element of revelation. If you wish tounderstand others you must intensify your own individualism. 

ERNEST. What, then, is the result?

GILBERT. I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best bydefinite example. It seems to me that, while the literary criticstands of course first, as having the wider range, and largervision, and nobler material, each of the arts has a critic, as itwere, assigned to it. The actor is a critic of the drama. Heshows the poet's work under new conditions, and by a method specialto himself. He takes the written word, and action, gesture andvoice become the media of revelation. The singer or the player onlute and viol is the critic of music. The etcher of a picture robsthe painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a newmaterial its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and therelations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, forthe critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a formdifferent from that of the work itself, and the employment of a newmaterial is a critical as well as a creative element. Sculpture, too, has its critic, who may be either the carver of a gem, as hewas in Greek days, or some painter like Mantegna, who sought toreproduce on canvas the beauty of plastic line and the symphonicdignity of processional bas-relief. And in the case of all thesecreative critics of art it is evident that personality is anabsolute essential for any real interpretation. When Rubinsteinplays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us notmerely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethovenabsolutely--Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artisticnature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intensepersonality. When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have the sameexperience. His own individuality becomes a vital part of theinterpretation. People sometimes say that actors give us their ownHamlets, and not Shakespeare's; and this fallacy--for it is afallacy--is, I regret to say, repeated by that charming andgraceful writer who has lately deserted the turmoil of literaturefor the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the author of ObiterDicta. In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare'sHamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work ofart, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There areas many Hamlets as there are melancholies. 

ERNEST. As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?

GILBERT. Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is onlyto personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of thetwo comes right interpretative criticism. 

ERNEST. The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will giveno less than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows?

GILBERT. He will be always showing us the work of art in some newrelation to our age. He will always be reminding us that greatworks of art are living things--are, in fact, the only things thatlive. So much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that, as civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, theelect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, willgrow less and less interested in actual life, and WILL SEEK TO GAINTHEIR IMPRESSIONS ALMOST ENTIRELY FROM WHAT ART HAS TOUCHED. Forlife is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in thewrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horrorabout its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last eithertoo long, or not long enough. 

ERNEST. Poor life! Poor human life! Are you not even touched bythe tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence. 

GILBERT. Too quickly touched by them, I fear. For when one looksback upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it allseems to be a dream and an illusion. What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are theincredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed?What are the improbable things? The things that one has doneoneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, withbitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across somenoble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedyto our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble takeits place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silenceand of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, ordull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we hadonce so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed. 

ERNEST. Life then is a failure?

GILBERT. From the artistic point of view, certainly. And thechief thing that makes life a failure from this artistic point ofview is the thing that lends to life its sordid security, the factthat one can never repeat exactly the same emotion. How differentit is in the world of Art! On a shelf of the bookcase behind youstands the Divine Comedy, and I know that, if I open it at acertain place, I shall be filled with a fierce hatred of some onewho has never wronged me, or stirred by a great love for some onewhom I shall never see. There is no mood or passion that Artcannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her secret cansettle beforehand what our experiences are going to be. We canchoose our day and select our hour. We can say to ourselves, 'To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valleyof the shadow of death, ' and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscurewood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through the gateof the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold thehorror of another world. The hypocrites go by, with their paintedfaces and their cowls of gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless windsthat drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the hereticrending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain. We breakthe withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries. Out of a horn of fire Odysseusspeaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame the greatGhibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of thatbed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple air flythose who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, andin the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen ofbody into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; westop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams dayand night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channelsgush down the green Casentine hills. Sinon, the false Greek ofTroy, mocks at him. He smites him in the face, and they wrangle. We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides usand leads us away to that city turreted by giants where greatNimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in store for us, and wego to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart. Wetraverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boatthrough the slimy waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. Whenwe hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises usfor the bitterness of our scorn. We tread upon the cold crystal ofCocytus, in which traitors stick like straws in glass. Our footstrikes against the head of Bocca. He will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming skull. Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his face that he may weep alittle. We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered hisdolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass fromhim; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who more base than hewho has mercy for the condemned of God? In the jaws of Lucifer wesee the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men whoslew Caesar. We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the stars. 

In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holy mountainrises into the pure light of day. There is peace for us, and forthose who for a season abide in it there is some peace also, though, pale from the poison of the Maremma, Madonna Pia passesbefore us, and Ismene, with the sorrow of earth still lingeringabout her, is there. Soul after soul makes us share in somerepentance or some joy. He whom the mourning of his widow taughtto drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us of Nella praying inher lonely bed, and we learn from the mouth of Buonconte how asingle tear may save a dying sinner from the fiend. Sordello, thatnoble and disdainful Lombard, eyes us from afar like a couchantlion. When he learns that Virgil is one of Mantua's citizens, hefalls upon his neck, and when he learns that he is the singer ofRome he falls before his feet. In that valley whose grass andflowers are fairer than cleft emerald and Indian wood, and brighterthan scarlet and silver, they are singing who in the world werekings; but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg do not move to the musicof the others, and Philip of France beats his breast and Henry ofEngland sits alone. On and on we go, climbing the marvellousstair, and the stars become larger than their wont, and the song ofthe kings grows faint, and at length we reach the seven trees ofgold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise. In a griffin-drawnchariot appears one whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiledin white, and mantled in green, and robed in a vesture that iscoloured like live fire. The ancient flame wakes within us. Ourblood quickens through terrible pulses. We recognise her. It isBeatrice, the woman we have worshipped. The ice congealed aboutour heart melts. Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bowour forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned. Whenwe have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of thefountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistressof our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven. Out of thateternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us. Her beauty troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing thatfalls through water, she passes away, we gaze after her withwistful eyes. The sweet planet of Venus is full of lovers. Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the lady of Sordello's heart, isthere, and Folco, the passionate singer of Provence, who in sorrowfor Azalais forsook the world, and the Canaanitish harlot whosesoul was the first that Christ redeemed. Joachim of Flora standsin the sun, and, in the sun, Aquinas recounts the story of St. Francis and Bonaventure the story of St. Dominic. Through theburning rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida approaches. He tells us of thearrow that is shot from the bow of exile, and how salt tastes thebread of another, and how steep are the stairs in the house of astranger. In Saturn the soul sings not, and even she who guides usdare not smile. On a ladder of gold the flames rise and fall. Atlast, we see the pageant of the Mystical Rose. Beatrice fixes hereyes upon the face of God to turn them not again. The beatificvision is granted to us; we know the Love that moves the sun andall the stars. 

Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and makeourselves one with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altarwith him, and share his rapture and his scorn. And if we growtired of an antique time, and desire to realise our own age in allits weariness and sin, are there not books that can make us livemore in one single hour than life can make us live in a score ofshameful years? Close to your hand lies a little volume, bound insome Nile-green skin that has been powdered with gilded nenupharsand smoothed with hard ivory. It is the book that Gautier loved, it is Baudelaire's masterpiece. Open it at that sad madrigal thatbegins

Que m'importe que tu sois sage?Sois belle! et sois triste!

and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have neverworshipped joy. Pass on to the poem on the man who tortureshimself, let its subtle music steal into your brain and colour yourthoughts, and you will become for a moment what he was who wroteit; nay, not for a moment only, but for many barren moonlit nightsand sunless sterile days will a despair that is not your own makeits dwelling within you, and the misery of another gnaw your heartaway. Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one of itssecrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent of strangecrimes of which it is guiltless, and to make atonement for terriblepleasures that it has never known. And then, when you are tired ofthese flowers of evil, turn to the flowers that grow in the gardenof Perdita, and in their dew-drenched chalices cool your feveredbrow, and let their loveliness heal and restore your soul; or wakefrom his forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and bid thelover of Heliodore make you music, for he too has flowers in hissong, red pomegranate blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh, ringed daffodils and dark blue hyacinths, and marjoram and crinkledox-eyes. Dear to him was the perfume of the bean-field at evening, and dear to him the odorous eared-spikenard that grew on the Syrianhills, and the fresh green thyme, the wine-cup's charm. The feetof his love as she walked in the garden were like lilies set uponlilies. Softer than sleep-laden poppy petals were her lips, softerthan violets and as scented. The flame-like crocus sprang from thegrass to look at her. For her the slim narcissus stored the coolrain; and for her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that wooedthem. And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus was as fairas she was. 

It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion. We sickenwith the same maladies as the poets, and the singer lends us hispain. Dead lips have their message for us, and hearts that havefallen to dust can communicate their joy. We run to kiss thebleeding mouth of Fantine, and we follow Manon Lescaut over thewhole world. Ours is the love-madness of the Tyrian, and theterror of Orestes is ours also. There is no passion that we cannotfeel, no pleasure that we may not gratify, and we can choose thetime of our initiation and the time of our freedom also. Life!Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or ourexperience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent inits utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form andspirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic andcritical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for itswares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that ismonstrous and infinite. 

ERNEST. Must we go, then, to Art for everything?

GILBERT. For everything. Because Art does not hurt us. The tearsthat we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotionsthat it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are notwounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter. In the actuallife of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to alesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us bothpurifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great artcritic of the Greeks. It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Artonly, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actualexistence. This results not merely from the fact that nothing thatone can imagine is worth doing, and that one can imagineeverything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, like theforces of the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy. One can feel so much, and no more. And how can it matter with whatpleasure life tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks tomaim and mar one's soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of thosewho have never existed one has found the true secret of joy, andwept away one's tears over their deaths who, like Cordelia and thedaughter of Brabantio, can never die?

ERNEST. Stop a moment. It seems to me that in everything that youhave said there is something radically immoral. 

GILBERT. All art is immoral. 

ERNEST. All art?

GILBERT. Yes. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim ofart, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and ofthat practical organisation of life that we call society. Society, which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for theconcentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its owncontinuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightlydemands, of each of its citizens that he should contribute someform of productive labour to the common weal, and toil and travailthat the day's work may be done. Society often forgives thecriminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterileemotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and socompletely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadfulsocial ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one atPrivate Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, 'What are you doing?'whereas 'What are you thinking?' is the only question that anysingle civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper toanother. They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk. Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious. But some one should teach them that while, in the opinion ofsociety, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen canbe guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the properoccupation of man. 

ERNEST. Contemplation?

GILBERT. Contemplation. I said to you some time ago that it wasfar more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. Let me sayto you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing inthe world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy. To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblestform of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holinessled the saint and the mystic of mediaeval days. 

ERNEST. We exist, then, to do nothing?

GILBERT. It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action islimited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of himwho sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at oncetoo cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and toocurious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations aboutlife in exchange for life itself. To us the citta divina iscolourless, and the fruitio Dei without meaning. Metaphysics donot satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date. The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes 'thespectator of all time and of all existence' is not really an idealworld, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter it, westarve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts of thecity of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded byIgnorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in ournature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their legacyto us is the scepticism of which they were afraid. Had they put itinto words, it might not live within us as thought. No, Ernest, no. We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to belearned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher, andthe mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formlessintangible Being which Plato rates so high? What to us is theIllumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Bohme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg'sblinded eyes? Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of onedaffodil of the field, far less than the meanest of the visiblearts, for, just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art ismind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to bothsense and soul alike. To the aesthetic temperament the vague isalways repellent. The Greeks were a nation of artists, becausethey were spared the sense of the infinite. Like Aristotle, likeGoethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete, and nothingbut the concrete can satisfy us. 

ERNEST. What then do you propose?

GILBERT. It seems to me that with the development of the criticalspirit we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, butthe collective life of the race, and so to make ourselvesabsolutely modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity. Forhe to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knowsnothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenthcentury, one must realise every century that has preceded it andthat has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneselfone must know all about others. There must be no mood with whichone cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot makealive. Is this impossible? I think not. By revealing to us theabsolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self-imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, thescientific principle of Heredity has become, as it were, thewarrant for the contemplative life. It has shown us that we arenever less free than when we try to act. It has hemmed us roundwith the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecyof our doom. We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may notsee it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul. It is Nemesiswithout her mask. It is the last of the Fates, and the mostterrible. It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know. 

And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it hasrobbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in thesubjective sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, thisterrible shadow, with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strangetemperaments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours andchill moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts of thoughtsthat are at variance with each other, and passions that war againstthemselves. And so, it is not our own life that we live, but thelives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no singlespiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created forour service, and entering into us for our joy. It is somethingthat has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres hasmade its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories ofcurious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter. It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what weknow we cannot gain. One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us. It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to usby the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordidclaims are marring the perfection of our development. It can helpus to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into otherages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air. It can teachus how to escape from our experience, and to realise theexperiences of those who are greater than we are. The pain ofLeopardi crying out against life becomes our pain. Theocritusblows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph andshepherd. In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before thehounds, and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of theQueen. We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowlof Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shameinto song. We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes, and when wewander with Endymion the Moon grows amorous of our youth. Ours isthe anguish of Atys, and ours the weak rage and noble sorrows ofthe Dane. Do you think that it is the imagination that enables usto live these countless lives? Yes: it is the imagination; andthe imagination is the result of heredity. It is simplyconcentrated race-experience. 

ERNEST. But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?

GILBERT. The culture that this transmission of racial experiencesmakes possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may be said to be one with it. For who is the truecritic but he who bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, andfeelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought isalien, no emotional impulse obscure? And who the true man ofculture, if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious rejectionhas made instinct self-conscious and intelligent, and can separatethe work that has distinction from the work that has it not, and soby contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets ofstyle and school, and understands their meanings, and listens totheir voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiositywhich is the real root, as it is the real flower, of theintellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity, and, having learned 'the best that is known and thought in the world, 'lives--it is not fanciful to say so--with those who are theImmortals. 

Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aimnot DOING but BEING, and not BEING merely, but BECOMING--that iswhat the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: eitherbrooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, asEpicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator thetragicomedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might livelike them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotionsthe varied scenes that man and nature afford. We might makeourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and becomeperfect by the rejection of energy. It has often seemed to me thatBrowning felt something of this. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet intoactive life, and makes him realise his mission by effort. Browningmight have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission bythought. Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning. Hemade the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy, and looked onaction as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at anyrate, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is the trueideal. From the high tower of Thought we can look out at theworld. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic criticcontemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can piercebetween the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He hasdiscovered how to live. 

Is such a mode of life immoral? Yes: all the arts are immoral, except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek toexcite to action of evil or of good. For action of every kindbelongs to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply tocreate a mood. Is such a mode of life unpractical? Ah! it is notso easy to be unpractical as the ignorant Philistine imagines. Itwere well for England if it were so. There is no country in theworld so much in need of unpractical people as this country ofours. With us, Thought is degraded by its constant associationwith practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actualexistence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poornarrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportantsection of the community among whom he has cast his lot, canseriously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectualjudgment about any one thing? Each of the professions means aprejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to takesides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that theybecome absolutely stupid. And, harsh though it may sound, I cannothelp saying that such people deserve their doom. The sure way ofknowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful. 

ERNEST. A charming doctrine, Gilbert. 

GILBERT. I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minormerit of being true. That the desire to do good to others producesa plentiful crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which it isthe cause. The prig is a very interesting psychological study, andthough of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still tohave a pose at all is something. It is a formal recognition of theimportance of treating life from a definite and reasonedstandpoint. That Humanitarian Sympathy wars against Nature, bysecuring the survival of the failure, may make the man of scienceloathe its facile virtues. The political economist may cry outagainst it for putting the improvident on the same level as theprovident, and so robbing life of the strongest, because mostsordid, incentive to industry. But, in the eyes of the thinker, the real harm that emotional sympathy does is that it limitsknowledge, and so prevents us from solving any single socialproblem. We are trying at present to stave off the coming crisis, the coming revolution as my friends the Fabianists call it, bymeans of doles and alms. Well, when the revolution or crisisarrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall know nothing. Andso, Ernest, let us not be deceived. England will never becivilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There ismore than one of her colonies that she might with advantagesurrender for so fair a land. What we want are unpractical peoplewho see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day. Those who tryto lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It isthrough the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways ofthe gods must be prepared. 

But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy ofbeholding, and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, thereis something that is egotistic. If you think so, do not say so. It takes a thoroughly selfish age, like our own, to deify self-sacrifice. It takes a thoroughly grasping age, such as that inwhich we live, to set above the fine intellectual virtues, thoseshallow and emotional virtues that are an immediate practicalbenefit to itself. They miss their aim, too, these philanthropistsand sentimentalists of our day, who are always chattering to oneabout one's duty to one's neighbour. For the development of therace depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard isinstantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost. If you meet atdinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself--a raretype in our time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be metwith--you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high idealhas for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But oh! my dearErnest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying toeducate others! What a dreadful experience that is! How appallingis that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habitof imparting opinions! How limited in range the creature's mindproves to be! How it wearies us, and must weary himself, with itsendless repetitions and sickly reiteration! How lacking it is inany element of intellectual growth! In what a vicious circle italways moves!

ERNEST. You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert. Have you hadthis dreadful experience, as you call it, lately?

 GILBERT. Few of us escape it. People say that the schoolmaster isabroad. I wish to goodness he were. But the type of which, afterall, he is only one, and certainly the least important, of therepresentatives, seems to me to be really dominating our lives; andjust as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is sooccupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had anytime to educate himself. No, Ernest, self-culture is the trueideal of man. Goethe saw it, and the immediate debt that we owe toGoethe is greater than the debt we owe to any man since Greek days. The Greeks saw it, and have left us, as their legacy to modernthought, the conception of the contemplative life as well as thecritical method by which alone can that life be truly realised. Itwas the one thing that made the Renaissance great, and gave usHumanism. It is the one thing that could make our own age greatalso; for the real weakness of England lies, not in incompletearmaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creepsthrough sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsomecourts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional andnot intellectual. 

I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult ofattainment, still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years tocome, unpopular with the crowd. It is so easy for people to havesympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to havesympathy with thought. Indeed, so little do ordinary peopleunderstand what thought really is, that they seem to imagine that, when they have said that a theory is dangerous, they havepronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such theories thathave any true intellectual value. An idea that is not dangerous isunworthy of being called an idea at all. 

ERNEST. Gilbert, you bewilder me. You have told me that all artis, in its essence, immoral. Are you going to tell me now that allthought is, in its essence, dangerous?

GILBERT. Yes, in the practical sphere it is so. The security ofsociety lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis ofthe stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the completeabsence of any intelligence amongst its members. The greatmajority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselvesnaturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them tothe dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusionof the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who alwaysloses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance withthe dictates of reason. But let us turn from the practical sphere, and say no more about the wicked philanthropists, who, indeed, maywell be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of the YellowRiver Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such well-meaningand offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneousvirtue that there is in man. They are a wearisome topic, and I amanxious to get back to the sphere in which criticism is free. 

ERNEST. The sphere of the intellect?

GILBERT. Yes. You remember that I spoke of the critic as being inhis own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may bemerely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestionfor some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise withequal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through theuse of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful andmore perfect. Well, you seemed to be a little sceptical about thetheory. But perhaps I wronged you?

ERNEST. I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit thatI feel very strongly that such work as you describe the criticproducing--and creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted tobe--is, of necessity, purely subjective, whereas the greatest workis objective always, objective and impersonal. 

GILBERT. The difference between objective and subjective work isone of external form merely. It is accidental, not essential. Allartistic creation is absolutely subjective. The very landscapethat Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his ownmind; and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seemto us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from thepoets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimateanalysis, simply the poets themselves, not as they thought theywere, but as they thought they were not; and by such thinking camein strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to be. Forout of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creationwhat in the creator was not. Nay, I would say that the moreobjective a creation appears to be, the more subjective it reallyis. Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in thewhite streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival housesbite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet cameout of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion. They were elementsof his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses that stirredso strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to sufferthem to realise their energy, not on the lower plane of actuallife, where they would have been trammelled and constrained and somade imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art where Love canindeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can stab theeavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave, andmake a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one's father'sspirit, beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in completesteel from misty wall to wall. Action being limited would haveleft Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it isbecause he did nothing that he has been able to achieve everything, so it is because he never speaks to us of himself in his plays thathis plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true natureand temperament far more completely than do those strange andexquisite sonnets, even, in which he bares to crystal eyes thesecret closet of his heart. Yes, the objective form is the mostsubjective in matter. Man is least himself when he talks in hisown person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. 

ERNEST. The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form, will necessarily be less able fully to express himself than theartist, who has always at his disposal the forms that areimpersonal and objective. 

GILBERT. Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if herecognises that each mode of criticism is, in its highestdevelopment, simply a mood, and that we are never more true toourselves than when we are inconsistent. The aesthetic critic, constant only to the principle of beauty in all things, will everbe looking for fresh impressions, winning from the various schoolsthe secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before foreignaltars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods. Whatother people call one's past has, no doubt, everything to do withthem, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself. The man whoregards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to lookforward to. When one has found expression for a mood, one has donewith it. You laugh; but believe me it is so. Yesterday it wasRealism that charmed one. One gained from it that nouveau frissonwhich it was its aim to produce. One analysed it, explained it, and wearied of it. At sunset came the Luministe in painting, andthe Symboliste in poetry, and the spirit of mediaevalism, thatspirit which belongs not to time but to temperament, woke suddenlyin wounded Russia, and stirred us for a moment by the terriblefascination of pain. To-day the cry is for Romance, and alreadythe leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple hill-topswalks Beauty with slim gilded feet. The old modes of creationlinger, of course. The artists reproduce either themselves or eachother, with wearisome iteration. But Criticism is always movingon, and the critic is always developing. 

Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form ofexpression. The method of the drama is his, as well as the methodof the epos. He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talkingto Marvel on the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney andLord Brooke discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks; oradopt narration, as Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whoseImaginary Portraits--is not that the title of the book?--presentsto us, under the fanciful guise of fiction, some fine and exquisitepiece of criticism, one on the painter Watteau, another on thephilosophy of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan elements of the earlyRenaissance, and the last, and in some respects the mostsuggestive, on the source of that Aufklarung, that enlighteningwhich dawned on Germany in the last century, and to which our ownculture owes so great a debt. Dialogue, certainly, that wonderfulliterary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian toGiordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whomCarlyle took such delight, the creative critics of the world havealways employed, can never lose for the thinker its attraction as amode of expression. By its means he can both reveal and concealhimself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood. By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, andshow it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gainingin this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comesfrom those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the centralidea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fullercompleteness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of thedelicate charm of chance. 

ERNEST. By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophisticalargument. 

GILBERT. Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficultto convert oneself. To arrive at what one really believes, onemust speak through lips different from one's own. To know thetruth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what is Truth?In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters ofart, it is one's last mood. And you see now, Ernest, that thecritic has at his disposal as many objective forms of expression asthe artist has. Ruskin put his criticism into imaginative prose, and is superb in his changes and contradictions; and Browning puthis into blank verse and made painter and poet yield us theirsecret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater fiction, andRossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione andthe design of Ingres, and his own design and colour also, feeling, with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that theultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium thatof words. 

ERNEST. Well, now that you have settled that the critic has at hisdisposal all objective forms, I wish you would tell me what are thequalities that should characterise the true critic. 

GILBERT. What would you say they were?

ERNEST. Well, I should say that a critic should above all thingsbe fair. 

GILBERT. Ah! not fair. A critic cannot be fair in the ordinarysense of the word. It is only about things that do not interestone that one can give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubtthe reason why an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who seesabsolutely nothing at all. Art is a passion, and, in matters ofart, Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluidrather than fixed, and, depending upon fine moods and exquisitemoments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a scientificformula or a theological dogma. It is to the soul that Art speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of thebody. One should, of course, have no prejudices; but, as a greatFrenchman remarked a hundred years ago, it is one's business insuch matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences oneceases to be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can equally andimpartially admire all schools of Art. No; fairness is not one ofthe qualities of the true critic. It is not even a condition ofcriticism. Each form of Art with which we come in contactdominates us for the moment to the exclusion of every other form. We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret. For the time, we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed. 

ERNEST. The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will henot?

GILBERT. Rational? There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest. One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally. For Art, as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener andspectator a form of divine madness. It does not spring frominspiration, but it makes others inspired. Reason is not thefaculty to which it appeals. If one loves Art at all, one mustlove it beyond all other things in the world, and against suchlove, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out. There isnothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to besane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will alwaysseem to the world to be pure visionaries. 

ERNEST. Well, at least, the critic will be sincere. 

GILBERT. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great dealof it is absolutely fatal. The true critic will, indeed, always besincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he willseek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will neversuffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought orstereotyped mode of looking at things. He will realise himself inmany forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever becurious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Throughconstant change, and through constant change alone, he will findhis true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his ownopinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth. Youmust not be frightened by word, Ernest. What people callinsincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply ourpersonalities. 

ERNEST. I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions. 

GILBERT. Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerityand fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least on theborderland of morals, and the first condition of criticism is thatthe critic should be able to recognise that the sphere of Art andthe sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. Whenthey are confused, Chaos has come again. They are too oftenconfused in England now, and though our modern Puritans cannotdestroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinaryprurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment. It ischiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people findexpression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favourof modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. Bycarefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, itshows us of what very little importance such events really are. Byinvariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand whatthings are requisite for culture, and what are not. But it shouldnot allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art. When itdoes this it stultifies itself. And yet Tartuffe's articles andChadband's notes do this good, at least. They serve to show howextremely limited is the area over which ethics, and ethicalconsiderations, can claim to exercise influence. Science is out ofthe reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed uponthings beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belongthe lower and less intellectual spheres. However, let thesemouthing Puritans pass; they have their comic side. Who can helplaughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limitthe subject-matter at the disposal of the artist? Some limitationmight well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of ournewspapers and newspaper writers. For they give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degradingavidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with theconscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaicdetails of the doings of people of absolutely no interestwhatsoever. But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yettransforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles ofpity or of awe, and shows their colour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical import also, and builds out of them a worldmore real than reality itself, and of loftier and more nobleimport--who shall set limits to him? Not the apostles of that newJournalism which is but the old vulgarity 'writ large. ' Not theapostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine of thehypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly. The mere suggestionis ridiculous. Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed tothe discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for thetrue critic. 

ERNEST. And what are they? Tell me yourself. 

GILBERT. Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic--atemperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the variousimpressions that beauty gives us. Under what conditions, and bywhat means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not discuss at present. It is sufficient to note that itexists, and that there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from theother senses and above them, separate from the reason and of noblerimport, separate from the soul and of equal value--a sense thatleads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as I think, tocontemplate merely. But to be purified and made perfect, thissense requires some form of exquisite environment. Without this itstarves, or is dulled. You remember that lovely passage in whichPlato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with whatinsistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings, tellingus how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights andsounds, so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soulfor the reception of the beauty that is spiritual. Insensibly, andwithout knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love ofbeauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the trueaim of education. By slow degrees there is to be engendered in himsuch a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choosethe good in preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgarand discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all thatpossesses grace and charm and loveliness. Ultimately, in its duecourse, this taste is to become critical and self-conscious, but atfirst it is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and 'he whohas received this true culture of the inner man will with clear andcertain vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature, and with a taste that cannot err, while he praises, and finds hispleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and sobecomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, nowin the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reasonwhy': and so, when, later on, the critical and self-consciousspirit develops in him, he 'will recognise and salute it as afriend with whom his education has made him long familiar. ' I needhardly say, Ernest, how far we in England have fallen short of thisideal, and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossyface of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that thetrue aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methodsby which education should work were the development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit. 

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, andthe dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when onecan loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to someflute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in thegreen meadow, among the strange snake-spotted fritillaries, andwatch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gildedvanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaultedceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway ofLaud's building in the College of St. John. Nor is it merely atOxford, or Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed andtrained and perfected. All over England there is a Renaissance ofthe decorative Arts. Ugliness has had its day. Even in the housesof the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are notrich have been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in. Caliban, poor noisy Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to makemows at a thing, the thing ceases to exist. But if he mocks nolonger, it is because he has been met with mockery, swifter andkeener than his own, and for a moment has been bitterly schooledinto that silence which should seal for ever his uncouth distortedlips. What has been done up to now, has been chiefly in theclearing of the way. It is always more difficult to destroy thanit is to create, and when what one has to destroy is vulgarity andstupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage butalso contempt. Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure, done. We have got rid of what was bad. We have now to make whatis beautiful. And though the mission of the aesthetic movement isto lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet, asthe creative instinct is strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt wholeads in art, there is no reason why in future years this strangeRenaissance should not become almost as mighty in its way as wasthat new birth of Art that woke many centuries ago in the cities ofItaly. 

Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to thedecorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts thatteach us. Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to livewith; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Theirmeaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. Oneexhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then theybecome as tedious as one's relations. I am very fond of the workof many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London. Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school. Some oftheir arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of theunapproachable beauty of Gautier's immortal Symphonie en BlancMajeur, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which mayhave suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their bestpictures. For a class that welcomes the incompetent withsympathetic eagerness, and that confuses the bizarre with thebeautiful, and vulgarity with truth, they are extremelyaccomplished. They can do etchings that have the brilliancy ofepigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes, and as fortheir portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them, noone can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charmwhich belongs to works of pure fiction. But even theImpressionists, earnest and industrious as they are, will not do. I like them. Their white keynote, with its variations in lilac, was an era in colour. Though the moment does not make the man, themoment certainly makes the Impressionist, and for the moment inart, and the 'moment's monument, ' as Rossetti phrased it, what maynot be said? They are suggestive also. If they have not openedthe eyes of the blind, they have at least given great encouragementto the short-sighted, and while their leaders may have all theinexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to beever sensible. Yet they will insist on treating painting as if itwere a mode of autobiography invented for the use of theilliterate, and are always prating to us on their coarse grittycanvases of their unnecessary selves and their unnecessaryopinions, and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine contemptof nature which is the best and only modest thing about them. Onetires, at the end, of the work of individuals whose individualityis always noisy, and generally uninteresting. There is far more tobe said in favour of that newer school at Paris, the Archaicistes, as they call themselves, who, refusing to leave the artist entirelyat the mercy of the weather, do not find the ideal of art in mereatmospheric effect, but seek rather for the imaginative beauty ofdesign and the loveliness of fair colour, and rejecting the tediousrealism of those who merely paint what they see, try to seesomething worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual andphysical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which isas far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid inartistic purpose. They, at any rate, work under those decorativeconditions that each art requires for its perfection, and havesufficient aesthetic instinct to regret those sordid and stupidlimitations of absolute modernity of form which have proved theruin of so many of the Impressionists. Still, the art that isfrankly decorative is the art to live with. It is, of all ourvisible arts, the one art that creates in us both mood andtemperament. Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied withdefinite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines andmasses becomes mirrored in the mind. The repetitions of patterngive us rest. The marvels of design stir the imagination. In themere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elementsof culture. Nor is this all. By its deliberate rejection ofNature as the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative methodof the ordinary painter, decorative art not merely prepares thesoul for the reception of true imaginative work, but develops in itthat sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than ofcritical achievement. For the real artist is he who proceeds, notfrom feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. Hedoes not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, 'I willput my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines, ' but, realisingthe beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes ofmusic and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is tofill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. Fromtime to time the world cries out against some charming artisticpoet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has'nothing to say. ' But if he had something to say, he wouldprobably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is justbecause he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. Hegains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artistshould. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occursis spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to beinartistic. 

ERNEST. I wonder do you really believe what you say?

GILBERT. Why should you wonder? It is not merely in art that thebody is the soul. In every sphere of life Form is the beginning ofthings. The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Platotells us, both rhythm and harmony into the mind. Forms are thefood of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments ofsincerity that make us admire and know the man. He was right, though he may not have known how terribly right he was. The Creedsare believed, not because they are rational, but because they arerepeated. Yes: Form is everything. It is the secret of life. Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Findexpression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wishto love? Use Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearningfrom which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a griefthat corrodes your heart? Steep yourself in the Language of grief, learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and youwill find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and thatForm, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain. And so, to return to the sphere of Art, it is Form that creates notmerely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under theirconditions of beauty. Start with the worship of form, and there isno secret in art that will not be revealed to you, and rememberthat in criticism, as in creation, temperament is everything, andthat it is, not by the time of their production, but by thetemperaments to which they appeal, that the schools of art shouldbe historically grouped. 

ERNEST. Your theory of education is delightful. But whatinfluence will your critic, brought up in these exquisitesurroundings, possess? Do you really think that any artist is everaffected by criticism?

GILBERT. The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of hisown existence. He will represent the flawless type. In him theculture of the century will see itself realised. You must not askof him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself. Thedemand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feelitself alive. The critic may, indeed, desire to exerciseinfluence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with theindividual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake intoconsciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it new desiresand appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his noblermoods. The actual art of to-day will occupy him less than the artof to-morrow, far less than the art of yesterday, and as for thisor that person at present toiling away, what do the industriousmatter? They do their best, no doubt, and consequently we get theworst from them. It is always with the best intentions that theworst work is done. And besides, my dear Ernest, when a manreaches the age of forty, or becomes a Royal Academician, or iselected a member of the Athenaeum Club, or is recognised as apopular novelist, whose books are in great demand at suburbanrailway stations, one may have the amusement of exposing him, butone cannot have the pleasure of reforming him. And this is, I daresay, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformationis a much more painful process than punishment, is indeedpunishment in its most aggravated and moral form--a fact whichaccounts for our entire failure as a community to reclaim thatinteresting phenomenon who is called the confirmed criminal. 

ERNEST. But may it not be that the poet is the best judge ofpoetry, and the painter of painting? Each art must appealprimarily to the artist who works in it. His judgment will surelybe the most valuable?

GILBERT. The appeal of all art is simply to the artistictemperament. Art does not address herself to the specialist. Herclaim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestationsshe is one. Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist isthe best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge ofother people's work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of hisown. That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his own goal. Thewheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him. Thegods are hidden from each other. They can recognise theirworshippers. That is all. 

ERNEST. You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty ofwork different from his own. 

GILBERT. It is impossible for him to do so. Wordsworth saw inEndymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with hisdislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth's message, beingrepelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate humanincomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloudnor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden fromhim. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles. Thosedroppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with hissense of the grand style, could not understand the method ofShakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method ofGainsborough. Bad artists always admire each other's work. Theycall it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a trulygreat artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beautyfashioned, under any conditions other than those that he hasselected. Creation employs all its critical faculty within its ownsphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others. It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the properjudge of it. 

ERNEST. Do you really mean that?

GILBERT. Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens, thevision. 

ERNEST. But what about technique? Surely each art has itsseparate technique?

GILBERT. Certainly: each art has its grammar and its materials. There is no mystery about either, and the incompetent can always becorrect. But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed andcertain, to find their true realisation they must be touched by theimagination into such beauty that they will seem an exception, eachone of them. Technique is really personality. That is the reasonwhy the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, andwhy the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music--his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting--that which he himselfemploys. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, canappreciate all forms and modes. It is to him that Art makes herappeal. 

ERNEST. Well, I think I have put all my questions to you. And nowI must admit -

GILBERT. Ah! don't say that you agree with me. When people agreewith me I always feel that I must be wrong. 

ERNEST. In that case I certainly won't tell you whether I agreewith you or not. But I will put another question. You haveexplained to me that criticism is a creative art. What future hasit?

GILBERT. It is to criticism that the future belongs. The subject-matter at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limitedin extent and variety. Providence and Mr. Walter Besant haveexhausted the obvious. If creation is to last at all, it can onlydo so on the condition of becoming far more critical than it is atpresent. The old roads and dusty highways have been traversed toooften. Their charm has been worn away by plodding feet, and theyhave lost that element of novelty or surprise which is so essentialfor romance. He who would stir us now by fiction must either giveus an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man inits innermost workings. The first is for the moment being done forus by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. As one turns over the pages of hisPlain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under apalm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The brightcolours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The jaded, second-rateAnglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an oddjournalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of viewof literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knowsvulgarity better than any one has ever known it. Dickens knew itsclothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its essence and itsseriousness. He is our first authority on the second-rate, and hasseen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds arereal works of art. As for the second condition, we have hadBrowning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much to bedone in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say thatfiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We have merely touched thesurface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of thebrain there are stored away things more marvellous and moreterrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of LeRouge et le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its mostsecret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins. Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and itis possible that a further development of the habit ofintrospection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which itseeks to supply fresh material. I myself am inclined to think thatcreation is doomed. It springs from too primitive, too natural animpulse. However this may be, it is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while thesubject-matter of criticism increases daily. There are always newattitudes for the mind, and new points of view. The duty ofimposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances. There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it isnow. It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious ofthe point at which it has arrived. 

Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism. You mightjust as well have asked me the use of thought. It is Criticism, asArnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of theage. It is Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, thatmakes the mind a fine instrument. We, in our educational system, have burdened the memory with a load of unconnected facts, andlaboriously striven to impart our laboriously-acquired knowledge. We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow. It has never occurred to us to try and develop in the mind a moresubtle quality of apprehension and discernment. The Greeks didthis, and when we come in contact with the Greek criticalintellect, we cannot but be conscious that, while our subject-matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs, theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can beinterpreted. England has done one thing; it has invented andestablished Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise theignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity ofphysical force. But Wisdom has always been hidden from it. Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarseand undeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is the growthof the critical instinct. 

It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culturepossible. It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, anddistils it into a finer essence. Who that desires to retain anysense of form could struggle through the monstrous multitudinousbooks that the world has produced, books in which thought stammersor ignorance brawls? The thread that is to guide us across thewearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism. Nay more, wherethere is no record, and history is either lost, or was neverwritten, Criticism can re-create the past for us from the verysmallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as the man ofscience can from some tiny bone, or the mere impress of a foot upona rock, re-create for us the winged dragon or Titan lizard thatonce made the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth outof his cave, and make Leviathan swim once more across the startledsea. Prehistoric history belongs to the philological andarchaeological critic. It is to him that the origins of things arerevealed. The self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly alwaysmisleading. Through philological criticism alone we know more ofthe centuries of which no actual record has been preserved, than wedo of the centuries that have left us their scrolls. It can do forus what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics. It cangive us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming. Itcan do for us what History cannot do. It can tell us what manthought before he learned how to write. You have asked me aboutthe influence of Criticism. I think I have answered that questionalready; but there is this also to be said. It is Criticism thatmakes us cosmopolitan. The Manchester school tried to make menrealise the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the commercialadvantages of peace. It sought to degrade the wonderful world intoa common market-place for the buyer and the seller. It addresseditself to the lowest instincts, and it failed. War followed uponwar, and the tradesman's creed did not prevent France and Germanyfrom clashing together in blood-stained battle. There are othersof our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, orto the shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics. They have their Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and their proposals for unarmed International Arbitration, sopopular among those who have never read history. But mereemotional sympathy will not do. It is too variable, and tooclosely connected with the passions; and a board of arbitratorswho, for the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived of thepower of putting their decisions into execution, will not be ofmuch avail. There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and thatis Justice without her sword in her hand. When Right is not Might, it is Evil. 

No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than thegreed for gain could do so. It is only by the cultivation of thehabit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to risesuperior to race-prejudices. Goethe--you will not misunderstandwhat I say--was a German of the Germans. He loved his country--noman more so. Its people were dear to him; and he led them. Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard andcornfield, his lips were silent. 'How can one write songs ofhatred without hating?' he said to Eckermann, 'and how could I, towhom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nationwhich is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I oweso great a part of my own cultivation?' This note, sounded in themodern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the startingpoint for the cosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism willannihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of thehuman mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to makewar upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking todestroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its mostimportant element. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it willalways have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, itwill cease to be popular. The change will of course be slow, andpeople will not be conscious of it. They will not say 'We will notwar against France because her prose is perfect, ' but because theprose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land. Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds farcloser than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding. 

Nor is this all. It is Criticism that, recognising no position asfinal, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths ofany sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper whichloves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because itknows it to be unattainable. How little we have of this temper inEngland, and how much we need it! The English mind is always in arage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupidquarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. Itwas reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example ofthat 'sweet reasonableness' of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect. The author of the Origin of Specieshad, at any rate, the philosophic temper. If one contemplates theordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel thecontempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne. We aredominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity. Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practicallyunknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it isnot the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sinexcept stupidity. 

ERNEST. Ah! what an antinomian you are!

GILBERT. The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomianalways. To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount ofsordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certainlow passion for middle-class respectability. Aesthetics are higherthan ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discernthe beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of theindividual, than a sense of right and wrong. Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in thesphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety andchange. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, weattain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, theperfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because theymake the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can doeverything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish fornothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity sodivine that it is able to transform into elements of a richerexperience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or withthe uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is thisdangerous? Yes; it is dangerous--all ideas, as I told you, are so. But the night wearies, and the light flickers in the lamp. Onemore thing I cannot help saying to you. You have spoken againstCriticism as being a sterile thing. The nineteenth century is aturning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, theother the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is tomiss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progressof the world. Creation is always behind the age. It is Criticismthat leads us. The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one. 

ERNEST. And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom thisspirit possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?

GILBERT. Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweetpensive Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel andamaranth are blooming, he will sit contented 'in that deep, motionless quiet which mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy. ' Hewill look out upon the world and know its secret. By contact withdivine things he will become divine. His will be the perfect life, and his only. 

ERNEST. You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert. You have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thingthan to do it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficultthing in the world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, andall thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative thancreation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals inthe work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it isexactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judgeof it; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and notrational. My friend, you are a dreamer. 

GILBERT. Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can onlyfind his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees thedawn before the rest of the world. 

ERNEST. His punishment?

GILBERT. And his reward. But, see, it is dawn already. Draw backthe curtains and open the windows wide. How cool the morning airis! Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. Afaint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the whitehouses are purple. It is too late to sleep. Let us go down toCovent Garden and look at the roses. Come! I am tired of thought. 

THE TRUTH OF MASKS--A NOTE ON ILLUSION

In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently beenmade on that splendour of mounting which now characterises ourShakespearian revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitlyassumed by the critics that Shakespeare himself was more or lessindifferent to the costumes of his actors, and that, could he seeMrs. Langtry's production of Antony and Cleopatra, he wouldprobably say that the play, and the play only, is the thing, andthat everything else is leather and prunella. While, as regardsany historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article in theNineteenth Century, has laid it down as a dogma of art thatarchaeology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any ofShakespeare's plays, and the attempt to introduce it one of thestupidest pedantries of an age of prigs. 

Lord Lytton's position I shall examine later on; but, as regardsthe theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about thecostume-wardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to studyShakespeare's method will see that there is absolutely no dramatistof the French, English, or Athenian stage who relies so much forhis illusionist effects on the dress of his actors as Shakespearedoes himself. 

Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beautyof costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques anddances, purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give theeye; and we have still his stage-directions for the three greatprocessions in Henry the Eighth, directions which are characterisedby the most extraordinary elaborateness of detail down to thecollars of S. S. And the pearls in Anne Boleyn's hair. Indeed itwould be quite easy for a modern manager to reproduce thesepageants absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed; and soaccurate were they that one of the court officials of the time, writing an account of the last performance of the play at the GlobeTheatre to a friend, actually complains of their realisticcharacter, notably of the production on the stage of the Knights ofthe Garter in the robes and insignia of the order as beingcalculated to bring ridicule on the real ceremonies; much in thesame spirit in which the French Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful actor, M. Christian, from appearing inuniform, on the plea that it was prejudicial to the glory of thearmy that a colonel should be caricatured. And elsewhere thegorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English stage underShakespeare's influence was attacked by the contemporary critics, not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic tendenciesof realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are always thelast refuge of people who have no sense of beauty. 

The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not thatShakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in addingpicturesqueness to poetry, but that he saw how important costume isas a means of producing certain dramatic effects. Many of hisplays, such as Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, The TwoGentleman of Verona, All's Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline, andothers, depend for their illusion on the character of the variousdresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the delightful scene inHenry the Sixth, on the modern miracles of healing by faith, losesall its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and thedenoument of the Merry Wives of Windsor hinges on the colour ofAnne Page's gown. As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguisesthe instances are almost numberless. Posthumus hides his passionunder a peasant's garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot'srags; Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attiredin 'all points as a man'; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogento the Youth Fidele; Jessica flees from her father's house in boy'sdress, and Julia ties up her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady as ashepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim; Prince Hal and Poins appearfirst as footpads in buckram suits, and then in white aprons andleather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as for Falstaff, does he not come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as Herne theHunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?

Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode ofintensifying dramatic situation less numerous. After slaughter ofDuncan, Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep;Timon ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richardflatters the London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and, as soon as he has stepped in blood to the throne, marchesthrough the streets in crown and George and Garter; the climax ofThe Tempest is reached when Prospero, throwing off his enchanter'srobes, sends Ariel for his hat and rapier, and reveals himself asthe great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in Hamlet changes hismystical apparel to produce different effects; and as for Juliet, amodern playwright would probably have laid her out in her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare arraysher in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault'a feasting presence full of light, ' turns the tomb into a bridalchamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo's speech of thetriumph of Beauty over Death. 

Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo'sstockings, the pattern on a wife's handkerchief, the sleeve of ayoung soldier, and a fashionable woman's bonnets, become inShakespeare's hands points of actual dramatic importance, and bysome of them the action of the play in question is conditionedabsolutely. Many other dramatists have availed themselves ofcostume as a method of expressing directly to the audience thecharacter of a person on his entrance, though hardly so brilliantlyas Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles, whosedress, by the way, only an archaeologist can understand; the fun ofa master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot offine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is inhis cups, may be regarded as part of that great career whichcostume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanesdown to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details of appareland adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast, such immediateand tragic effect, such pity and such pathos, as Shakespearehimself. Armed cap-a-pie, the dead King stalks on the battlementsof Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark; Shylock's Jewishgaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded andembittered nature writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think ofno better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert -

Have you the heart? when your head did but ache, I knit my handkerchief about your brows, (The best I had, a princess wrought it me)And I did never ask it you again;

and Orlando's blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre note inthat exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feelingthat underlies Rosalind's fanciful wit and wilful jesting. 

Last night 'twas on my arm; I kissed it;I hope it be not gone to tell my lordThat I kiss aught but he, says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was alreadyon its way to Rome to rob her of her husband's faith; the littlePrince passing to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle'sgirdle; Duncan sends a ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his ownmurder, and the ring of Portia turns the tragedy of the merchantinto a wife's comedy. The great rebel York dies with a paper crownon his head; Hamlet's black suit is a kind of colour-motive in thepiece, like the mourning of the Chimene in the Cid; and the climaxof Antony's speech is the production of Caesar's cloak:-

I rememberThe first time ever Caesar put it on. 'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent, The day he overcame the Nervii:-Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through:See what a rent the envious Casca made:Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . . Kind souls, what, weep you when you but beholdOur Caesar's vesture wounded?

The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are aspathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect ofLear's wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words by hisfantastic attire; and when Cloten, stung by the taunt of thatsimile which his sister draws from her husband's raiment, arrayshimself in that husband's very garb to work upon her the deed ofshame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of modern Frenchrealism, nothing even in Therese Raquin, that masterpiece ofhorror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare withthis strange scene in Cymbeline. 

In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages arethose suggested by costume. Rosalind's

Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have adoublet and hose in my disposition?

Constance's

Grief fills the place of my absent child, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth -

Ah! cut my lace asunder! -

are only a few of the many examples one might quote. One of thefinest effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in thelast act of Lear, tearing the plume from Kent's cap and applying itto Cordelia's lips when he came to the line, This feather stirs; she lives!

Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked, I remember, some fur from his archaeologically-incorrect ermine forthe same business; but Salvini's was the finer effect of the two, as well as the truer. And those who saw Mr. Irving in the last actof Richard the Third have not, I am sure, forgotten how much theagony and terror of his dream was intensified, by contrast, throughthe calm and quiet that preceded it, and the delivery of such linesas

What, is my beaver easier than it was?And all my armour laid into my tent?Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy -

lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering thelast words which Richard's mother called after him as he wasmarching to Bosworth:-

Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse, Which in the day of battle tire thee moreThan all the complete armour that thou wear'st. 

As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, itis to be remarked that, while he more than once complains of thesmallness of the stage on which he has to produce big historicalplays, and of the want of scenery which obliges him to cut out manyeffective open-air incidents, he always writes as a dramatist whohad at his disposal a most elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and whocould rely on the actors taking pains about their make-up. Evennow it is difficult to produce such a play as the Comedy of Errors;and to the picturesque accident of Miss Ellen Terry's brotherresembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing Twelfth Nightadequately performed. Indeed, to put any play of Shakespeare's onthe stage, absolutely as he himself wished it to be done, requiresthe services of a good property-man, a clever wig-maker, acostumier with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, amaster of the methods of making-up, a fencing-master, a dancing-master, and an artist to direct personally the whole production. For he is most careful to tell us the dress and appearance of eachcharacter. 'Racine abhorre la realite, ' says Auguste Vacqueriesomewhere; 'il ne daigne pas s'occuper de son costume. Si l'ons'en rapportait aux indications du poete, Agamemnon serait vetud'un sceptre et Achille d'une epee. ' But with Shakespeare it isvery different. He gives us directions about the costumes ofPerdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in Macbeth, and theapothecary in Romeo and Juliet, several elaborate descriptions ofhis fat knight, and a detailed account of the extraordinary garb inwhich Petruchio is to be married. Rosalind, he tells us, is tall, and is to carry a spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller, andis to paint her face brown so as to look sunburnt. The childrenwho play at fairies in Windsor Forest are to be dressed in whiteand green--a compliment, by the way, to Queen Elizabeth, whosefavourite colours they were--and in white, with green garlands andgilded vizors, the angels are to come to Katherine in Kimbolton. Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by hiswearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his boots. TheDuchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her husband inmourning beside her. The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of theCardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, areall made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue. We know thepatterns on the Dauphin's armour and the Pucelle's sword, the creston Warwick's helmet and the colour of Bardolph's nose. Portia hasgolden hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek's hair hangs like flax on a distaff, andwon't curl at all. Some of the characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some areto blacken their faces. Lear has a white beard, Hamlet's father agrizzled, and Benedick is to shave his in the course of the play. Indeed, on the subject of stage beards Shakespeare is quiteelaborate; tells us of the many different colours in use, and givesa hint to actors always to see that their own are properly tied on. There is a dance of reapers in rye-straw hats, and of rustics inhairy coats like satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque of Russians, and a classical masque; several immortal scenes over a weaver in anass's head, a riot over the colour of a coat which it takes theLord Mayor of London to quell, and a scene between an infuriatedhusband and his wife's milliner about the slashing of a sleeve. 

As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and theaphorisms he makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies' bonnets, and themany descriptions of the mundus muliebris, from the long ofAutolycus in the Winter's Tale down to the account of the Duchessof Milan's gown in Much Ado About Nothing, they are far toonumerous to quote; though it may be worth while to remind peoplethat the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to be found inLear's scene with Edgar--a passage which has the advantage ofbrevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthingmetaphysics of Sartor Resartus. But I think that from what I havealready said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very muchinterested in costume. I do not mean in that shallow sense bywhich it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds anddaffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethanage; but that he saw that costume could be made at once impressiveof a certain effect on the audience and expressive of certain typesof character, and is one of the essential factors of the meanswhich a true illusionist has at his disposal. Indeed to him thedeformed figure of Richard was of as much value as Juliet'sloveliness; he sets the serge of the radical beside the silks ofthe lord, and sees the stage effects to be got from each: he hasas much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has incloth of gold, and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness. 

The difficulty Ducis felt about translating Othello in consequenceof the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moorreiterate 'Le bandeau! le bandeau!' may be taken as an example ofthe difference between la tragedie philosophique and the drama ofreal life; and the introduction for the first time of the wordmouchoir at the Theatre Francais was an era in that romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and M. Zola theenfant terrible, just as the classicism of the earlier part of thecentury was emphasised by Talma's refusal to play Greek heroes anylonger in a powdered periwig--one of the many instances, by theway, of that desire for archaeological accuracy in dress which hasdistinguished the great actors of our age. 

In criticising the importance given to money in La Comedie Humaine, Theophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a newhero in fiction, le heros metallique. Of Shakespeare it may besaid he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, andthat a climax may depend on a crinoline. 

The burning of the Globe Theatre--an event due, by the way, to theresults of the passion for illusion that distinguishedShakespeare's stage-management--has unfortunately robbed us of manyimportant documents; but in the inventory, still in existence, ofthe costume-wardrobe of a London theatre in Shakespeare's time, there are mentioned particular costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns, friars, and fools; green coats for Robin Hood's men, and a green gown for Maid Marian; a white and gold doublet forHenry the Fifth, and a robe for Longshanks; besides surplices, copes, damask gowns, gowns of cloth of gold and of cloth of silver, taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet coats, satin coats, friezecoats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather, red suits, grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe 'for to goo invisibell, 'which seems inexpensive at 3 pounds, 10s. , and four incomparablefardingales--all of which show a desire to give every character anappropriate dress. There are also entries of Spanish, Moorish andDanish costumes, of helmets, lances, painted shields, imperialcrowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of costumes for TurkishJanissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and goddesses ofOlympus, which evidence a good deal of archaeological research onthe part of the manager of the theatre. It is true that there is amention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the donnee of the playwas after the Fall. 

Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare willsee that archaeology was one of its special characteristics. Afterthat revival of the classical forms of architecture which was oneof the notes of the Renaissance, and the printing at Venice andelsewhere of the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature, hadcome naturally an interest in the ornamentation and costume of theantique world. Nor was it for the learning that they couldacquire, but rather for the loveliness that they might create, thatthe artists studied these things. The curious objects that werebeing constantly brought to light by excavations were not left tomoulder in a museum, for the contemplation of a callous curator, and the ennui of a policeman bored by the absence of crime. Theywere used as motives for the production of a new art, which was tobe not beautiful merely, but also strange. 

Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the AppianWay came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name'Julia, daughter of Claudius. ' On opening the coffer they foundwithin its marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of aboutfifteen years of age, preserved by the embalmer's skill fromcorruption and the decay of time. Her eyes were half open, herhair rippled round her in crisp curling gold, and from her lips andcheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet departed. Borne back tothe Capitol, she became at once the centre of a new cult, and fromall parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at the wonderfulshrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the secretof beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judaea's roughand rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away bynight, and in secret buried. Legend though it may be, yet thestory is none the less valuable as showing us the attitude of theRenaissance towards the antique world. Archaeology to them was nota mere science for the antiquarian; it was a means by which theycould touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath andbeauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism formsthat else had been old and outworn. From the pulpit of NiccolaPisano down to Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar, ' and the serviceCellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit canbe traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts--thearts of arrested movement--but its influence was to be seen also inthe great Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement ofthe gay courts of the time, and in the public pomps and processionswith which the citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greetthe princes that chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, whichwere considered so important that large prints were made of themand published--a fact which is a proof of the general interest atthe time in matters of such kind. 

And this use of archaeology in shows, so far from being a bit ofpriggish pedantry, is in every way legitimate and beautiful. Forthe stage is not merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but isalso the return of art to life. Sometimes in an archaeologicalnovel the use of strange and obsolete terms seems to hide thereality beneath the learning, and I dare say that many of thereaders of Notre Dame de Paris have been much puzzled over themeaning of such expressions as la casaque a mahoitres, lesvoulgiers, le gallimard tache d'encre, les craaquiniers, and thelike; but with the stage how different it is! The ancient worldwakes from its sleep, and history moves as a pageant before oureyes, without obliging us to have recourse to a dictionary or anencyclopaedia for the perfection of our enjoyment. Indeed, thereis not the slightest necessity that the public should know theauthorities for the mounting of any piece. From such materials, for instance, as the disk of Theodosius, materials with which themajority of people are probably not very familiar, Mr. E. W. Godwin, one of the most artistic spirits of this century inEngland, created the marvellous loveliness of the first act ofClaudian, and showed us the life of Byzantium in the fourthcentury, not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts, not by anovel which requires a glossary to explain it, but by the visiblepresentation before us of all the glory of that great town. Andwhile the costumes were true to the smallest points of colour anddesign, yet the details were not assigned that abnormal importancewhich they must necessarily be given in a piecemeal lecture, butwere subordinated to the rules of lofty composition and the unityof artistic effect. Mr. Symonds, speaking of that great picture ofMantegna's, now in Hampton Court, says that the artist hasconverted an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of line. The same could have been said with equal justice of Mr. Godwin'sscene. Only the foolish called it pedantry, only those who wouldneither look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play beingkilled by its paint. It was in reality a scene not merely perfectin its picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also, getting ridof any necessity for tedious descriptions, and showing us, by thecolour and character of Claudian's dress, and the dress of hisattendants, the whole nature and life of the man, from what schoolof philosophy he affected, down to what horses he backed on theturf. 

And indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfusedinto some form of art. I have no desire to underrate the servicesof laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made ofLempriere's Dictionary is of far more value to us than ProfessorMax Muller's treatment of the same mythology as a disease oflanguage. Better Endymion than any theory, however sound, or, asin the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic among adjectives!And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi's book onVases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his 'Ode on aGrecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful;and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, forit can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actuallife with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenthcentury was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age ofVecellio also. Every nation seems suddenly to have becomeinterested in the dress of its neighbours. Europe began toinvestigate its own clothes, and the amount of books published onnational costumes is quite extraordinary. At the beginning of thecentury the Nuremberg Chronicle, with its two thousandillustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the centurywas over seventeen editions were published of Munster'sCosmography. Besides these two books there were also the works ofMichael Colyns, of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecelliobeing probably from the hand of Titian. 

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired theirknowledge. The development of the habit of foreign travel, theincreased commercial intercourse between countries, and thefrequency of diplomatic missions, gave every nation manyopportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary dress. After the departure from England, for instance, of the ambassadorsfrom the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of Morocco, Henry theEighth and his friends gave several masques in the strange attireof their visitors. Later on London saw, perhaps too often, thesombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came envoysfrom all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an importantinfluence on English costume. 

And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress, or thedress of foreign nations; there was also a good deal of research, amongst theatrical people especially, into the ancient costume ofEngland itself: and when Shakespeare, in the prologue to one ofhis plays, expresses his regret at being unable to produce helmetsof the period, he is speaking as an Elizabethan manager and notmerely as an Elizabethan poet. At Cambridge, for instance, duringhis day, a play of Richard The Third was performed, in which theactors were attired in real dresses of the time, procured from thegreat collection of historical costume in the Tower, which wasalways open to the inspection of managers, and sometimes placed attheir disposal. And I cannot help thinking that this performancemust have been far more artistic, as regards costume, thanGarrick's mounting of Shakespeare's own play on the subject, inwhich he himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress, andeverybody else in the costume of the time of George the Third, Richmond especially being much admired in the uniform of a youngguardsman. 

For what is the use to the stage of that archaeology which has sostrangely terrified the critics, but that it, and it alone, cangive us the architecture and apparel suitable to the time in whichthe action of the play passes? It enables us to see a Greekdressed like a Greek, and an Italian like an Italian; to enjoy thearcades of Venice and the balconies of Verona; and, if the playdeals with any of the great eras in our country's history, tocontemplate the age in its proper attire, and the king in his habitas he lived. And I wonder, by the way, what Lord Lytton would havesaid some time ago, at the Princess's Theatre, had the curtainrisen on his father's Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair, attired in a flowing wig and a flowered dressing-gown, a costumewhich in the last century was considered peculiarly appropriate toan antique Roman! For in those halcyon days of the drama noarchaeology troubled the stage, or distressed the critics, and ourinartistic grandfathers sat peaceably in a stifling atmosphere ofanachronisms, and beheld with the calm complacency of the age ofprose an Iachimo in powder and patches, a Lear in lace ruffles, anda Lady Macbeth in a large crinoline. I can understand archaeologybeing attacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but toattack it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the mark. However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just aswell speak disrespectfully of the equator. For archaeology, beinga science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply. Its valuedepends entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it. We look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist forthe method. 

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare'splays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best datefor the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit ofthe play, more than by any actual historical references which mayoccur in it. Most Hamlets I have seen were placed far too early. Hamlet is essentially a scholar of the Revival of Learning; and ifthe allusion to the recent invasion of England by the Danes puts itback to the ninth century, the use of foils brings it down muchlater. Once, however, that the date has been fixed, then thearchaeologist is to supply us with the facts which the artist is toconvert into effects. 

It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves showus that Shakespeare was indifferent to historical accuracy, and agreat deal of capital has been made out of Hector's indiscreetquotation from Aristotle. Upon the other hand, the anachronismsare really few in number, and not very important, and, hadShakespeare's attention been drawn to them by a brother artist, hewould probably have corrected them. For, though they can hardly becalled blemishes, they are certainly not the great beauties of hiswork; or, at least, if they are, their anachronistic charm cannotbe emphasised unless the play is accurately mounted according toits proper date. In looking at Shakespeare's plays as a whole, however, what is really remarkable is their extraordinary fidelityas regards his personages and his plots. Many of his dramatispersonae are people who had actually existed, and some of themmight have been seen in real life by a portion of his audience. Indeed the most violent attack that was made on Shakespeare in histime was for his supposed caricature of Lord Cobham. As for hisplots, Shakespeare constantly draws them either from authentichistory, or from the old ballads and traditions which served ashistory to the Elizabethan public, and which even now no scientifichistorian would dismiss as absolutely untrue. And not merely didhe select fact instead of fancy as the basis of much of hisimaginative work, but he always gives to each play the generalcharacter, the social atmosphere in a word, of the age in question. Stupidity he recognises as being one of the permanentcharacteristics of all European civilisations; so he sees nodifference between a London mob of his own day and a Roman mob ofpagan days, between a silly watchman in Messina and a silly Justiceof the Peace in Windsor. But when he deals with higher characters, with those exceptions of each age which are so fine that theybecome its types, he gives them absolutely the stamp and seal oftheir time. Virgilia is one of those Roman wives on whose tomb waswritten 'Domi mansit, lanam fecit, ' as surely as Juliet is theromantic girl of the Renaissance. He is even true to thecharacteristics of race. Hamlet has all the imagination andirresolution of the Northern nations, and the Princess Katharine isas entirely French as the heroine of Divorcons. Harry the Fifth isa pure Englishman, and Othello a true Moor. 

Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from thefourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it is wonderful how carefulhe is to have his facts perfectly right--indeed he followsHolinshed with curious fidelity. The incessant wars between Franceand England are described with extraordinary accuracy down to thenames of the besieged towns, the ports of landing and embarkation, the sites and dates of the battles, the titles of the commanders oneach side, and the lists of the killed and wounded. And as regardsthe Civil Wars of the Roses we have many elaborate genealogies ofthe seven sons of Edward the Third; the claims of the rival Housesof York and Lancaster to the throne are discussed at length; and ifthe English aristocracy will not read Shakespeare as a poet, theyshould certainly read him as a sort of early Peerage. There ishardly a single title in the Upper House, with the exception ofcourse of the uninteresting titles assumed by the law lords, whichdoes not appear in Shakespeare along with many details of familyhistory, creditable and discreditable. Indeed if it be reallynecessary that the School Board children should know all about theWars of the Roses, they could learn their lessons just as well outof Shakespeare as out of shilling primers, and learn them, I neednot say, far more pleasurably. Even in Shakespeare's own day thisuse of his plays was recognised. 'The historical plays teachhistory to those who cannot read it in the chronicles, ' saysHeywood in a tract about the stage, and yet I am sure thatsixteenth-century chronicles were much more delightful reading thannineteenth-century primers are. 

Of course the aesthetic value of Shakespeare's plays does not, inthe slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth, and Truth is independent of facts always, inventing or selectingthem at pleasure. But still Shakespeare's use of facts is a mostinteresting part of his method of work, and shows us his attitudetowards the stage, and his relations to the great art of illusion. Indeed he would have been very much surprised at any one classinghis plays with 'fairy tales, ' as Lord Lytton does; for one of hisaims was to create for England a national historical drama, whichshould deal with incidents with which the public was wellacquainted, and with heroes that lived in the memory of a people. Patriotism, I need hardly say, is not a necessary quality of art;but it means, for the artist, the substitution of a universal foran individual feeling, and for the public the presentation of awork of art in a most attractive and popular form. It is worthnoticing that Shakespeare's first and last successes were bothhistorical plays. 

It may be asked, what has this to do with Shakespeare's attitudetowards costume? I answer that a dramatist who laid such stress onhistorical accuracy of fact would have welcomed historical accuracyof costume as a most important adjunct to his illusionist method. And I have no hesitation in saying that he did so. The referenceto helmets of the period in the prologue to Henry the Fifth may beconsidered fanciful, though Shakespeare must have often seen

The very casqueThat did affright the air at Agincourt, where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey, alongwith the saddle of that 'imp of fame, ' and the dinted shield withits torn blue velvet lining and its tarnished lilies of gold; butthe use of military tabards in Henry the Sixth is a bit of purearchaeology, as they were not worn in the sixteenth century; andthe King's own tabard, I may mention, was still suspended over histomb in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, in Shakespeare's day. For, up to the time of the unfortunate triumph of the Philistines in1645, the chapels and cathedrals of England were the great nationalmuseums of archaeology, and in them were kept the armour and attireof the heroes of English history. A good deal was of coursepreserved in the Tower, and even in Elizabeth's day tourists werebrought there to see such curious relics of the past as CharlesBrandon's huge lance, which is still, I believe, the admiration ofour country visitors; but the cathedrals and churches were, as arule, selected as the most suitable shrines for the reception ofthe historic antiquities. Canterbury can still show us the helm ofthe Black Prince, Westminster the robes of our kings, and in oldSt. Paul's the very banner that had waved on Bosworth field washung up by Richmond himself. 

In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London, he saw theapparel and appurtenances of past ages, and it is impossible todoubt that he made use of his opportunities. The employment oflance and shield, for instance, in actual warfare, which is sofrequent in his plays, is drawn from archaeology, and not from themilitary accoutrements of his day; and his general use of armour inbattle was not a characteristic of his age, a time when it wasrapidly disappearing before firearms. Again, the crest onWarwick's helmet, of which such a point is made in Henry the Sixth, is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century play when crests weregenerally worn, but would not have been so in a play ofShakespeare's own time, when feathers and plumes had taken theirplace--a fashion which, as he tells us in Henry the Eighth, wasborrowed from France. For the historical plays, then, we may besure that archaeology was employed, and as for the others I feelcertain that it was the case also. The appearance of Jupiter onhis eagle, thunderbolt in hand, of Juno with her peacocks, and ofIris with her many-coloured bow; the Amazon masque and the masqueof the Five Worthies, may all be regarded as archaeological; andthe vision which Posthumus sees in prison of Sicilius Leonatus--'anold man, attired like a warrior, leading an ancient matron'--isclearly so. Of the 'Athenian dress' by which Lysander isdistinguished from Oberon I have already spoken; but one of themost marked instances is in the case of the dress of Coriolanus, for which Shakespeare goes directly to Plutarch. That historian, in his Life of the great Roman, tells us of the oak-wreath withwhich Caius Marcius was crowned, and of the curious kind of dressin which, according to ancient fashion, he had to canvass hiselectors; and on both of these points he enters into longdisquisitions, investigating the origin and meaning of the oldcustoms. Shakespeare, in the spirit of the true artist, acceptsthe facts of the antiquarian and converts them into dramatic andpicturesque effects: indeed the gown of humility, the 'woolvishgown, ' as Shakespeare calls it, is the central note of the play. There are other cases I might quote, but this one is quitesufficient for my purpose; and it is evident from it at any ratethat, in mounting a play in the accurate costume of the time, according to the best authorities, we are carrying outShakespeare's own wishes and method. 

Even if it were not so, there is no more reason that we shouldcontinue any imperfections which may be supposed to havecharacterised Shakespeare's stage mounting than that we should haveJuliet played by a young man, or give up the advantage ofchangeable scenery. A great work of dramatic art should not merelybe made expressive of modern passion by means of the actor, butshould be presented to us in the form most suitable to the modernspirit. Racine produced his Roman plays in Louis Quatorze dress ona stage crowded with spectators; but we require differentconditions for the enjoyment of his art. Perfect accuracy ofdetail, for the sake of perfect illusion, is necessary for us. What we have to see is that the details are not allowed to usurpthe principal place. They must be subordinate always to thegeneral motive of the play. But subordination in art does not meandisregard of truth; it means conversion of fact into effect, andassigning to each detail its proper relative value

'Les petits details d'histoire et de vie domestique (says Hugo)doivent etre scrupuleusement etudies et reproduits par le poete, mais uniquement comme des moyens d'accroitre la realite del'ensemble, et de faire penetrer jusque dans les coins les plusobscurs de l'oeuvre cette vie generale et puissante au milieu delaquelle les personnages sont plus vrais, et les catastrophes, parconsequeut, plus poignantes. Tout doit etre subordonne a ce but. L'Homme sur le premier plan, le reste au fond. '

This passage is interesting as coming from the first great Frenchdramatist who employed archaeology on the stage, and whose plays, though absolutely correct in detail, are known to all for theirpassion, not for their pedantry--for their life, not for theirlearning. It is true that he has made certain concessions in thecase of the employment of curious or strange expressions. Ruy Blastalks of M, de Priego as 'sujet du roi' instead of 'noble du roi, 'and Angelo Malipieri speaks of 'la croix rouge' instead of 'lacroix de gueules. ' But they are concessions made to the public, orrather to a section of it. 'J'en offre ici toute mes excuses auxspectateurs intelligents, ' he says in a note to one of the plays;'esperons qu'un jour un seigneur venitien pourra dire toutbonnement sans peril son blason sur le theatre. C'est un progresqui viendra. ' And, though the description of the crest is notcouched in accurate language, still the crest itself was accuratelyright. It may, of course, be said that the public do not noticethese things; upon the other hand, it should be remembered that Arthas no other aim but her own perfection, and proceeds simply by herown laws, and that the play which Hamlet describes as being caviareto the general is a play he highly praises. Besides, in England, at any rate, the public have undergone a transformation; there isfar more appreciation of beauty now than there was a few years ago;and though they may not be familiar with the authorities andarchaeological data for what is shown to them, still they enjoywhatever loveliness they look at. And this is the important thing. Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under amicroscope. Archaeological accuracy is merely a condition ofillusionist stage effect; it is not its quality. And Lord Lytton'sproposal that the dresses should merely be beautiful without beingaccurate is founded on a misapprehension of the nature of costume, and of its value on the stage. This value is twofold, picturesqueand dramatic; the former depends on the colour of the dress, thelatter on its design and character. But so interwoven are the twothat, whenever in our own day historical accuracy has beendisregarded, and the various dresses in a play taken from differentages, the result has been that the stage has been turned into thatchaos of costume, that caricature of the centuries, the Fancy DressBall, to the entire ruin of all dramatic and picturesque effect. For the dresses of one age do not artistically harmonise with thedresses of another: and, as far as dramatic value goes, to confusethe costumes is to confuse the play. Costume is a growth, anevolution, and a most important, perhaps the most important, signof the manners, customs and mode of life of each century. ThePuritan dislike of colour, adornment and grace in apparel was partof the great revolt of the middle classes against Beauty in theseventeenth century. A historian who disregarded it would give usa most inaccurate picture of the time, and a dramatist who did notavail himself of it would miss a most vital element in producing anillusionist effect. The effeminacy of dress that characterised thereign of Richard the Second was a constant theme of contemporaryauthors. Shakespeare, writing two hundred years after, makes theking's fondness for gay apparel and foreign fashions a point in theplay, from John of Gaunt's reproaches down to Richard's own speechin the third act on his deposition from the throne. And thatShakespeare examined Richard's tomb in Westminster Abbey seems tome certain from York's speech:-

See, see, King Richard doth himself appearAs doth the blushing discontented sunFrom out the fiery portal of the east, When he perceives the envious clouds are bentTo dim his glory. 

For we can still discern on the King's robe his favourite badge--the sun issuing from a cloud. In fact, in every age the socialconditions are so exemplified in costume, that to produce asixteenth-century play in fourteenth-century attire, or vice versa, would make the performance seem unreal because untrue. And, valuable as beauty of effect on the stage is, the highest beauty isnot merely comparable with absolute accuracy of detail, but reallydependent on it. To invent, an entirely new costume is almostimpossible except in burlesque or extravaganza, and as forcombining the dress of different centuries into one, the experimentwould be dangerous, and Shakespeare's opinion of the artistic valueof such a medley may be gathered from his incessant satire of theElizabethan dandies for imagining that they were well dressedbecause they got their doublets in Italy, their hats in Germany, and their hose in France. And it should be noted that the mostlovely scenes that have been produced on our stage have been thosethat have been characterised by perfect accuracy, such as Mr. AndMrs. Bancroft's eighteenth-century revivals at the Haymarket, Mr. Irying's superb production of Much Ado About Nothing, and Mr, Barrett's Claudian. Besides, and this is perhaps the most completeanswer to Lord Lytton's theory, it must be remembered that neitherin costume nor in dialogue is beauty the dramatist's primary aim atall. The true dramatist aims first at what is characteristic, andno more desires that all his personages should be beautifullyattired than he desires that they should all have beautiful naturesor speak beautiful English. The true dramatist, in fact, shows uslife under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life. TheGreek dress was the loveliest dress the world has ever seen, andthe English dress of the last century one of the most monstrous;yet we cannot costume a play by Sheridan as we would costume a playby Sophokles. For, as Polonius says in his excellent lecture, alecture to which I am glad to have the opportunity of expressing myobligations, one of the first qualities of apparel is itsexpressiveness. And the affected style of dress in the lastcentury was the natural characteristic of a society of affectedmanners and affected conversation--a characteristic which therealistic dramatist will highly value down to the smallest detailof accuracy, and the materials for which he can get only fromarchaeology. 

But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate; it must bealso appropriate to the stature and appearance of the actor, and tohis supposed condition, as well as to his necessary action in theplay. In Mr. Hare's production of As You Like It at the St. James's Theatre, for instance, the whole point of Orlando'scomplaint that he is brought up like a peasant, and not like agentleman, was spoiled by the gorgeousness of his dress, and thesplendid apparel worn by the banished Duke and his friends wasquite out of place. Mr. Lewis Wingfield's explanation that thesumptuary laws of the period necessitated their doing so, is, I amafraid, hardly sufficient. Outlaws, lurking in a forest and livingby the chase, are not very likely to care much about ordinances ofdress. They were probably attired like Robin Hood's men, to whom, indeed, they are compared in the course of the play. And thattheir dress was not that of wealthy noblemen may be seen byOrlando's words when he breaks in upon them. He mistakes them forrobbers, and is amazed to find that they answer him in courteousand gentle terms. Lady Archibald Campbell's production, under Mr. E. W. Godwin's direction, of the same play in Coombe Wood was, asregards mounting, far more artistic. At least it seemed so to me. The Duke and his companions were dressed in serge tunics, leathernjerkins, high boots and gauntlets, and wore bycocket hats andhoods. And as they were playing in a real forest, they found, I amsure, their dresses extremely convenient. To every character inthe play was given a perfectly appropriate attire, and the brownand green of their costumes harmonised exquisitely with the fernsthrough which they wandered, the trees beneath which they lay, andthe lovely English landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players. The perfect naturalness of the scene was due to the absoluteaccuracy and appropriateness of everything that was worn. Norcould archaeology have been put to a severer test, or come out ofit more triumphantly. The whole production showed once for allthat, unless a dress is archaeologically correct, and artisticallyappropriate, it always looks unreal, unnatural, and theatrical inthe sense of artificial. 

Nor, again, is it enough that there should be accurate andappropriate costumes of beautiful colours; there must be alsobeauty of colour on the stage as a whole, and as long as thebackground is painted by one artist, and the foreground figuresindependently designed by another, there is the danger of a want ofharmony in the scene as a picture. For each scene the colour-scheme should be settled as absolutely as for the decoration of aroom, and the textures which it is proposed to use should be mixedand re-mixed in every possible combination, and what is discordantremoved. Then, as regards the particular kinds of colours, thestage is often too glaring, partly through the excessive use ofhot, violent reds, and partly through the costumes looking too new. Shabbiness, which in modern life is merely the tendency of thelower orders towards tone, is not without its artistic value, andmodern colours are often much improved by being a little faded. Blue also is too frequently used: it is not merely a dangerouscolour to wear by gaslight, but it is really difficult in Englandto get a thoroughly good blue. The fine Chinese blue, which we allso much admire, takes two years to dye, and the English public willnot wait so long for a colour. Peacock blue, of course, has beenemployed on the stage, notably at the Lyceum, with great advantage;but all attempts at a good light blue, or good dark blue, which Ihave seen have been failures. The value of black is hardlyappreciated; it was used effectively by Mr. Irving in Hamlet as thecentral note of a composition, but as a tone-giving neutral itsimportance is not recognised. And this is curious, considering thegeneral colour of the dress of a century in which, as Baudelairesays, 'Nous celebrons tous quelque enterrement. ' The archaeologistof the future will probably point to this age as the time when thebeauty of black was understood; but I hardly think that, as regardsstage-mounting or house decoration, it really is. Its decorativevalue is, of course, the same as that of white or gold; it canseparate and harmonise colours. In modern plays the black frock-coat of the hero becomes important in itself, and should be given asuitable background. But it rarely is. Indeed the only goodbackground for a play in modern dress which I have ever seen wasthe dark grey and cream-white scene of the first act of thePrincesse Georges in Mrs. Langtry's production. As a rule, thehero is smothered in bric-a-brac and palm-trees, lost in the gildedabyss of Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to a mere midge inthe midst of marqueterie; whereas the background should always bekept as a background, and colour subordinated to effect. This, ofcourse, can only be done when there is one single mind directingthe whole production. The facts of art are diverse, but theessence of artistic effect is unity. Monarchy, Anarchy, andRepublicanism may contend for the government of nations; but atheatre should be in the power of a cultured despot. There may bedivision of labour, but there must be no division of mind. Whoeverunderstands the costume of an age understands of necessity itsarchitecture and its surroundings also, and it is easy to see fromthe chairs of a century whether it was a century of crinolines ornot. In fact, in art there is no specialism, and a really artisticproduction should bear the impress of one master, and one masteronly, who not merely should design and arrange everything, butshould have complete control over the way in which each dress is tobe worn. 

Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of Hernani, absolutelyrefused to call her lover 'Mon Lion!' unless she was allowed towear a little fashionable toque then much in vogue on theBoulevards; and many young ladies on our own stage insist to thepresent day on wearing stiff starched petticoats under Greekdresses, to the entire ruin of all delicacy of line and fold; butthese wicked things should not be allowed. And there should be farmore dress rehearsals than there are now. Actors such as Mr. Forbes-Robertson, Mr. Conway, Mr. George Alexander, and others, notto mention older artists, can move with ease and elegance in theattire of any century; but there are not a few who seem dreadfullyembarrassed about their hands if they have no side pockets, and whoalways wear their dresses as if they were costumes. Costumes, ofcourse, they are to the designer; but dresses they should be tothose that wear them. And it is time that a stop should be put tothe idea, very prevalent on the stage, that the Greeks and Romansalways went about bareheaded in the open air--a mistake theElizabethan managers did not fall into, for they gave hoods as wellas gowns to their Roman senators. 

More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining to theactors that there is a form of gesture and movement that is notmerely appropriate to each style of dress, but really conditionedby it. The extravagant use of the arms in the eighteenth century, for instance, was the necessary result of the large hoop, and thesolemn dignity of Burleigh owed as much to his ruff as to hisreason. Besides until an actor is at home in his dress, he is notat home in his part. 

Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistictemperament in the audience, and producing that joy in beauty forbeauty's sake without which the great masterpieces of art can neverbe understood, I will not here speak; though it is worth while tonotice how Shakespeare appreciated that side of the question in theproduction of his tragedies, acting them always by artificiallight, and in a theatre hung with black; but what I have tried topoint out is that archaeology is not a pedantic method, but amethod of artistic illusion, and that costume is a means ofdisplaying character without description, and of producing dramaticsituations and dramatic effects. And I think it is a pity that somany critics should have set themselves to attack one of the mostimportant movements on the modern stage before that movement has atall reached its proper perfection. That it will do so, however, Ifeel as certain as that we shall require from our dramatic criticsin the future higher qualification than that they can rememberMacready or have seen Benjamin Webster; we shall require of them, indeed, that they cultivate a sense of beauty. Pour etre plusdifficile, la tache n'en est que plus glorieuse. And if they willnot encourage, at least they must not oppose, a movement of whichShakespeare of all dramatists would have most approved, for it hasthe illusion of truth for its method, and the illusion of beautyfor its result. Not that I agree with everything that I have saidin this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. Theessay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aestheticcriticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no suchthing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whosecontradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonictheory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel's system of contraries. The truths ofmetaphysics are the truths of masks.