Littell's Living Age/Volume 180/Issue 2329/The Decay of Lying: a Dialogue
Scene. —The Library of a Country House in England.
Cyril (coming in through the open window from the terrace). My dear Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy nature.
Vivian. Enjoy nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that art makes us love nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped us. My own experience is that the more we study art, the less we care for nature. What art really reveals to us is nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in nature herself, but in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness, of the man who looks at her.
C. Well, you need not look at the landscape. You can lie on the grass and smoke and talk.
V. But nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of horrid little black insects. Why. even Maple can make you a more comfortable seat than nature can. Nature pales before the Tottenham Court Road. I don’t complain. If nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is absolutely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one. And then nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to nature than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is clearer than that nature hates mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at least, it is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching — that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to. In the mean time you had better go back to your wearisome uncomfortable nature, and leave me to correct my proofs.
C. Writing an article! That is not very consistent after what you have just said.
V. Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to thereductio ad absurdum of practice? Not I. Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word “Whim.” Besides, my article is really a most salutary and valuable warning. If it is attended to, there may be a new renaissance of art.
C. What is the subject?
V. I intend to call it “The Decay of Lying: a Protest.”
C. Lying! I should have thought our politicians kept up that habit.
V. I assure you they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misinterpretation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians won’t do, and besides, what I am pleading for is lying in art. Shall I read you what I have written? It might do you a great deal of good.
C. Certainly, if you give me a cigarette. Thanks. By the way, what magazine do you intend it for?
V. For the Retrospective Review. I think I told you that we had revived it.
C. Whom do you mean by “we”?
V. Oh, the Tired Hedonists of course. It is a club to which I belong. We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian. I am afraid you are not eligible. You are too fond of simple pleasures.
C. I should be black-balled on the ground of animal spirits, I suppose?
V. Probably. Besides, you are a little too old. We don’t admit any one who is of the usual age.
C. Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with each other.
V. We are. That is one of the objects of the club. Now, if you promise not to interrupt too often, I will read you my article.
C. (flinging himself down on the sofa). All right.
V. (reading in a very clear, musical voice). “The Decay of Lying: a Protest. One of the chief causes of the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. The blue-book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner. He has his tedious document humain, his miserable little coin de la création, into which he peers with his microscope. He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between encyclopædias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which he never, even in his most thoughtful moments, can thoroughly free himself.
“The loss that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be over-estimated. People have a careless way of talking about a ‘born liar,’ just as they talk about a ‘born poet.’ But in both cases they are wrong. Lying and poetry are arts — arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other — and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion. Indeed, they have their technique, just as the more material arts of painting and sculpture have, their subtle secrets of form and color, their craft-mysteries, their deliberate artistic methods. As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. But in modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute. Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy —”
C. My dear Vivian!
V. Please don’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence. “He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling, be gins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe them. This is no isolated instance that we are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.
“Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we positively know no other name for it. There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and ‘The Black Arrow’ is so inartistic that it does not contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it was 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. Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local color. He is like the lady in the French comedy who is always talking about le beau ciel d’Italie. Besides, he has fallen into a bad habit of uttering moral platitudes. At times he is almost edifying. ‘Robert Elsmere’ is of course a masterpiece — a masterpiece of the genre ennuyeux, the one form of literature that the English people seem thoroughly to enjoy. Indeed it is only in England that such a novel could be possible. As for that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.
“In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as ‘Robert Elsmere’ has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, ‘L’homme de génie n’a jamais de l’esprit,’ is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds! He is not without power. Indeed at times, as in ‘Germinal,’ there is something almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals but on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint his work is just what it should be. He is perfectly truthful, and describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? I have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the rage of Caliban on seeing his own face in a glass. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favor of the author of ‘L’Assommoir,’ ‘Nana,’ and ‘Pot-Bouille’? Nothing. Mr. Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola’s characters are much worse. They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtures. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders. M. Daudet is better. He has esprit, a light touch, and an amusing style. But he has lately committed literary suicide. Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle with his Il faut lutter pour l’art, or for Valmajour with his eternal refrain about the nightingale, or for the poet in ‘Jack’ with his mots cruels, now that we have learned from ‘Vingt Ans de ma Vie littéraire’ that these characters were taken directly from life. To me they seem to have suddenly lost all their vitality, all the few qualities they ever possessed. The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages, he should at least pretend that they are creations and not boast of them as copies. As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the roman psychologique, he commits the error of imagining that the men and women of modern life are capable of being infinitely analyzed for an innumerable series of chapters. In point of fact what is interesting about people in good society — and M. Bourget never moves out of the Faubourg — is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humor. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals; in dress, in manner, tone of voice, personal appearance, tricks of habit, and the like. The more one analyzes people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a terrible reality; and if a writer insists upon analyzing the upper classes he might just as well write of match-girls and costermongers at once.” However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain you any further on this point. I quite admit that modern novels have many good points. All I say is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable.
C. That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I must say that I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures. I like “Robert Elsmere,” for instance. Not that I can look upon it as a serious work. As a statement of the problems that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated. It is simply Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma” with the literature left out. It is as much behind the age as Paley’s “Evidences,” or Colenso’s method of Biblical exegesis. Nor could anything be less impressive than the unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so completely missing its true significance that he proposes to carry on the business of the old firm under the new name. On the other hand, it contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of delightful quotations, and Green’s philosophy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitter pill of the author’s fiction. I also cannot help expressing my surprise that you have said nothing about the two novelists whom you are always reading, Balzac and George Meredith. Surely they are realists, both of them?
V. Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything, except language; as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story; as an artist he is everything, except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare — Touchstone, I think — talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis of a criticism of Meredith’s style. But whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and after all, even if the man’s fine spirit did not revolt against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and with some wonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples; the former was entirely his own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola “L’Assommoir” and Balzac’s “Illusions Perdues” is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. “ All Balzac’s characters,” said Baudelaire, “are gifted with the same ardor of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply colored as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.” A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent, fiery-colored existence. They dominate us and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubemprd. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with “Salammbô,” or “Esmond,” or “The Cloister and the Hearth,” or the “Vicomte de Bragelonne.”
C. Do you object to modernity of form then?
V. Yes. It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result. Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarizing. It cannot help being so. The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subject-matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject-matter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind. It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an admirable motive for a tragedy. I do not know anything in the whole history of literature sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful book, “‘The Cloister and the Hearth,” a book as much above “Romola” as “Romola” is above “Daniel Deronda,” and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons and the management of private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor-law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of modern life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over. Believe me, my dear Cyril, modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.
C. There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt that whatever amusement we may find in reading an absolutely modern novel, we have rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it. And this is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no good reading it at all. But what do you say about the return to life and nature? This is the panacea that is always being recommended to us.
V. (taking up his proofs). I will read you what I say on that subject. The passage comes later on in the article, but I may as well read it now —
“The popular cry of our time is: ‘Let us return to life and nature; they will recreate art for us, and send the red blood coursing through her veins; they will give her feet swiftness and make her hand strong.’ But, alas I we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meaning efforts. Nature is always behind the age; and as for life, she is the solvent that breaks up art, the enemy that lays waste her house.”
C. What do you mean by saying that nature is always behind the age?
V. Well, perhaps that is rather obscure. What I mean is this. If we take nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. If, on the other hand, we regard nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went moralizing about the district, but his good work was produced when he returned, not to nature, but to poetry. Poetry gave him “Laodamia,” and the fine sonnets, and the “Ode to Immortality,” and nature gave him “Martha Ray” and “Peter Bell.”
C. I think that view might be questioned. I am rather inclined to believe in the “impulse from a vernal wood,” though of course the artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of temperament that receives it. However, proceed with your article.
V. (reading). “Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when life gets the upper hand, and drives art out into the wilderness. This is the decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.
“Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks dramatic art was abstract, decorative, and mythological. Then she enlisted life in her service, and using some of life’s external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than lovers’ joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them she gave a language different from that of actual life, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its marble tomb. A new Cæsar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch. Old myth, and legend, and dream, took form and substance. History was entirely rewritten, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognize that the object of art is not simple truth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art herself is simply a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
“But life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking up of the blank verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterization. The passages in Shakespeare — and they are many — where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are due entirely to life calling for an echo of its own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone it should be allowed to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s natural utterance. He forgets that when art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything. Goethe says somewhere, —
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich 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 will not linger any longer over Shakespeare’s realism. ‘The Tempest’ is the best of palinodes. All that we desired to point out was, that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that if it drew some of its strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life as an artistic method. As the inevitable result of this substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama. The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they are taken directly from life and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they have the gait, manner, costume, and accent of real people; they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage. And yet how wearisome the plays are! They do not succeed in producing even that impression of reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing. As a method realism is a complete failure.
“What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history of decorative art in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its dislike to the actual representation of any object in nature, and our own imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in Byzantium, Sicily, and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic conventions, and the things that life has not are invented and fashioned for her. But wherever we have returned to life and nature, our work has always become vulgar, common, and uninteresting. Modern tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we have returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets of twenty years ago, with their healthy national feeling, their inane worship of nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured Mahomedan once remarked to me, ‘You Christians are so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of making an artistic application of the second.’ He was perfectly right, and the whole truth of the matter is this: the proper school to learn art in is not life but art.”
And now let me read you a passage which deals with the commonplace character of our literature : —
“It was not always thus. We need not say anything about the poets, for they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have always been faithful to their high mission, and are universally recognized as being absolutely unreliable. But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modern sciolists to verify his history, may be justly called the ‘Father of Lies;’ in the published speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny’s ‘Natural History;’ in Hanno’s ‘Periplus;’ in all the early chronicles; in the lives of the saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent ‘Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chronicon;’ in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini: in the memoirs of Casanuova; in Defoe’s ‘ History of the Plague;’ in Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson;’ in Napoleon’s despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle, whose ‘French Revolution’ is one of the most fascinating historical romances ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness. Now everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing in history, but they are usurping the domain of fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarizing mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high, unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who according to his own confession was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.”
C. My dear boy!
V. I assure you it is quite true, and the amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the cherry-tree is an absolute myth. However, you must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic future of America or of our own country. Listen to this —
“That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close, we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. Who he was who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the wondering cave-men at sunset how he had dragged the megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the mammoth in single combat and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of our modern anthropologists, with all their much-boasted science, has had the ordinary courage to tell us. Whatever was his name or race, he was certainly the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of a liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society or a debate at the Incorporated Authors.
“Nor will he be welcomed merely by society. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style. While life — poor, probable, uninteresting human life — tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.
“No doubt there will always be critics who, like a recent writer in the Saturday Review, will gravely censure the teller of fairy-tales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and who will hold up their inkstained hands in horror if some honest gentleman, who has never been farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book of travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole history of the world, in prison, and without knowing anything about the past. To excuse themselves they will try to shelter under the shield of him who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his servants, who heard the tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs of the enchanted isle and the fairies singing to each other in a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters. They will call upon Shakespeare — they always do — and will quote that hackneyed passage about art holding up the mirror to nature, forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in art-matters.”
C. Ahem! Ahem! Another cigarette, please.
V. My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare’s real views upon art than the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals. But let me get to the end of the passage:
“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no botanist knows of, birds that no museum possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the ‘forms more real than living man,’ and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will,. and when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the almond-tree blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield. At her word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them. She has hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.”
C. Is that the end of this dangerous article?
V. No. There is one more passage, but it is purely practical. It simply suggests some methods by which we could revive this lost art of lying.
C. Well, before you read me that, I should like to ask you a question. What do you mean by saying that life, “poor, probable, uninteresting human life,” will try to reproduce the marvels of art? I can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked looking-glass. But you don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that life imitates art, that life in fact is the mirror, and art the reality?
V. Certainly I do. Paradox though it may seem — and paradoxes are always dangerous things — it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasized by two imaginative painters, has so influenced life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees here the mystic eyes of Rossetti’s dream, the long ivory throat, the strange, square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of “The Golden Stair,” the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the “Laus Amoris,” the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivien in “Merlin’s Dream.” And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They brought their types with them, and life with her keen imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with models. The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride’s chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children like the works of art that she looked at. They knew that life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth of thought and passion, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colors of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We try to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better housing of the people. But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times ; in fact, life is art’s best, art’s only pupil.
As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate applewomen, break into sweetshops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning from the city, by leaping out on them, with black masks and loaded revolvers. This interesting phenomenon, which always occurs after the appearance of a new edition of either of the books I have named, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination. But this is a mistake. The imagination is essentially creative and always seeks for a new form. The boy burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct. He is fact, occupied, as fact usually is, with trying to reproduce fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale through the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analyzed the pessimism that characterizes modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgénieff, and completed by DostoieffskL Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau, as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the débris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempré, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays, made their first appearance in the “Comédie Humaine.” We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy of a great novelist. I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp. She told me that Becky was an invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governess who lived in the neighborhood of Kensington Square, and was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman. I inquired what became of the governess and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after the appearance of “Vanity Fair,” the governess ran away with the nephew of the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s style, and entirely by Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling-places. The noble gentleman from whom the same great sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died a few months after “The Newcomes” had reached a fourth edition, with the word “Adsum” on his lips. Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious psychological story of transformation, a friend of mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the north of London, and being anxious to get to a railway station, he took what he thought was a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a network of mean, evil-looking streets. Feeling rather nervous he was walking extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right between his legs. The child fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and trampled upon it. Being of course very much frightened and not a little hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole street was full of rough people who kept pouring out of the houses like ants. They surrounded him, and asked him his name. He was just about to give it when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson’s story. He was so filled with horror at having realized in his own person that terrible scene, and at having done accidentally what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate intent, that he ran away as hard as he could go. He was, however, very closely followed, and he finally took refuge in a surgery, the door of which happened to be open, where he explained to a young man, apparently an assistant, who happened to be there, exactly what had occurred. The crowd was induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and as soon as the coast was clear he left. As he passed out, the name on the brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye. It was “Jekyll.”
Here the imitation was of course accidental. In the following case the imitation was self-conscious. In the year 1879, just after I had left Oxford, I met at a reception at the house of one of the foreign ministers a lady who interested me very much, not merely in appearance, but in nature. What interested me most in her was her strange vagueness of character. She seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the possibility of many types. Sometimes she would give herself up entirely to art, turn her drawing-room into a studio, and spend two or three days a week at picture-galleries or museums. Then she would take to attending race-meetings, would wear the most horsey clothes, and talk about nothing but betting. She was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all her transformations as the sea-god was when Odysseus got hold of him. One day a serial began in one of the French magazines. At that time I used to read serial stories, and I well remember the shock of surprise I felt when I came to the description of the heroine. She was so like my friend that I brought her the magazine, and she recognized herself in it immediately, and seemed fascinated by the resemblance. I should tell you, by the way, that the story was translated from the Russian, so that the author had not taken his type from my friend. Well, to put the matter briefly, some months afterwards I was in Venice, and finding the magazine in the reading-room of the hotel, I took it up to see what had become of the heroine. It was a most piteous tale, as the heroine had ended by running away with a man inferior to her, not merely in social station, but in nature and intellect also. I wrote to my friend that evening, and added a postscript to the effect that her double had behaved in a very silly manner. I don’t know why I wrote, but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same thing. Before my letter had reached her, she had run away with a man who deserted her in six months. I saw her in 1884 in Paris, where she was living with her mother, and I asked her whether the story had had anything to do with her action. She told me that she had felt an absolutely irresistible impulse to follow the heroine step by step in her strange and fatal progress, and that it was with a feeling of real terror that she had looked forward to the last few chapters of the story. When they appeared it seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them in life, and she did so. It was a most clear example of this imitative instinct of which I was speaking, and an extremely tragic one.
However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual instances. Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle. All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the mirror up to art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life — the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it — is simply the desire for expression, and art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Cæsar.
C. The theory is certainly a very curious one. But even admitting this strange imitative instinct in life, surely you would acknowledge that art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and under whose influence it is produced.
V. Certainly not! Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, and not any vital connection between form and substance, as Mr. Pater fancies, that makes music the true type of all the arts. Of course, nations and individuals, with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of life, are always under the impression that it is of them that the Muses are talking, always trying to find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo, but Marsyas. Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave, art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the marvellous many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression in a new form But it is not so The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols, her reflections, her echoes. Even those who hold that art is representative of time, and place, and people, cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less it represents to us the spirit of its age. The evil faces of the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work, and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire. But it was not so. The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that great civilization, any more than the virtues of the Antonines could save it. It fell for other, for greater reasons. The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and brawling peasants of Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.
C. I do not quite agree with you there. The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal; but for the visible aspect of an age, for its look, as the phrase goes, we must surely go to the arts of imitation.
V. I don’t think so After all, what the imitative arts really give us are merely the various styles of particular artists, or of particular schools of artists. Surely you don’t imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on mediæval stained glass, or in mediæval stone and wood carving, or on mediæeval metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminated MSS. They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic about them. The Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a form of style, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be produced in the nineteenth century. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese art. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate creation of certain artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, or beside a photograph of a Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters, whose tiny full-length portraits of children are so beautiful and so powerful that he should be named the Velasquez to the court of Lilliput, went recently to Japan in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was unable to discover the inhabitants, as the delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell’s gallery showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, a whimsical fancy of art. Take the Greeks. Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately, dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of our own day. We look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art very fortunately has never once told us the truth.
C. But modern portraits by English painters, what of them? Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent?
V. Quite so. They are so like them that a hundred years from now no one will believe in them. The only portraits that one believes in are portraits where there is very little of the sitter and a great deal of the artist. Holbein’s portraits of the men and women of his time impress us with a sense of their absolute reality. But this is simply because Holbein compelled life to accept his conditions, to restrain itself within his limitations, to reproduce his type, and to appear as he wished it to appear. It is style that makes us believe in a thing — nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait-painters never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
C. Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end of your article.
V. With pleasure. Whether it will do any good I really cannot say. Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible. Why, even sleep has played us false, and has closed up the gates of ivory, and opened the gates of horn. The dreams of the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr. Myers’s two bulky volumes on the subject and in the transactions of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing things I have ever read. There is not even a fine nightmare among them. They are commonplace, sordid, and probable. As for the Church I cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that mythopœic faculty which is so essential for the imagination. But in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in good works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallow, uneducated passman out of either university to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah’s ark or Balaam’s ass or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to his Church and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism. However, I must read the end of my article —
“What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive this old art of lying. Much of course may be done, in the way of educating the public, by amateurs in the domestic circle, at literary lunches, and at afternoon teas. But this is merely the light and graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard at Cretan dinner-parties. There are many other forms. Lying for the sake of gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance — lying for a moral purpose, as it is usually called — though of late it has been rather looked down upon, was extremely popular with the antique world. Athena laughs when Odysseus tells her what a Cambridge professor once elegantly termed a ‘whopper,’ and the glory of mendacity illumines the pale brow of the stainless hero of Euripidean tragedy, and sets amongst the noble women of the world the young bride of one of Horace's most exquisite odes. Later on what at first had been merely a natural instinct was elevated into a self-conscious science. Elaborate rules were laid down for the guidance of mankind, and an important school of literature grew up round the subject. Indeed, when one remembers the excellent philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question, one cannot help regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheap and condensed edition of the works of that great casuist. A short primer, ‘When to Lie and How,’ if brought out in an attractive and not too expensive form, would no doubt command a large sale, and would prove of real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people. Lying for the sake of the improvement of the young, which is the basis of home education, still lingers amongst us, and its advantages are so admirably set forth in the early books of the ‘Republic’ that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them here. It is a form of lying for which all good mothers have peculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still further development, and has been sadly overlooked by the School Board, Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader-writer is not without its advantages. But it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity. The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development for this is, as we have already pointed out, lying in art. Just as those who do not love Plato more than truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love beauty more than truth never know the inmost shrine of art. The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy, la Chimère, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice. It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings.
“And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phœnix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. The hippogriff will stand in our stalls, champing his gilded oats, and over our heads will float the blue bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of lying.”
C. Then we must certainly cultivate it at once. But in order to avoid making any error I want you briefly to tell me the doctrines of the new æsthetics.
V. Briefly, then, they are these. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress. Sometimes it returns on its own footsteps, and revives some old form, as happened in the archaistic movement of late Greek art, and in the pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day. At other times it entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another century to understand, to appreciate, and to enjoy. In no case does it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great fallacy of all historians. The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to life and nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and nature may sometimes be used as part of art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything. As a method realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter. To us, who live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own. The only beautiful things are things that do not concern us. It is, to have the pleasure of quoting myself, exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy.
The third doctrine is that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. This results not merely from life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the desire of life is simply to find expression, and that art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy. It is a theory that has never been formularized before, but it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light on the history of art.
The last doctrine is that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art. But of this I think I have spoken at sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace, where “the milk-white peacock glimmers like a ghost,” while the evening star “washes the dusk with silver.” At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets. Come! We have talked long enough.