Books: Intentions
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Oscar Wilde >> Intentions
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VIVIAN. My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.
CYRIL. Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her
effects from him?
VIVIAN. Certainly. Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we
get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets,
blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous
shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the
lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint
forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The
extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London
during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of
Art. You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a
metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For
what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She
is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it,
depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is
very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything
until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into
existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are
fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the
mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs
for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw
them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not
exist till Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs
are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a
clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull
people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the
uncultured catch cold. And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to
turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has done so already,
indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France,
with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet
shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces
it quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and
Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing
Pissaros. Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to
be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely
modern. Of course she is not always to be relied upon. The fact
is that she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates an
incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to
other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that
imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on
repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about
the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They
belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire
them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the
other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on
my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she
called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those
absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what
was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad
period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over-
emphasised. Of course, I am quite ready to admit that Life very
often commits the same error. She produces her false Renes and her
sham Vautrins, just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp,
and on another a more than questionable Rousseau. Still, Nature
irritates one more when she does things of that kind. It seems so
stupid, so obvious, so unnecessary. A false Vautrin might be
delightful. A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable. However, I don't want
to be too hard on Nature. I wish the Channel, especially at
Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry Moore, grey
pearl with yellow lights, but then, when Art is more varied, Nature
will, no doubt, be more varied also. That she imitates Art, I
don't think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one
thing that keeps her in touch with civilised man. But have I
proved my theory to your satisfaction?
CYRIL. You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better.
But even admitting this strange imitative instinct in Life and
Nature, surely you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper
of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions
that surround it, and under whose influence it is produced.
VIVIAN. Certainly not! Art never expresses anything but itself.
This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more
than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr.
Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts. Of
course, nations and individuals, with that healthy natural vanity
which is the secret of existence, are always under the impression
that it is of them that the Muses are talking, always trying to
find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their
own turbid passions, always forgetting that the singer of life is
not Apollo but Marsyas. Remote from reality, and with her eyes
turned away from the shadows of the cave, Art reveals her own
perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the
marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history
that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression
in a new form. But it is not so. The highest art rejects the
burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a
fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from
any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human
consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not
symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols.
Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place
and people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is,
the less it represents to us the spirit of its age. The evil faces
of the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and
spotted jasper in which the realistic artists of the day delighted
to work, and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual
jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire. But it was
not so. The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supreme
civilisation, any more than the virtues of the Antonines could save
it. It fell for other, for less interesting reasons. The sibyls
and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some
that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the
Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of
Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? The more
abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the
temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of
its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.
CYRIL. I quite agree with you there. The spirit of an age may be
best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is
abstract and ideal. Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of
an age, for its look, as the phrase goes, we must of course go to
the arts of imitation.
VIVIAN. I don't think so. After all, what the imitative arts
really give us are merely the various styles of particular artists,
or of certain schools of artists. Surely you don't imagine that
the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the
figures on mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stone and wood
carving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminated
MSS. They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with nothing
grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance. The
Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of
style, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style
should not be produced in the nineteenth century. No great artist
ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to
be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you
are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the
Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any
existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at
all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious
creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by
Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a
real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the
slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in
Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to
say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or
extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure
invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.
One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the
Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he
saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and
some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his
delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only
too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have
said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so,
if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a
tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home
and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and
then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught
their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and
sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an
absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.
Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the
ancient Greeks. Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the
Greek people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian women
were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or
like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments
of the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainly
were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance.
You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-
heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their
faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen
creature of our own day. The fact is that we look back on the ages
entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has
never once told us the truth.
CYRIL. But modern portraits by English painters, what of them?
Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent?
VIVIAN. Quite so. They are so like them that a hundred years from
now no one will believe in them. The only portraits in which one
believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter,
and a very great deal of the artist. Holbein's drawings of the men
and women of his time impress us with a sense of their absolute
reality. But this is simply because Holbein compelled life to
accept his conditions, to restrain itself within his limitations,
to reproduce his type, and to appear as he wished it to appear. It
is style that makes us believe in a thing--nothing but style. Most
of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion.
They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees,
and the public never sees anything.
CYRIL. Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end of
your article.
VIVIAN. With pleasure. Whether it will do any good I really
cannot say. Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century
possible. Why, even Sleep has played us false, and has closed up
the gates of ivory, and opened the gates of horn. The dreams of
the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr.
Myers's two bulky volumes on the subject, and in the Transactions
of the Psychical Society, are the most depressing things that I
have ever read. There is not even a fine nightmare among them.
They are commonplace, sordid and tedious. As for the Church, I
cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than
the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in
the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that
mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination. But
in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for
belief, but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only
Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas
is regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a worthy clergyman, who
passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives and
dies unnoticed and unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallow
uneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpit
and express his doubts about Noah's ark, or Balaam's ass, or Jonah
and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit
open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. The
growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much
to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form
of realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance
of psychology. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never
believe the improbable. However, I must read the end of my
article:-
'What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to
revive this old art of Lying. Much of course may be done, in the
way of educating the public, by amateurs in the domestic circle, at
literary lunches, and at afternoon teas. But this is merely the
light and graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard at
Cretan dinner-parties. There are many other forms. Lying for the
sake of gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance--
lying with a moral purpose, as it is usually called--though of late
it has been rather looked down upon, was extremely popular with the
antique world. Athena laughs when Odysseus tells her "his words of
sly devising," as Mr. William Morris phrases it, and the glory of
mendacity illumines the pale brow of the stainless hero of
Euripidean tragedy, and sets among the noble women of the past the
young bride of one of Horace's most exquisite odes. Later on, what
at first had been merely a natural instinct was elevated into a
self-conscious science. Elaborate rules were laid down for the
guidance of mankind, and an important school of literature grew up
round the subject. Indeed, when one remembers the excellent
philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question, one cannot
help regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheap
and condensed edition of the works of that great casuist. A short
primer, "When to Lie and How," if brought out in an attractive and
not too expensive a form, would no doubt command a large sale, and
would prove of real practical service to many earnest and deep-
thinking people. Lying for the sake of the improvement of the
young, which is the basis of home education, still lingers amongst
us, and its advantages are so admirably set forth in the early
books of Plato's Republic that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them
here. It is a mode of lying for which all good mothers have
peculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still further
development, and has been sadly overlooked by the School Board.
Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is of course well known in
Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader-writer is
not without its advantages. But it is said to be a somewhat dull
occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of
ostentatious obscurity. The only form of lying that is absolutely
beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest
development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in
Art. Just as those who do not love Plato more than Truth cannot
pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love
Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art. The
solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the
Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, La 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 bored
to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will
hearken to her and try to borrow her wings.
'And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall
all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be
found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of
wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will
change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and
Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on
the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were
actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and
the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall
lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad's
head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our
stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of
beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that
never happen, of things that are not and that should be. But
before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.'
CYRIL. Then we must entirely cultivate it at once. But in order
to avoid making any error I want you to tell me briefly the
doctrines of the new aesthetics.
VIVIAN. Briefly, then, they are these. Art never expresses
anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought
has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily
realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith.
So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct
opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is
the history of its own progress. Sometimes it returns upon its
footsteps, and revives some antique form, as happened in the
archaistic movement of late Greek Art, and in the pre-Raphaelite
movement of our own day. At other times it entirely anticipates
its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another
century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy. In no case does
it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time
itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.
The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to
Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature
may sometimes be used as part of Art's rough material, but before
they are of any real service to art they must be translated into
artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative
medium it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a complete
failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are
modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter. To us, who live
in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for
art except our own. The only beautiful things are the things that
do not concern us. It is, to have the pleasure of quoting myself,
exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are so
suitable a motive for a tragedy. Besides, it is only the modern
that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us a
picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now?
It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism
is always in front of Life.
The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art
imitates Life. This results not merely from Life's imitative
instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is
to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms
through which it may realise that energy. It is a theory that has
never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, and
throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art.
It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also
imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects
that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings. This is
the secret of Nature's charm, as well as the explanation of
Nature's weakness.
The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
things, is the proper aim of Art. But of this I think I have
spoken at sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace,
where 'droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,' while the
evening star 'washes the dusk with silver.' At twilight nature
becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without
loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate
quotations from the poets. Come! We have talked long enough.
PEN, PENCIL AND POISON--A STUDY IN GREEN
It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists
and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and
completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so.
That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is
the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode
of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of
form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many
exceptions to this rule. Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe
as state councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell.
Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the humourists,
essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire nothing
better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their
country; and Charles Lamb's friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright,
the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic
temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely
a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer
of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of
things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary
capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without
rival in this or any age.
This remarkable man, so powerful with 'pen, pencil and poison,' as
a great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at
Chiswick, in 1794. His father was the son of a distinguished
solicitor of Gray's Inn and Hatton Garden. His mother was the
daughter of the celebrated Dr. Griffiths, the editor and founder of
the Monthly Review, the partner in another literary speculation of
Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that he
was not a bookseller, but 'a gentleman who dealt in books,' the
friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the most well-known
men of his day. Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him birth, at the
early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the Gentleman's
Magazine tells us of her 'amiable disposition and numerous
accomplishments,' and adds somewhat quaintly that 'she is supposed
to have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any
person of either sex now living.' His father did not long survive
his young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up
by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his
uncle George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned. His
boyhood was passed at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those
many fine Georgian mansions that have unfortunately disappeared
before the inroads of the suburban builder, and to its lovely
gardens and well-timbered park he owed that simple and impassioned
love of nature which never left him all through his life, and which
made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual influences of
Wordsworth's poetry. He went to school at Charles Burney's academy
at Hammersmith. Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of music,
and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn
out his most remarkable pupil. He seems to have been a man of a
good deal of culture, and in after years Mr. Wainewright often
spoke of him with much affection as a philosopher, an
archaeologist, and an admirable teacher who, while he valued the
intellectual side of education, did not forget the importance of
early moral training. It was under Mr. Burney that he first
developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us that a
drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays
great talent and natural feeling. Indeed, painting was the first
art that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he sought
to find expression by pen or poison.
Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish
dreams of the romance and chivalry of a soldier's life, and to have
become a young guardsman. But the reckless dissipated life of his
companions failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of
one who was made for other things. In a short time he wearied of
the service. 'Art,' he tells us, in words that still move many by
their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, 'Art touched her
renegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists were
purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated
with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.'
But Art was not the only cause of the change. 'The writings of
Wordsworth,' he goes on to say, 'did much towards calming the
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations. I wept
over them tears of happiness and gratitude.' He accordingly left
the army, with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-
tattle, and returned to Linden House, full of this new-born
enthusiasm for culture. A severe illness, in which, to use his own
words, he was 'broken like a vessel of clay,' prostrated him for a
time. His delicately strung organisation, however indifferent it
might have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most
keenly sensitive to pain. He shrank from suffering as a thing that
mars and maims human life, and seems to have wandered through that
terrible valley of melancholia from which so many great, perhaps
greater, spirits have never emerged. But he was young--only
twenty-five years of age--and he soon passed out of the 'dead black
waters,' as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic
culture. As he was recovering from the illness that had led him
almost to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up
literature as an art. 'I said with John Woodvil,' he cries, 'it
were a life of gods to dwell in such an element,' to see and hear
and write brave things:-
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