Intentions.............................................................................................................................................................1

Oscar Wilde.............................................................................................................................................1

THE DECAY OF LYING.......................................................................................................................1

PEN, PENCIL AND POISON A STUDY IN GREEN ......................................................................16

DOING NOTHING..............................................................................................................................26

THE TRUTH OF MASKS A NOTE ON ILLUSION.......................................................................60

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

CYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace). My dear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all

day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods, like

the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.

VIVIAN. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us

love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of

Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience is that the

more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her

curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good

intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at a landscape I

cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we

should have no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As

for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the

CYRIL. Well, you need not look at the landscape. You can lie on the grass and smoke and talk.

VIVIAN. But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black

insects. Why, even Morris's poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of

Nature can. Nature pales before the furniture of 'the street which from Oxford has borrowed its name,' as the

poet you love so much once vilely phrased it. 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 entirely 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 her

than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is more evident than

that Nature hates Mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die

of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought 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 overeducated;

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 meantime, you had better go back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature,

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

VIVIAN. Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their

principles to the bitter end of action, to the REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of practice. Not I. Like Emerson, I

write over the door of my library the word 'Whim.' Besides, my article is really a most salutary and valuable

VIVIAN. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually

condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank,

fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all,

what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce

evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians won't do.

Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members.

Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful. They can make the worse appear the better cause, as

though they were fresh from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries

triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and

unmistakeably innocent. But they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In

spite of their endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be

absolutely relied upon. One feels it as one wades through their columns. It is always the unreadable that

occurs. I am afraid that there is not much to be said in favour of either the lawyer or the journalist. Besides,

what I am pleading for is Lying in art. Shall I read you what I have written? It might do you a great deal of

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

VIVIAN. For the RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW. I think I told you that the elect had revived it.

VIVIAN. Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course. It is a club to which I belong. We are supposed to wear faded

roses in our buttonholes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian. I am afraid you are not

VIVIAN. Probably. Besides, you are a little too old. We don't admit anybody who is of the usual age.

VIVIAN. We are. This is one of the objects of the club. Now, if you promise not to interrupt too often, I will

VIVIAN (reading in a very clear, musical voice). THE DECAY OF LYING: A PROTEST. One of the

chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age

is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us

delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modem novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

The BlueBook is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner. He has his tedious DOCUMENT

HUMAIN, his miserable little COIN DE LA CREATION, 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 encyclopaedias 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 never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself.

'The lose that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated.

People have a careless way of talking about a "born liar," just as they talk about a "born poet." But in both

cases they are wrong. Lying and poetry are arts arts, as Pinto saw, not unconnected with each other and

they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion. Indeed, they have their technique, just as

the more material arts of painting and sculpture have, their subtle secrets of form and colour, their

craftmysteries, their deliberate artistic methods. As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can

recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment

suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection. But in modern days while the fashion of

writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has

almost fallen into disrepute. Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if

nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into

something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits

VIVIAN. Please don't interrupt in the middle of a sentence. 'He either falls into careless habits of accuracy,

or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the wellinformed. 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, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no

hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels

which are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability. This is no isolated instance that we

are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and if something cannot be done to check, or at least to

modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.

'Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this

modern vice, for we know positively no other name for it. There is such a thing as robbing a story of its

reality by trying to make it too true, and THE BLACK ARROW is so inartistic as not to contain a single

anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of

the LANCET. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent

liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels

bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration.

Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and

wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view" his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his

swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his

voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing

what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a shortsighted detective. As

one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost unbearable. The horses of Mr. William

Black's phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent

chromolithographic effects. On seeing them approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant

prattles pleasantly about curates, lawntennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. Marion

Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is like the lady in the French comedy who

keeps talking about "le beau ciel d'Italie." Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral

platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times

he is almost edifying. ROBERT ELSMERE is of course a masterpiece a masterpiece of the "genre

ennuyeux," the one form of literature that the English people seems thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young

friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the

house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a

book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas. As for that great and daily increasing school of

novelists for whom the sun always rises in the EastEnd, the only thing that can be said about them is that

'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 genie n'a

jamais d'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 it is just what it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and

describes things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire? We have no sympathy at all

with the moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being

exposed. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in favour of the author of L'ASSOMMOIR, NANA

and POTBOUILLE? 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 virtues. 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 wit,

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

LITTERAIRE that these characters were taken directly from life. To us 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. The justification of a character 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 a work of art. 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 analysed for an innumerable series of chapters. In

point of fact what is interesting about people in good society and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the

Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London, 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 humour. Where we differ from each other is

purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit

and the like. The more one analyses 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 most depressing and

humiliating reality; and if a writer insists upon analysing the upper classes, he might just as well write of

matchgirls and costermongers at once.' However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain you any further just here. I

quite admit that modern novels have many good points. All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite

CYRIL. That is certainly a very grave qualification, but I must say that I think you are rather unfair in some

of your strictures. I like THE DEEMSTER, and THE DAUGHTER OF HETH, and LE DISCIPLE, and MR.

ISAACS, and as for ROBERT ELSMERE, I am quite devoted to it. Not that I can look upon it as a serious

work. As a statement of the problems that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated. It is

simply 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

VIVIAN. Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a

writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as

an artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare Touchstone, I think talks about a

man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis

for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a

child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate choice he has made himself a

romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt

against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful

distance. By its means he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with wonderful roses.

As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.

The latter he bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The difference between such a

book as M. Zola's L'ASSOMMOIR and Balzac's ILLUSIONS PERDUES is the difference between

unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. 'All Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the

same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a

weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.' A steady course of Balzac reduces

our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of

fervent fierycoloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my

life is the death of Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid

myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist

than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a value on

modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank

VIVIAN. Yes. It is a huge price to pay for a very poor result. Pure modernity of form is always somewhat

vulgarising. It cannot help being so. The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate

surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subject matter. But the

mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The only beautiful

things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary

to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a

vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art's subjectmatter

we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan

feeling of any kind. It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an admirable

motive for a tragedy. I do not know anything in the whole history of literature sadder than the artistic career

of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful book, THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH, a book as much

above ROMOLA as ROMOLA is above DANIEL DERONDA, and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish

attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our

private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse our

sympathy for the victims of the poorlaw administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a

true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a

sensational journalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over. Believe me, my dear Cyril, modernity of

form and modernity of subject matter are entirely and absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the common

livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of

our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have

CYRIL. There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt that whatever amusement we may find in

reading a purely model novel, we have rarely any artistic pleasure in rereading it. And this is perhaps the

best rough test of what is literature and what is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again,

there is no use reading it at all. But what do you say about the return to Life and Nature? This is the panacea

VIVIAN. I will read you what I say on that subject. The passage comes later on in the article, but I may as

'The popular cry of our time is "Let us return to Life and Nature; they will recreate Art for us, and send the

red blood coursing through her veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong." But,

alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and wellmeaning 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.'

VIVIAN. Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic. What I mean is this. If we take Nature to mean natural simple

instinct as opposed to selfconscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always

oldfashioned, antiquated, and out of date. One touch of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two

touches of Nature will destroy any work of Art. If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of

phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her

own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had

already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when he

returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetry gave him 'Laodamia,' and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode,

such as it is. Nature gave him 'Martha Ray' and 'Peter Bell,' and the address to Mr. Wilkinson's spade.

CYRIL. I think that view might be questioned. I am rather inclined to believe in 'the impulse from a vernal

wood,' though of course the artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of temperament

that receives it, so that the return to Nature would come to mean simply the advance to a great personality.

VIVIAN (READING). 'Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work

dealing with what is unreal and nonexistent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this

new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material,

recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and

keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.

The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. That is the true

'Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative

and mythological. Then she enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's external forms, she created

an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose

joys were keener than lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had

monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them she gave a language different

from that of actual use, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence,

or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and enriched with lofty diction. She

clothed her children in strange raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from

its marble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and fluteled

oars another Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape and

substance. History was entirely rewritten, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognise

that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself is

really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified

'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 breakingup of the blankverse in the later plays, by the predominance given to

prose, and by the overimportance assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare and they are

many where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life

calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone

should life be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of

going directly to life, and borrowing life's natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her

"It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself," and the limitation, the very condition of any

art is style. However, we need not linger any longer over Shakespeare's realism. THE TEMPEST is the most

perfect of palinodes. All that we desired to point out was, that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and

Jacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its

strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life as an artistic method. As

the inevitable result of this substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an imaginative

form, we have the modern English melodrama. The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they

would talk off it; they have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life and reproduce

its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the gait, manner, costume and accent of real people;

they would pass unnoticed in a thirdclass 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

'What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those arts that we call the decorative arts.

The whole history of these arts in 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 delight. 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 solemn depressing truths, 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 us, "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 seems to me to settle the question very completely.

'It was not always thus. We need not say anything about the poets, for they, with the unfortunate exception of

Mr. Wordsworth, have been really faithful to their high mission, and are universally recognised as being

absolutely unreliable. But in the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts of

modem sciolists to verify his history, may justly be called the "Father of Lies"; in the published speeches of

Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny's NATURAL HISTORY; in Hanno's

PERIPLUS; in all the early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in the

travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent

PRODIGIORUM ET OSTENTORUM CHRONICON; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the

memoirs of Casanova; in Defoe's HISTORY OF THE PLAGUE; in Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON; in

Napoleon's despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle, whose FRENCH REVOLUTION is one of the

most fascinating historical novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or

else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness. Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely

finding a footingplace 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 vulgarising mankind. The crude

commercialism of America, its materialising 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 cherrytree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time,

VIVIAN. I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the

cherrytree is an absolute myth. However, you must not think that I am too despondent about the artistic

'That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever.

Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the

genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory,

whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by

the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the

cultured and fascinating liar. Who he was who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the

wandering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper

cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat and brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and not one of

our modern anthropologists, for all their muchboasted science, has had the ordinary courage to tell us.

Whatever was his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar

is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilised society, and without him a

dinnerparty, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate at the

'Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prisonhouse 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

'No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer in the SATURDAY REVIEW, will gravely

censure the teller of fairy tales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative

work by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and will hold up their inkstained hands in horror if some

honest gentleman, who has never been farther than the yewtrees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book

of travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole history of the world, without

knowing anything whatsoever about the past. To excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield

of him who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his servants, who heard the

Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in

a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid

Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters. They will call upon Shakespeare they always do and will quote

that hackneyed passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up to Nature, is

deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all artmatters.'

VIVIAN. My dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic utterance, and no more represents

Shakespeare's real views upon art than the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals. But let me

'Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external

standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that

no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a

scarlet thread. Hers are the "forms more real than living man," and hers the great archetypes of which things

that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work

miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the almondtree

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.

VIVIAN. No. There is one more passage, but it is purely practical. It simply suggests some methods by

CYRIL. Well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you a question. What do you mean by saying that

life, 'poor, probable, uninteresting human life,' will try to reproduce the marvels of art? I can quite understand

your objection to art being treated as a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked

lookingglass. But you don't mean to say that you seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is

VIVIAN. Certainly I do. Paradox though it may seem and paradoxes are always dangerous things it is

none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in

England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative

painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here

the mystic eyes of Rossetti's dream, the long ivory throat, the strange squarecut jaw, the loosened shadowy

hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of 'The Golden Stair,' the blossomlike mouth and

weary loveliness of the 'Laus Amoris,' the passionpale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty

of the Vivian in 'Merlin's Dream.' And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to

copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found

in 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 as lovely

as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. They knew that Life gains from art not merely

spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soulturmoil or soulpeace, but that she can form herself on the

very lines and colours 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, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better housing of the lower

orders. 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 studioimitators, but those who become like his works of art, be

they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word, 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 apple women, break into sweetshops at night, and alarm old gentlemen

who are returning home from the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and

unloaded revolvers. This interesting phenomenon, which always occurs after the appearance of a new edition

of either of the books I have alluded to, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination.

But this is a mistake. The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form. The

boyburglar is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is,

with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the

whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet

invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange

martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in,

is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski. Robespierre

came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out of the DEBRIS 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 Rubempre, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays

made their first appearance on the stage of the COMEDIE HUMAINE. We are merely carrying out, with

footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist. I once asked a

lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp. She told me that

Becky was an invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governess who lived

in the neighbourhood of 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, she 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 NEWCOMER 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,

took what he thought would be a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a network of mean,

evillooking streets. Feeling rather nervous he began to walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an

archway ran a child right between his legs. It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and trampled upon it.

Being of course very much frightened and a little hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole

street was full of rough people who came 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 realised in his own person that terrible and

wellwritten scene, and at having done accidentally, though in fact, 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

finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door of which happened to be open, where he explained to a young

assistant, who happened to be there, exactly what had occurred. The humanitarian crowd were 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 doorplate of the surgery caught 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

selfconscious. In the year 1879, just after I had left Oxford, I met at a reception at the house of one of the

Foreign Ministers a woman of very curious exotic beauty. We became great friends, and were constantly

together. And yet what interested me most in her was not her beauty, but her character, her entire vagueness

of character. She seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the possibility of many types. Sometimes

she would give herself up entirely to art, turn her drawingroom into a studio, and spend two or three days a

week at picture galleries or museums. Then she would take to attending racemeetings, wear the most horsey

clothes, and talk about nothing but betting. She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics,

and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy. In fact, she was a kind of Proteus, and as much

a failure in all her transformations as was that wondrous seagod when Odysseus laid hold of him. One day a

serial began in one of the French magazines. At that time I used to read serial stories, and I well remember

the shock of surprise I felt when I came to the description of the heroine. She was so like my friend that I

brought her the magazine, and she recognised herself in it immediately, and seemed fascinated by the

resemblance. I should tell you, by the way, that the story was translated from some dead Russian writer, so

that the author had not taken his type from my friend. Well, to put the matter briefly, some months afterwards

I was in Venice, and finding the magazine in the readingroom of the hotel, I took it up casually to see what

had become of the heroine. It was a most piteous tale, as the girl had ended by running away with a man

absolutely inferior to her, not merely in social station, but in character and intellect also. I wrote to my friend

that evening about my views on John Bellini, and the admirable ices at Florian's, and the artistic value of

gondolas, but added a postscript to the effect that her double in the story had behaved in a very silly manner. I

don't know why I added that, but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same thing.

Before my letter had reached her, she had run away with a man who deserted her in six months. I saw her in

1884 in Paris, where she was living with her mother, and I asked her whether the story had had anything to do

with her action. She told me that she had felt an absolutely irresistible impulse to follow the heroine step by

step in her strange and fatal progress, and that it was with a feeling of real terror that she had looked forward

to the last few chapters of the story. When they appeared, it seemed to her that she was compelled to

reproduce them in life, and she did so. It was a most clear example of this imitative instinct of which I was

However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual instances. Personal experience is a most vicious

and limited circle. All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art

imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the

mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact

what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life the energy of life, as Aristotle

would call it is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which

this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young

men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand

Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.

CYRIL. The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make it complete you must show that Nature, no

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 gaslamps 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 oldfashioned. 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 secondrate 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, manypetalled 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

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 metalwork, or tapestries, or illuminated MSS. They were probably very

ordinarylooking 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 selfconscious 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

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.

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 openmouthed 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

dinnerparties. 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 selfconscious 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 leaderwriter 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, flutetoned 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

'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 highpooped 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

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 preRaphaelite 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

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 subjectmatter. 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

oldfashioned. 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 selfconscious 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,

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 milkwhite

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

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 artcritic, 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

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 wellknown men of his day. Mrs. Wainewright died, in

giving him birth, at the early age of twentyone, 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 welltimbered 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 drawingbook

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

simplehearted.' 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 barracklife and coarse

messroom tittle tattle, and returned to Linden House, full of this newborn 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 twentyfive 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

It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance of a man who had a true passion for

Scott, the editor of the LONDON MAGAZINE, struck by the young man's genius, or under the influence of

the strange fascination that he exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of articles

on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonym he began to contribute to the literature of his

grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more

than a face. These disguises intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time he seems to have made his

mark. Charles Lamb speaks of 'kind, lighthearted Wainewright,' whose prose is 'capital.' We hear of him

entertaining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and

others, at A PETITDINER. Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful

rings, his antique cameo breastpin, and his pale lemoncoloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed

were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes,

and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others.

There was something in him of Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De

Quincey saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb's. 'Amongst the company, all literary men, sat a

murderer,' he tells us, and he goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of

man and woman, and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table at the young writer

beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and

speculates on 'what sudden growth of another interest' would have changed his mood, had he known of what

terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even then guilty.

His lifework falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly

admitted that, if we set aside his achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us hardly

But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This

young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art, and

has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work without interest. We hear of

William Blake stopping in the Royal Academy before 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 modern culture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writes about La Gioconda, and

early French poets and the Italian Renaissance. He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan

translations of CUPID AND PSYCHE, and the HYPNEROTOMACHIA, and bookbinding and early

editions, and wide margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful surroundings, and never

wearies of describing to us the rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live. He had that curious love

of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to

denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats, and with

Gautier, he was fascinated by that 'sweet marble monster' of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in

There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for decoration, that shows that he did not

entirely free himself from the false taste of his time. But it is clear that he was one of the first to recognise

what is, indeed, the very keynote of aesthetic eclecticism, I mean the true harmony of all really beautiful

things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner. He saw that in decorating a room, which is to be, not

a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim at any archaeological reconstruction of the past,

nor burden ourselves with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this artistic perception he was

And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its

exquisitely painted figures and the faint [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] finely traced upon its side,

and behind it hangs an engraving of the 'Delphic Sibyl' of Michael Angelo, or of the 'Pastoral' of Giorgione.

Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a

book of Hours, 'cased in a cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with small

brilliants and rubies,' and close by it 'squats a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of

cornbearing Sicily.' Some dark antique bronzes contrast with the pale gleam of two noble CHRISTI

CRUCIFIXI, one carved in ivory, the other moulded in wax.' He has his trays of Tassie's gems, his tiny

LouisQuatorze BONBONNIERE with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized 'brownbiscuit teapots,

One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle

connoisseur, turning over his fine collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner's 'Liber Studiorum,' of which

he was a warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, 'the head of

Alexander on an onyx of two strata,' or 'that superb ALTISSIMO RELIEVO on cornelian, Jupiter

AEgiochus.' He was always a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful suggestions as to the

best means of forming a collection. Indeed, while fully appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the

importance of reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that he says about the value of

As an artcritic he concerned himself primarily with the complex impressions produced by a work of art, and

certainly the first step in aesthetic criticism is to realise one's own impressions. He cared nothing for abstract

discussions on the nature of the Beautiful, and the historical method, which has since yielded such rich fruit,

did not belong to his day, but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art's first appeal is neither to the

intellect nor to the emotions, but purely to the artistic temperament, and he more than once points out that this

temperament, this 'taste,' as he calls it, being unconsciously guided and made perfect by frequent contact with

the best work, becomes in the end a form of right judgment. Of course there are fashions in art just as there

are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free ourselves from the influence of custom and

the influence of novelty. He certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to form any

fair estimate of contemporary work. But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound. He admired Turner and

Constable at a time when they were not so much thought of as they are now, and saw that for the highest

landscape art we require more than 'mere industry and accurate transcription.' Of Crome's 'Heath Scene near

Norwich' he remarks that it shows 'how much a subtle observation of the elements, in their wild moods, does

for a most uninteresting flat,' and of the popular type of landscape of his 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 mapwork; in which rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting

through rifted clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of the real painter, are not.' He had a

thorough dislike of what is obvious or commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie at

dinner, he cared as little for Sir David's pictures as he did for Mr. Crabbe's poems. With the imitative and

realistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy and he tells us frankly that his great admiration for Fuseli

was largely due to the fact that the little Swiss did not consider it necessary that an artist should paint only

what he sees. The qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity of line,

richness of colour, and imaginative power. Upon the other hand, he was not a doctrinaire. 'I hold that no work

of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the

question.' This is one of his excellent aphorisms. And in criticising painters so different as Landseer and

Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical, he is trying 'to see the object as in

However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease in his criticisms of contemporary work. 'The

present,' he says, 'is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first perusal. . . . Modern things

dazzle me. I must look at them through Time's telescope. Elia complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem

is uncertain; "print," as he excellently says, "settles it." Fifty years' toning does the same thing to a picture.'

He is happier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt,

Corregio, and Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things. What is Gothic touched

him very little, but classical art and the art of the Renaissance were always dear to him. He saw what our

English school could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies of pointing out to the young

student the artistic possibilities that 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 in one 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 to revive style as a conscious tradition. But he saw that no amount of art

lectures or art congresses, or 'plans for advancing the fine arts,' will ever produce this result. The people, he

says very wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have 'the best models constantly before

As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely technical in his art criticisms. Of

Tintoret's 'St. George delivering the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,' he remarks:

The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from the pale greenish background by a

vermilion scarf; and the full hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the purplelake

coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saint, besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the

And elsewhere he talks learnedly of 'a delicate Schiavone, various as a tulipbed, with rich broken tints,' of 'a

glowing portrait, remarkable for MORBIDEZZA, by the scarce Moroni,' and of another picture being 'pulpy

But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate those

impressions into words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect. He

was one of the first to develop what has been called the artliterature of the nineteenth century, that form of

literature which has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning, its two most perfect exponents. His description

of Lancret's REPAS ITALIEN, in which 'a darkhaired girl, "amorous of mischief," lies on the

daisypowdered grass,' is in some respects very charming. Here is his account of 'The Crucifixion,' by

Darkness sooty, portentous darkness shrouds the whole scene: only above the accursed wood, as if

through a horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge 'sleetyflaw, discoloured water' streams down

amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable night. Already the Earth pants

thick and fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt the air is stagnant a muttering rumble

growls underneath their feet, and some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. The horses snuff

the coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear. The moment rapidly approaches when, nearly

torn asunder by His own weight, fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from His

slit veins, His temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His black tongue parched with the fiery deathfever,

His head sinks, and the sacred corpse 'swings senseless of the cross.' A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer

through the air and vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea rolls on high from the

sands its black weltering waves. Earth yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers. The dead and the living

are mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy city. New prodigies await them

there. The veil of the temple the unpierceable veil is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that dreaded

recess containing the Hebrew mysteries the fatal ark with the tables and sevenbranched candelabrum is

Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right. It would have lost nearly all its charms in losing

that perplexing veil of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting imagination may

speculate. At present it is like a thing in another world. A dark gulf is betwixt us. It is not tangible by the

In this passage, written, the author tells us, 'in awe and reverence,' there is much that is terrible, and very

much that is quite horrible, but it is not without a certain crude form of power, or, at any rate, a certain crude

violence of words, a quality which this age should highly appreciate, as it is its chief defect. It is pleasanter,

We should read Moschus's lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before looking at this picture, or study the

picture as a preparation for the lament. We have nearly the same images in both. For either victim the high

groves and forest dells murmur; the flowers exhale sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale mourns on

the craggy lands, and the swallow in the longwinding vales; 'the satyrs, too, and fauns darkveiled groan,'

and the fountain nymphs within the wood melt into tearful waters. The sheep and goats leave their pasture;

and oreads, 'who love to scale the most inaccessible tops of all uprightest rocks,' hurry down from the song of

their windcourting pines; while the dryads bend from the branches of the meeting trees, and the rivers moan

The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling horn of Aurora's love no more shall

scatter away the cold twilight on the top of Hymettus. The foreground of our subject is a grassy sunburnt

bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of landbreakers), rendered more uneven by many

foottripping roots and stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing out

lightgreen shoots. This bank rises rather suddenly on the right to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at

the entrance of which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees that ivorybright body

which was, but an instant agone, parting the rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on

thorns and flowers with jealousystung foot now helpless, heavy, void of all motion, save when the breeze

From between the closelyneighboured boles astonished nymphs press forward with loud cries

And deerskinvested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance; And put strange pity in their horned

Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of death. On the other side of the group,

Virtuous Love with 'vans dejected' holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan people, fauns,

rams, goats, satyrs, and satyrmothers, pressing their children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry

along from the left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on whose lowest ridge a

brookguardian pours from her urn her grieftelling waters. Above and more remote than the Ephidryad,

another female, rending her locks, appears among the vinefestooned pillars of an unshorn grove. The centre

of the picture is filled by shady meadows, sinking down to a rivermouth; beyond is 'the vast strength of the

ocean stream,' from whose floor the extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine washed

Were this description carefully rewritten, it would be quite admirable. The conception of making a prose

poem out of paint is excellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim. In a very ugly

His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everything connected with the stage, for instance, he was

always extremely interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archaeological accuracy in costume and

scenepainting. 'In art,' he says in one of his essays, 'whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well'; and

he points out that once we allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to

be drawn. In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous occasion, he was 'on the side of the angels.'

He was one of the first to admire Keats and Shelley 'the tremulouslysensitive and poetical Shelley,' as he

calls him. His admiration for Wordsworth was 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 loved Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and

Chaucer and Chapman, and Petrarch. And to him all the arts were one. 'Our critics,' he remarks with much

wisdom, 'seem hardly aware 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 says

elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving

either himself or his listeners. To his fellowcontributors in the LONDON MAGAZINE he was always most

generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham, Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything

of the malice of a friend. Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way, and, with the art

What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety of a boy with the knowledge of a man:

How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most seasonably out of season. His talk

without affectation was compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity. Like grains of fine

gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets. He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic

observation on the FASHION FOR MEN OF GENIUS was a standing dish. Sir Thomas Browne was a

'bosom cronie' of his; so was Burton, and old Fuller. In his amorous vein he dallied with that peerless

Duchess of manyfolio odour; and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he induced light

dreams. He would deliver critical touches on these, like one inspired, but it was good to let him choose his

own game; if another began even on the acknowledged pets he was liable to interrupt, or rather append, in a

mode difficult to define whether as misapprehensive or mischievous. One night at C's, the above dramatic

partners were the temporary subject of chat. Mr. X. commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I

don't know which of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who told him 'THAT was nothing; the lyrics

One side of his literary career deserves especial notice. Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as

much to him as to any man of the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and

delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the

subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street

leaderwriters, and this school JANUS WEATHERCOCK may be said to have invented. He also saw that it

was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely

journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had for dinner, where he gets his

clothes, what wines he likes, and in what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for some

popular newspaper of our own time. This being the least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the

most obvious influence. A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of the

Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature. 'I hold three things in high estimation,' he says

somewhere: 'to sit lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees while

the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the consciousness of neighbourhood. The country gives

them all to me.' He writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating Collins's 'Ode to

Evening,' just to catch the fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face 'in a watery bed of cowslips,

wet with May dews'; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweetbreathed kine 'pass slowly homeward

through the twilight,' and hearing 'the distant clank of the sheepbell.' One phrase of his, 'the polyanthus

glowed in its cold bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel,' is curiously

characteristic of his temperament, and this passage is rather pretty in its way:

The short tender grass was covered with marguerites 'such that men called DAISIES in our town' thick as

stars on a summer's night. The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high dusky

grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from

the newlysown seeds. The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a cloud streaked the

calm aether; only round the horizon's edge streamed a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the

near village with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding whiteness. I thought of

However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines, and who was so

susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, 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

tell us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods that

he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days, too, he was always reticent on the matter,

and preferred to speak about 'The Excursion,' and the 'Poems founded on the Affections.' There is no doubt,

however, that the poison that he used was strychnine. In one of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud,

and which served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry crystals of the

Indian NUX VOMICA, a poison, one of his biographers tells us, 'nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, 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. His first victim was his uncle, Mr.

Thomas Griffiths. He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had

always been very much attached. In the August of the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife's

mother, and in the following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his sisterin law. Why

he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained. It may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous

sense of power that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason. But the murder of

Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about 18,000 pounds, for

which they had insured her life in various offices. The circumstances were as follows. On the 12th of

December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden House, and took lodgings at No. 12

Conduit Street, Regent Street. With them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie. On the

evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night Helen sickened. The next day she was

extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in to attend her. She lived till Monday, the

20th, when, after the doctor's morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright brought her some poisoned jelly, and

then went out for a walk. When they returned Helen Abercrombie was dead. She was about twenty years of

age, a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming redchalk drawing of her by her brotherin law is

still in existence, and shows how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a

painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey says that Mrs.

Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and

The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined to pay the policy on the technical

ground of misrepresentation and want of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in

the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one decision should govern all the cases. The

trial, however, did not come on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately given in

the companies' favour. The judge on the occasion was Lord Abinger. EGOMET BONMOT was represented

by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet, and the AttorneyGeneral and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for the

other side. The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present at either of the trials. The refusal of the

companies to give him the 18,000 pounds had placed him in a position of most painful pecuniary

embarrassment. Indeed, a few months after the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested

for debt in the streets of London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends. This

difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he thought it better to go abroad till he could come

to some practical arrangement with his creditors. He accordingly went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of

the young lady in question, and while he was there induced him to insure his life with the Pelican Company

for 3000 pounds. As soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy executed, he

dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they sat together one evening after dinner. He himself

did not gain any monetary advantage by doing this. His aim was simply to revenge himself on the first office

that had refused to pay him the price of his sin. His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left

Boulogne at once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany, and was for some time

the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a beautiful country house at St. Omer. From this he moved to

Paris, where he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others talk of his 'skulking with

poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all who knew him.' In 1837 he returned to England privately.

Some strange mad fascination brought him back. He followed a woman whom he loved.

It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in Covent Garden. His sittingroom was on

the ground floor, and he prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen. Thirteen years before, when

he was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a

power of attorney, which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had inherited from

his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement. He knew that this forgery had been discovered, and

that by returning to England he was imperilling his life. Yet he returned. Should one wonder? It was said that

It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. A noise in the street attracted his attention, and, in his

artistic interest in modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment. Some one outside called out, 'That's

On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey. The following report of the proceedings appeared in

Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, aged fortytwo, a man

of gentlemanly appearance, wearing mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of

attorney for 2259 pounds, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company of the Bank of England.

There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned

before Mr. Serjeant Arabin in the course of the morning. On being brought before the judges, however, he

begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which

The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other indictments, but that the Bank did not

desire to shed blood, the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at the close

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies. In a fanciful passage in one of his

early essays he had fancied himself 'lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death' for having been

unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the British Museum in order to complete

his collection. The sentence now passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death. He complained

bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some people may fancy, that the

money was practically his own, having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had

been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase, was at least a CIRCONSTANCE

ATTENUANTE. The permanence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the

English law solves the question in an extremely roughandready manner. There is, however, something

dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal

influence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across him by chance. They had been

going over the prisons of London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of

Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was 'horrified to recognise a

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of fashionable lounge. Many men of letters

went down to visit their old literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind lighthearted Janus whom

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon, and thought he would improve

the occasion by pointing out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: 'Sir, you City men enter

on your speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of your speculations succeed, some fail. Mine

happen to have failed, yours happen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between my visitor

and me. But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last. I have been determined

through life to hold the position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is the custom of this

place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning's turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a

bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!' When a friend reproached him with the murder

of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said, 'Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had

From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from there in the SUSAN to Van

Diemen's Land along with three hundred other convicts. The voyage seems to have been most distasteful to

him, and in a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of 'the companion of poets and

artists' being compelled to associate with 'country bumpkins.' The phrase that he applies to his companions

need not surprise us. Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result of starvation.

There was probably no one on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a

His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he started a studio, and returned to sketching

and portraitpainting, 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 cases on record in which he tried to make away with people who

had offended him. But his hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were complete failures,

and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he presented a memorial to the governor

of the settlement, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticketofleave. In it he speaks of himself as being

'tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and

deprived of the exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.' His request, however, was refused, and the

associate of Coleridge consoled himself by making those marvellous PARADIS ARTIFICIELS whose secret

is only known to the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for

His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a

quality that his early work certainly lacked. In a note to the LIFE OF DICKENS, Forster mentions that in

1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart

Town, an oil portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that 'he had contrived to put the

expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kindhearted girl.' M. Zola, in one of his novels,

tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist

portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance to his victim. The

development of Mr. Wainewright's style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can fancy an

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary London, and made so brilliant a

DEBUT in life and letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest

biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this memoir, and whose little book is,

indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretence and

assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or at least a

mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not

the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for secondrate artists. It is possible

that De Quincey exaggerated his critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his

published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word. Here

and there he is distinctly vulgar in expression, and he is always lacking in the selfrestraint of the true artist.

But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb

thought 'capital' has no small historic interest. That he had a sincere love of art and nature seems to me quite

certain. There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot rewrite the whole of history

Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form any purely artistic judgment about him.

It is impossible not to feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or Mr.

Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol. But had the man worn a costume and spoken a language different from

our own, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the

seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and this land, we would be quite able to

arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position and value. I know that there are many historians, or

at least writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and

who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster. This,

however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of

perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the true historical sense

ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia. These personages have

become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us.

They are not in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them. They have passed into the

sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval. And

so it may be some day with Charles Lamb's friend. At present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be

treated in that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming studies of the 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 forgotten him. He is the

hero of Dickens's HUNTED DOWN, the Varney of Bulwer's LUCRETIA; and it is gratifying to note that

fiction has paid some homage to one who was so powerful with 'pen, pencil and poison.' To be suggestive for

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

ERNEST (looking up). At a capital story that I have just come across in this volume of Reminiscences that I

ERNEST. Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over the pages with some amusement,

though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely

lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true

explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is

GILBERT. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. But I must confess

that I like all memoirs. I like them for their form, just as much as for their matter. In literature mere egotism is

delightful. It is what fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert

and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sevigne. Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather

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 that Cellini wrought in bronze

for the castle of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows the

moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given it more pleasure than has that

autobiography in which the supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his

shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a sceptic like

the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he

can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman

represented if that can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of

the supremacy of the intellect may not, cannot, I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching

that troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely church at Littlemore, where 'the

breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are few,' will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the

yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that gracious undergraduate who saw

in the flower's sure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his days

a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is

irresistible. Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into the circle of the Immortals,

and, conscious that indiscretion is the better part of valour, bustles about among them in that 'shaggy purple

gown with gold buttons and looped lace' which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, and

prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the

'good hog's hars let,' and the 'pleasant French fricassee of veal' that he loved to eat, of his game of bowls

with Will Joyce, and his 'gadding after beauties,' and his reciting of HAMLET on a Sunday, and his playing

of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things. Even in actual life egotism is not without its

attractions. When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves

they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as

one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.

ERNEST. There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say. But do you seriously propose that every

man should become his own Boswell? What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and

GILBERT. What has become of them? They are the pest of the age, nothing more and nothing less. Every

great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

GILBERT. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to

vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are

GILBERT. Oh! to all our secondrate LITTERATEURS. We are overrun by a set of people who, when poet

or painter passes away, arrive at the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to

behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them. They are the mere bodysnatchers of literature. The dust is

given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach. And now, let me play Chopin to you,

or Dvorek? Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorek? He writes passionate, curiouslycoloured things.

ERNEST. No; I don't want music just at present. It is far too indefinite. Besides, I took the Baroness

Bernstein down to dinner last night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect, she insisted on

discussing music as if it were actually written in the German language. Now, whatever music sounds like I

am glad to say 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 to me till the

whitehorned day comes into the room. There is something in your voice that is wonderful.

GILBERT (rising from the piano). I am not in a mood for talking tonight. I really am not. How horrid of

you to smile! Where are the cigarettes? Thanks. How exquisite these single daffodils are! They seem to be

made of amber and cool ivory. They are like Greek things of the best period. What was the story in the

confessions of the remorseful Academician that made you laugh? Tell it to me. After playing Chopin, I feel

as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my

own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been

ignorant, and fills one 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, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly

discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and

known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations. And so tell me this story, Ernest. I want to

ERNEST. Oh! I don't know that it is of any importance. But I thought it a really admirable illustration of the

true value of ordinary artcriticism. It seems that a lady once gravely asked the remorseful Academician, as

you call him, if his celebrated picture of 'A SpringDay at Whiteley's,' or, 'Waiting for the Last Omnibus,' or

ERNEST. You are quite incorrigible. But, seriously speaking, what is the use of artcriticism? Why cannot

the artist be left alone, to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which we

already know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice

and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a momentary perfection. It

seems to me that the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it, and works best in silence and

in isolation. Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism? Why should those who

cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value of creative work? What can they know about it? If a

GILBERT. Ah! but you should have. Nowadays, we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to

part with one of them. The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad Church

Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott's Great Writers Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to

explain their divinity away. Where one had hoped that Browning was a mystic they have sought to show that

he was simply inarticulate. Where one had fancied that he had something to conceal, they have proved that he

had but little to reveal. But I speak merely of his incoherent work. Taken as a whole the man was great. He

did not belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the Titan. He did not survey, and it was

but rarely that he could sing. His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from

emotion to form, but from thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was

certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated

him, but rather the processes by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine

makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the

wise. So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or looked

upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow

hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a

material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood,

it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some

golden 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 Robert Browning's

hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and

ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous

music. Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in

discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the

movement perfect, or the interval less harsh. Yet, he was great: and though he turned language into ignoble

clay, he made from it men and women that live. He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare. If

Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths. Even now, as

I am speaking, and speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the pageant of his

persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, stands

dread Saul with the lordly malesapphires 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. The spawn of

Setebos gibbers in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima's haggard face, and loathes

her and his own sin, and himself. Pale as the white satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with

dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears the

cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go down. 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 writer of fiction, as the most

supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled,

and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what more should an

artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet.

Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside him. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is

George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing

ERNEST. There is something in what you say, but there is not everything in what you say. In many points

GILBERT. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. But let us return to the particular point at issue.

GILBERT. I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest. It has all the vitality of error and all the

ERNEST. It is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that petulant manner. It is quite true. In the

best days of art there were no artcritics. The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great whitelimbed

Hermes that slept within it. The waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to the statue, and the

world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb. He poured the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and

the river of red metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body of a god. With enamel or

polished jewels he gave sight to the sightless eyes. The hyacinthlike curls grew crisp beneath his graver.

And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal,

those who passed by, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], became conscious of a new influence that had

come across their lives, and dreamily, or with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went to their homes or

daily labour, or wandered, it may be, through the city gates to that nymphhaunted meadow where young

Phaedrus bathed his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tall wind whispering planes and

flowering AGNUS CASTUS, began to think of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed

awe. In those days the artist was free. From the river valley he took the fine clay in his fingers, and with a

little tool of wood or bone, fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to the dead as their

playthings, and we find them still in the dusty tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold

and the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment. On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with

bright sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with tired feet the purple

whitestarred fields of asphodel, one 'in whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan War,' Polyxena, the

daughter of Priam; or figured Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords to the maststep, that he

might listen without hurt to the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron, where the

ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek

at Marathon, or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay. He drew with

silverpoint and charcoal upon parchment and prepared cedar. Upon ivory and rosecoloured terracotta he

painted with wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated irons making it firm. Panel and

marble and linen canvas became wonderful as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her own image,

was still, and dared not speak. All life, indeed, was his, from the merchants seated in the marketplace to the

cloaked shepherd lying on the hill; from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon, to

the king whom, in long green curtained litter, slaves bore upon oilbright shoulders, and fanned with

peacock fans. Men and women, with pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passed before him. He watched them,

All subtle arts belonged to him also. He held the gem against the revolving disk, and the amethyst became the

purple couch for Adonis, and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds. He beat out the gold

into roses, and strung them together for necklace or armlet. He beat out the gold into wreaths for the

conqueror's helmet, or into palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the royal dead. On the back of the

silver mirror he graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or lovesick Phaedra with her nurse, or Persephone,

weary of memory, putting poppies in her hair. The potter sat in his shed, and, flowerlike from the silent

wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands. He decorated the base and stem and ears with pattern of dainty

oliveleaf, or foliated acanthus, or curved and crested wave. Then in black or red he painted lads wrestling,

or in the race: knights in full armour, with strange heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from

shellshaped chariot over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or working their miracles: the heroes in

their victory or in their pain. Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground of white the

languid bridegroom and his bride, with Eros hovering round them an Eros like one of Donatello's angels, a

little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings. On the curved side he would write the name of his

friend. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] tells us the story of his days. Again, on the rim of the wide

flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at rest, as his fancy willed it. From the tiny perfume

bottle laughed Aphrodite at her toilet, and, with barelimbed Maenads in his train, Dionysus danced round

the winejar on naked muststained feet, while, satyrlike, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated skins,

or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted fircone, and wreathed with dark ivy. And no one

came to trouble the artist at his work. No irresponsible chatter disturbed him. He was not worried by

opinions. By the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no Higginbotham. By the Ilyssus, my dear

Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the

mediocrity how to mouth. By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious

prattle of what they do not understand. On the reed grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous

journalism monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in the dock. The Greeks had no

GILBERT. Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are terribly unsound. I am afraid that you have

been listening to the conversation of some one older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do,

and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.

As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great

Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest. I have merely to do with literature.

GILBERT. Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read. That is all. But with regard to your

statement that the Greeks had no artcritics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It would be more just to say that

GILBERT. Yes, a nation of artcritics. But I don't wish to destroy the delightfully unreal picture that you

have drawn of the relation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his age. To give an accurate

description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the

inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. Still less do I desire to talk learnedly. Learned

conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed. And, as

for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish

philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes. No: let me play to you some mad

scarlet thing by Dvorek. 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 of the

fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being

misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an

admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be

taught. Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded

bees the stars cluster round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the night. Thought is

wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia,

ERNEST. You are horribly wilful. I insist on your discussing this matter with me. You have said that the

GILBERT. My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art criticism had come down to us from

Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art critics, and

that they invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of everything else. For, after all, what

is our primary debt to the Greeks? Simply the critical spirit. And, this spirit, which they exercised on

questions of religion and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education, they exercised on

questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless

GILBERT. Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The principles of the former, as laid

down by the Greeks, we may 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 many cases, so subtle that we can hardly understand them. Recognising

that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated the

criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material of that art, to a point to which we, with our

accentual system of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for instance, the

metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and,

I need hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they were right in all things.

Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and

lower classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and

less and less to the ear which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek to

please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the

whole, the most perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of

mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the

fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have made writing a

definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate design. The Greeks, upon the other

hand, regarded writing simply as a method of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its

musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear the critic. I have sometimes thought

that the story of Homer's blindness might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to

remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does

with the eyes of the soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music, repeating each line

over and over again to himself till he has caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that

are winged with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a

cause, that England's great poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later

verse. When Milton could no longer write he began to sing. Who would match the measures of COMUS with

the 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

days became that mighty manystopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all the stateliness of

Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have its swiftness, and is the one imperishable inheritance of English

literature sweeping through all the ages, because above them, and abiding with us ever, being immortal in its

form. Yes: writing has done much harm to writers. We must return to the voice. That must be our test, and

perhaps then we shall be able to appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek artcriticism.

As it now is, we cannot do so. Sometimes, when I have written a piece of prose that I have been modest

enough to consider absolutely free from fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I may have been guilty

of the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachic movements, a crime for which a learned critic of

the Augustan age censures with most just severity the brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias. I grow cold

when I think of it, and wonder to myself if the admirable ethical effect of the prose of that charming writer,

who once in a spirit of reckless generosity towards the uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed the

monstrous doctrine that conduct is threefourths of life, will not some day be entirely annihilated by the

GILBERT. Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that the Greeks had no artcritics? I can

understand it being said that the constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but not that the race

to whom we owe the critical spirit did not criticise. You will not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art

criticism from Plato to Plotinus. The night is too lovely for that, and the moon, if she heard us, would put

more ashes on her face than are there already. But think merely of one perfect little work of aesthetic

criticism, Aristotle's TREATISE ON POETRY. It is not perfect in form, for it is badly written, consisting

perhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or of isolated fragments destined for some larger book, but in

temper and treatment it is perfect, absolutely. The ethical effect of art, its importance to culture, and its place

in the formation of character, had been done once for all by Plato; but here we have art treated, not from the

moral, but from the purely aesthetic point of view. Plato had, of course, dealt with many definitely artistic

subjects, such as the importance of unity in a work of art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic

value of appearances, the relation of the visible arts to the external world, and the relation of fiction to fact.

He first perhaps stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet satisfied, the desire to know the

connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the

Kosmos. The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat

barren of result in the metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer them to the

sphere of art, and you will find that they are still vital and full of meaning. It may be that it is as a critic of

Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering the name of the sphere of his speculation we shall

find a new philosophy. But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily in its concrete manifestations,

taking Tragedy, for instance, and investigating the material it uses, which is language, its subject matter,

which is life, the method by which it works, which is action, the conditions under which it reveals itself,

which are those of theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is plot, and its final aesthetic appeal,

which is to the sense of beauty realised through the passions of pity and awe. That purification and

spiritualising of the nature which he calls [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is, as Goethe saw,

essentially aesthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied. Concerning himself primarily with the impression

that the work of art produces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, to investigate its source, to see

how it is engendered. As a physiologist and psychologist, he knows that the health of a function resides in

energy. To have a capacity for a passion and not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and limited. The

mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom of much 'perilous stuff,' and by presenting

high and worthy objects for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the man; nay, not merely

does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him also into noble feelings of which he might else have known

nothing, the word [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] having, it has sometimes seemed to me, a definite

allusion to the rite of initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to fancy, its true and only

meaning here. This is of course a mere outline of the book. But you see what a perfect piece of aesthetic

criticism it is. Who indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so well? After reading it, one does not wonder

any longer that Alexandria devoted itself so largely to artcriticism, and that we find the artistic

temperaments of the day investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great Academic

schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve the dignified traditions

of the antique mode, or the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual life, or the

elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the

proper subjectmatter for the artist. Indeed, I fear that the inartistic temperaments of the day busied

themselves also in matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such

accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those

who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they

have been robbed. And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much

as people do nowadays, and had their private views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and

PreRaphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art,

and produced their arthistorians, and their archaeologists, and all the rest of it. Why, even the theatrical

managers of travelling companies brought their dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid

them 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 the Greeks who have given us the

whole system of artcriticism, and how fine their critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that the

material they criticised with most care was, as I have already said, language. For the material that painter or

sculptor uses is meagre in comparison with that of words. Words have not merely music as sweet as that of

viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the

Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but

thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticised

nothing but language, they would still have been the great artcritics of the world. To know the principles of

But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphurcoloured cloud. Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleams

like a lion's eye. She is afraid that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, of Quinctilian and Dionysius, of

Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of all those who in the antique world wrote or lectured upon art matters. She

need not be afraid. I am tired of my expedition into the dim, dull abyss of facts. There is nothing left for me

now but the divine [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of another cigarette. Cigarettes have at least the

ERNEST. Try one of mine. They are rather good. I get them direct from Cairo. The only use of our

ATTACHES is that they supply their friends with excellent tobacco. And as the moon has hidden herself, let

us talk a little longer. I am quite ready to admit that I was wrong in what I said about the Greeks. They were,

as you have pointed out, a nation of artcritics. I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them. For the

creative faculty is higher than the critical. There is really no comparison between them.

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 fine spirit of choice and delicate

instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary perfection. Well, that

spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic

moods, and no one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art. Arnold's

definition of literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form, but it showed how keenly he

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

GILBERT. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work is selfconscious and deliberate. No poet

sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing. It is

so now, and it has always been so. We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of

poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at,

and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing could

pass into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but

once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at

evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages

what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces

poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product

of its time is always the result of the most selfconscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art

without selfconsciousness, and self consciousness and the critical spirit are one.

ERNEST. I see what you mean, and there is much in it. But surely you would admit that the great poems of

the early world, the primitive, anonymous collective poems, were the result of the imagination of races, rather

GILBERT. Not when they became poetry. Not when they received a beautiful form. For there is no art

where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual. No doubt Homer

had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to

work, but they were merely his rough material. He took them, and shaped them into song. They become his,

The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful

stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.

Indeed, I am inclined to think that each 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 the invention of one single mind. The curiously limited

number of the myths seems to me to point to this conclusion. But we must not go off into questions of

comparative mythology. We must keep to criticism. And what I want to point out is this. An age that has no

criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types,

or an age that possesses no art at all. There have been critical ages that have not been creative, in the ordinary

sense of the word, ages in which the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his

treasurehouse, to separate the gold from the silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over the jewels, and

to give names to the pearls. But there has never been a creative age that has not been critical also. For it is the

critical faculty that invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. It is to the critical instinct

that we owe each new school that springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand. There is really

not a single form that art now uses that does not come to us from the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these

forms were either stereotyped or invented or made perfect. I say Alexandria, not merely because it was there

that the Greek spirit became most selfconscious, and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and theology,

but because it was to that city, and not to Athens, that Rome turned for her models, and it was through the

survival, such as it was, of the Latin language that culture lived at all. When, at the Renaissance, Greek

literature dawned upon Europe, the soil had been in some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of the details

of history, which are always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have

been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its

developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the

dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the

wide meaning of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, except the sonnet, to which, however, some curious

parallels of thought movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism, to which no parallel

can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham Scotch dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has

recently proposed should be made the basis for a final and unanimous effort on the part of our secondrate

poets to make themselves really romantic. Each new school, as it appears, cries out against criticism, but it is

to the critical faculty in man that it owes its origin. The mere creative instinct does not innovate, but

ERNEST. You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of the creative spirit, and I now fully accept

your theory. But what of criticism outside creation? I have a foolish habit of reading periodicals, and it seems

GILBERT. So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrity weighing mediocrity in the balance, and

incompetence applauding its brother that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us

from time to time. And yet, I feel I am a little unfair in this matter. As a rule, the critics I speak, of course,

of the higher class, of those in fact who write for the sixpenny papers are far more cultured than the people

whose work they are called upon to review. This is, indeed, only what one would expect, for criticism

GILBERT. Certainly. Anybody can write a threevolumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of

both life and literature. The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any

standard. Where there is no style a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently reduced

to be the reporters of the policecourt of literature, the chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of

art. It is sometimes said of them that they do not read all through the works they are called upon to criticise.

They do not. Or at least they should not. If they did so, they would become confirmed misanthropes, or if I

may borrow a phrase from one of the pretty Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the rest of

their lives. Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.

It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten

minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One

tastes it, and that is quite enough more than enough, I should imagine. I am aware that there are many

honest workers in painting as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. They are quite right. Their

work stands in no intellectual relation to their age. It brings us no new element of pleasure. It suggests no

fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty. It should not be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion

ERNEST. But, my dear fellow excuse me for interrupting you you seem to me to be allowing your

passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too far. For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more

GILBERT. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is

very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course

obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form of

emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or

above each other by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought. Action, indeed, is always

easy, and when presented to us in its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be that

of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don't

talk about action. It is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose

nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of

its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource

ERNEST. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball. You hold it in your hand, and reverse it to

GILBERT. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. That is 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 than the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin of

his deeds nor their results. From the field in which he thought that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our

vintage, and the figtree that he planted for our pleasure is as barren as the thistle, and more bitter. It is

because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

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

GILBERT. It is worse than a delusion. If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that

those who call themselves good would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls evil

stirred by a noble joy. Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our

virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more

marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone before. But men are the slaves of words. They rage

against Materialism, as they call it, forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has not

spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the

world's faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds. What is termed

Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become

colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of

individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is

one with the higher ethics. And as for the virtues! What are the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little

about chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not to their own purity, that the

Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion 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 so ignorantly proud, is a sign of

our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine. Selfdenial is simply a

method by which man arrests his progress, and selfsacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part

of that old worship of 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 altars in 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 the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show

us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared

ERNEST. Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note. Let us go back to the 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 that simple truth. Surely you see now that I am

right? When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet. The whole secret lies in that. It was

easy enough on the sandy plains by windy Ilion to send the notched arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl

against the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ashhandled spear. It was easy for the adulterous

queen to spread the Tyrian carpets for her lord, and then, as he lay couched in the marble bath, to throw over

his head the purple net, and call to her smoothfaced lover to stab through the meshes at the heart that should

have broken at Aulis. For Antigone even, with Death waiting for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass

through the tainted air at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the wretched naked corse that

had no tomb. But what of those who wrote about these things? What of those who gave them reality, and

made them live for ever? Are they not greater than the men and women they sing of? 'Hector that sweet

knight is dead,' and Lucian tells us how in the dim underworld Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen,

and marvelled that it was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships were launched, those beautiful

mailed men laid low, those towered cities brought to dust. Yet, every day the swanlike daughter of Leda

comes out on the battlements, and looks down at the tide of war. The greybeards wonder at her loveliness,

and she stands by the side of the king. In his chamber of stained ivory lies her leman. He is polishing his

dainty armour, and combing the scarlet plume. With squire and page, her husband passes from tent to tent.

She can see his bright hair, and hears, or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice. In the courtyard below,

the son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass. The white arms of Andromache are around his neck. He

sets his helmet on the ground, lest their babe should be frightened. Behind the embroidered curtains of his

pavilion sits Achilles, in perfumed raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his soul arrays

himself to go forth to the fight. From a curiously carven chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his

shipside, the Lord of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that the lip of man had never touched, and

cleanses it with brimstone, and with fresh water cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black wine

its burnished hollow, and spills the thick grapeblood upon the ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona

barefooted prophets worshipped, 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 lovelocks were looped with gold, and the

Priamid, the lionhearted, Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his doom. Phantoms, are they?

Heroes of mist and mountain? Shadows in a song? No: they are real. Action! What is action? It dies at the

moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

GILBERT. It is so in truth. On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze.

The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with

their flocks, and where, on the wine surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as Homer

calls it, copperprowed and streaked with vermilion, the great galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming

crescent, the lonely tunnyfisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his net. Yet, every

morning the doors of the city are thrown open, and on foot, or in horsedrawn chariot, the warriors go forth

to battle, and mock their enemies from behind their iron masks. All day long the fight rages, and when night

comes the torches gleam by the tents, and the cresset burns in the hall. Those who live in marble or on

painted panel, know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its beauty, but limited to one note

of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and

terror, of courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go in glad or saddening

pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them. They have their youth and their

manhood, they are children, and they grow old. It is always dawn for St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the

window. Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God's pain. The cool breezes of the

morning lift the gilt threads from her brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers of

Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer suns that

hardly can the slim naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers of

the luteplayer rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free

among the silver poplars of France. In eternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose

tremulous white feet seem not to touch the dewdrenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos,

drama, or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night

from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can 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 for their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of

perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they

know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those,

and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future,

and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly

realised by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.

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

ERNEST. Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo of rich music, a dim shadow of

clearoutlined form. It may, indeed, be that life is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms are

mean and its heroisms ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature to create, from the rough material of

actual existence, a new world that will be more marvellous, more enduring, and more true than the world that

common eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek to realise their perfection. But surely, if

this new world has been made by the spirit and touch of a great artist, it will be a thing so complete and

perfect that there will be nothing left for the critic to do. I quite understand now, and indeed admit most

readily, that it is far more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. But it seems to me that this sound and

sensible maxim, which is really extremely soothing to one's feelings, and should be adopted as its motto by

every Academy of Literature all over the world, applies only to the relations that exist between Art and Life,

GILBERT. But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the

critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the

highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.

GILBERT. Yes; independent. Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or

resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that

he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of

thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his

purpose. And just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a small country doctor in

the squalid village of Yonvillel'Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a classic, and

make a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or of no importance, such as the pictures in this year's

Royal Academy, or in any year's Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris's poems, 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 waste his

faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct with intellectual subtlety.

Why not? Dulness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent BESTIA

TRIONFANS that calls wisdom from its cave. To an artist so creative as the critic, what does subjectmatter

signify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist and the painter. Like them, he can find his motives

everywhere. Treatment is the test. There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge.

GILBERT. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and

delightful. What more can one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For

just as the great artists, from Homer and AEschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to

life for their subjectmatter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with

materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been

already added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal

impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself,

and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.

Certainly, it is never trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations of probability,

that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever. One may appeal

GILBERT. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is

more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as

its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it

deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or

circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind. I am always amused by the

silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the primary function of the critic

is to chatter about their second rate work. The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is

just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of

delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes

away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His

sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble

GILBERT. Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all revere, and the music of whose pipe

once lured Proserpina from her Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the Cumnor

cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is. But this is a very serious

error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism's most perfect form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and

seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another. For the highest Criticism deals with art not as

GILBERT. Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What does it

matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fierycoloured in its noble eloquence, so rich

in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at

least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in

England's Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its equal beauty is more

enduring, but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those longcadenced

lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with

intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and

with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares whether Mr.

Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of? The painter may

have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool

galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirque

of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,' I murmur to myself, 'She is older than the rocks among

which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has

been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern

merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this

has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded

the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.' And I say to my friend, 'The presence that

thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come

to desire'; and he answers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the

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 was that fluteplayer's

music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo

would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of the world had

etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the outward form,

the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and

imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias?' He would probably have answered

that he had contemplated none of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain arrangements

of lines and masses, and with new and curious colour harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very

reason that the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply

as a startingpoint for a new creation. It does not confine itself let us at least suppose so for the moment

to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning

of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who

wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it

marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives,

and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The

longer I study, Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts is, as the beauty of music,

impressive primarily, and that it may be marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention

on the part of the artist. For when the work is finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and

may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say. Sometimes, when I listen to the

overture to TANNHAUSER, I seem indeed to see that comely knight treading delicately on the

flowerstrewn grass, and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from the caverned hill. But at other times

it speaks to me of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life, or of the lives of others

whom one has loved and grown weary of loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions

that man has not known, and so has sought for. To night it may fill one with that [Greek text which cannot

be reproduced], that AMOUR DE L'IMPOSSIBLE, which falls like a madness on many who think they live

securely and out of reach of harm, so that they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in

the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. Tomorrow, like the

music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it may perform the office of a

physician, and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and 'bring the soul into

harmony with all right things.' And what is true about music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as many

meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it

expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fierycoloured world.

GILBERT. It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the individual work of art, but Beauty itself,

and fills with wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood

ERNEST. The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to

GILBERT. Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his

own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. The one characteristic

of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see;

and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn,

and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue

It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the highest Criticism nor the charm of the

highest Art, that the pictures that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the anecdotage

of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature or history. But this is not so. Indeed, pictures of

this kind are far too intelligible. As a class, they rank with illustrations, and, even considered from this point

of view are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to it. For the domain of the

painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of the poet. To the latter belongs life in its full and

absolute entirety; not merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to also; not merely

the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect

cycle of thought. The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the body that he can show us

the mystery of the soul; only through conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical

equivalents that he can deal with psychology. And how inadequately does he do it then, asking us to accept

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 seems as if nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and wasted

lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to

render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their

pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded the invisible arts into the

obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and painter may not

treat of the same subject. They have always done so and will always do so. But while the poet can be pictorial

or not, as he chooses, the painter must be pictorial always. For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in

And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate the critic. He will turn from them to

such works as make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion,

and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world. It is sometimes said that the

tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most

artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder

and its mystery, and becomes simply a new startingpoint for an ideal that is other than itself. This is the

reason why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the

explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter

the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a

presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which

would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty,

and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense

alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both

to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements

the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the

ultimate impression itself. You see, then, how it is that the aesthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art

that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for

such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and

no interpretation final. Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will have to the work that

has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that

the painter of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between Nature and the work of the

decorative artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to

look on, though they are not reproduced in visible 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 the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna

is made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail, though the birds of Juno fly not

across it; so the critic reproduces the work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of

whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows us in this way not merely the

meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the

But I see it is time for supper. After we have discussed some Chambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on

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

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

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

GILBERT. Ah! don't let us do that. Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on

nothing. Let us talk about MORAL INDIGNATION, ITS CAUSE AND CURE, a subject on which I think of

writing: or about THE SURVIVAL OF THERSITES, as shown by the English comic papers; or about any

ERNEST. No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism. You have told me that the highest criticism deals

with art, not as expressive, but as impressive purely, and is consequently both creative and independent, is in

fact an art by itself, occupying the same relation to creative work that creative work does to the visible world

of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought. Well, now, tell me, will not the critic be

GILBERT. Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses. He can pass from his synthetic impression of

the work of art as a whole, to an analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I hold it

to be, there are many delightful things to be said and done. Yet his object will not always be to explain the

work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of

wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are 'terribly at ease in Zion.' They

propose to walk arm in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, 'Why should we read

what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read the plays and the poems. That is enough.' But an

appreciation of Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate

scholarship. And he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which

Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he

must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical forms and the new

spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and

Marlowe's greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare's disposal, and the method in

which he used them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, their

limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of Shakespeare's day, its aims and

modes and canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed verse in its

various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator of

the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London

to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the history of European drama and the

drama of the world. The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx,

whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by 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 province to intensify, and whose

And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens. The critic will indeed be an interpreter, but he will not be an

interpreter in the sense of one who simply repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips to

say. For, just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that

individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own

personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this

personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the

ERNEST. I would have said that personality would have been a disturbing element.

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

GILBERT. I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by definite example. It seems to me that, while the

literary critic stands of course first, as having the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material, each of

the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned to it. The actor is a critic of the drama. He shows the poet's work

under new conditions, and by a method special to himself. He takes the written word, and action, gesture and

voice become the media of revelation. The singer or the player on lute and viol is the critic of music. The

etcher of a picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a new material its true

colourquality, its tones and values, and the relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the

critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from that of the work itself, and the

employment of a new material is a critical as well as a creative element. Sculpture, too, has its critic, who

may be either the carver of a gem, as he was in Greek days, or some painter like Mantegna, who sought to

reproduce on canvas the beauty of plastic line and the symphonic dignity of processional basrelief. And in

the case of all these creative critics of art it is evident that personality is an absolute essential for any real

interpretation. When Rubinstein plays to us the SONATA APPASSIONATA of Beethoven, he gives us not

merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely Beethoven reinterpreted

through a rich artistic nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality. When a

great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience. His own individuality becomes a vital part of the

interpretation. People sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare's; and this

fallacy for it is a fallacy is, I regret to say, repeated by that charming and graceful writer who has lately

deserted the turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the author of OBITER

DICTA. In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare's Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the

definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as

GILBERT. Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is only to personality that it can be revealed, and

ERNEST. The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will give no less than he receives, and lend as much

GILBERT. He will be always showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age. He will always be

reminding us that great works of art are living things are, in fact, the only things that live. So much, indeed,

will he feel this, that I am certain that, as civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the

elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and

TOUCHED. For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong

people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is

always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long, or not long enough.

ERNEST. Poor life! Poor human life! Are you not even touched by the tears that the Roman poet tells us are

GILBERT. Too quickly touched by them, I fear. For when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in

its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a dream

and an illusion. What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the

incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things? The things

that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet master. We ask it for

pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief

that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less

noble take its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves

looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of goldflecked hair that we had once so

GILBERT. From the artistic point of view, certainly. And the chief thing that makes life a failure from this

artistic point of view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security, the fact that one can never repeat exactly

the same emotion. How different it is in the world of Art! On a shelf of the bookcase behind you stands the

DIVINE COMEDY, and I know that, if I open it at a certain place, I shall be filled with a fierce hatred of

some one who has never wronged me, or stirred by a great love for some one whom I shall never see. There

is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her secret can settle

beforehand what our experiences are going to be. We can choose our day and select our hour. We can say to

ourselves, 'To morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley of the shadow of death,'

and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through the gate

of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the horror of another world. The hypocrites go

by, with their painted faces and their cowls of gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless winds that drive them, the

carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain. We break the

withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dullhued poisonous twig bleeds with

red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries. Out of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when

from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that bed

becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty

of their sin, and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsystricken and swollen of body into the semblance of a

monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and

with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool

dewy channels gush down the green Casentine hills. Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him. He smites

him in the face, and they wrangle. We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads

us away to that city turreted by giants where great Nimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in store for us,

and we go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart. We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and

Argenti swims to the boat through the slimy waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. When we hear the

voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our scorn. We tread upon the cold

crystal of Cocytus, in which traitors stick like straws in glass. Our foot strikes 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 a little. We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered his

dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed,

for who more base than he who has mercy for the condemned of God? In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man

who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew Caesar. We tremble, and come forth to

In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holy mountain rises into the pure light of day. There is peace

for us, and for those who for a season abide in it there is some peace also, though, pale from the poison of the

Maremma, Madonna Pia passes before us, and Ismene, with the sorrow of earth still lingering about her, is

there. Soul after soul makes us share in some repentance or some joy. He whom the mourning of his widow

taught to drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us of Nella praying in her lonely bed, and we learn from

the mouth of Buonconte how a single tear may save a dying sinner from the fiend. Sordello, that noble and

disdainful Lombard, eyes us from afar like a couchant lion. When he learns that Virgil is one of Mantua's

citizens, he falls upon his neck, and when he learns that he is the singer of Rome he falls before his feet. In

that valley whose grass and flowers are fairer than cleft emerald and Indian wood, and brighter than scarlet

and silver, they are singing who in the world were kings; but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg do not move to

the music of the others, and Philip of France beats his breast and Henry of England sits alone. On and on we

go, climbing the marvellous stair, and the stars become larger than their wont, and the song of the kings

grows faint, and at length we reach the seven trees of gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise. In a

griffindrawn chariot appears one whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiled in white, and mantled in

green, and robed in a vesture that is coloured like live fire. The ancient flame wakes within us. Our blood

quickens through terrible pulses. We recognise her. It is Beatrice, the woman we have worshipped. The ice

congealed about our heart melts. Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bow our forehead to the

ground, for we know that we have sinned. When we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of

the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress of our soul raises us to the Paradise of

Heaven. Out of that eternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us. Her beauty troubles us

for a moment, and when, like a thing that falls through water, she passes away, we gaze after her with wistful

eyes. The sweet planet of Venus is full of lovers. Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the lady of Sordello's heart, is

there, and Folco, the passionate singer of Provence, who in sorrow for Azalais forsook the world, and the

Canaanitish harlot whose soul was the first that Christ redeemed. Joachim of Flora stands in the sun, and, in

the sun, Aquinas recounts the story of St. Francis and Bonaventure the story of St. Dominic. Through the

burning rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida approaches. He tells us of the arrow that is shot from the bow of exile,

and how salt tastes the bread of another, and how steep are the stairs in the house of a stranger. In Saturn the

soul sings not, and even she who guides us dare not smile. On a ladder of gold the flames rise and fall. At

last, we see the pageant of the Mystical Rose. Beatrice fixes her eyes upon the face of God to turn them not

again. The beatific vision is granted to us; we know the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.

Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make ourselves one with the great Florentine, kneel at

the same altar with him, and share his rapture and his scorn. And if we grow tired of an antique time, and

desire to realise our own age in all its weariness and sin, are there not books that can make us live more in

one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years? Close to your hand lies a little

volume, bound in some Nilegreen skin that has been powdered with gilded nenuphars and smoothed with

hard ivory. It is the book that Gautier loved, it is Baudelaire's masterpiece. Open it at that sad madrigal that

and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never worshipped joy. Pass on to the poem on the

man who tortures himself, let its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts, and you will

become for a moment what he was who wrote it; nay, not for a moment only, but for many barren moonlit

nights and sunless sterile days will a despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you, and the

misery of another gnaw your heart away. Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one of its secrets to your

soul, and your soul will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent of

strange crimes of which it is guiltless, and to make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never known.

And then, when you are tired of these flowers of evil, turn to the flowers that grow in the garden of Perdita,

and in their dewdrenched chalices cool your fevered brow, and let their loveliness heal and restore your

soul; or wake from his forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and bid the lover of Heliodore make you

music, for he too has flowers in his song, red pomegranate blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh, ringed

daffodils and dark blue hyacinths, and marjoram and crinkled oxeyes. Dear to him was the perfume of the

beanfield at evening, and dear to him the odorous earedspikenard that grew on the Syrian hills, and the

fresh green thyme, the winecup's charm. The feet of his love as she walked in the garden were like lilies set

upon lilies. Softer than sleepladen poppy petals were her lips, softer than violets and as scented. The

flamelike crocus sprang from the grass to look at her. For her the slim narcissus stored the cool rain; and for

her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that wooed them. And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus

It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion. We sicken with the same maladies as the poets, and the

singer lends us his pain. Dead lips have their message for us, and hearts that have fallen to dust can

communicate their joy. We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine, and we follow Manon Lescaut over the

whole world. Ours is the lovemadness of the Tyrian, and the terror of Orestes is ours also. There is no

passion that we cannot feel, no pleasure that we may not gratify, and we can choose the time of our initiation

and the time of our freedom also. Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a

thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form

and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too

high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.

GILBERT. For everything. Because Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the

exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We

grieve, but our grief is not bitter. In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to

a lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more

from the great art critic of the Greeks. It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our

perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual

existence. This results not merely from the fact that nothing that one can imagine is worth doing, and that one

can imagine everything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, like the forces of the physical sphere,

are limited in extent and energy. One can feel so much, and no more. And how can it matter with what

pleasure life tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one's soul, if in the spectacle of

the lives of those who have never existed one has found the true secret of joy, and wept away one's tears over

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

GILBERT. Yes. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is

the aim of life, and of that practical organisation of life that we call society. Society, which is the beginning

and basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own

continuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, of each of its citizens that he

should contribute some form of productive labour to the common weal, and toil and travail that the day's

work may be done. Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile

emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny

of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private 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 any single civilised being should ever be allowed

to whisper to another. 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 of society,

Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is

GILBERT. Contemplation. I said to you some time ago that it was far more difficult to talk about a thing

than to do it. Let me say to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the 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 noblest form of energy also. It was to this that the

GILBERT. It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is

the vision of him who 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 once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too

curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself. To us the

CITTE DIVINA is colourless, and the FRUITIO DEI without meaning. Metaphysics do not satisfy our

temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date. The world through which the Academic philosopher

becomes 'the spectator of all time and of all existence' is not really an ideal world, but simply a world of

abstract ideas. When we enter it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts of the city of

God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all

that in our nature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faithfaculty

of the species. Their legacy to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid. Had they put it into words, it

might not live within us as thought. No, Ernest, no. We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be

learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr.

Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single roseleaf for that formless intangible Being

which Plato rates so high? What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of

Bohme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's blinded eyes? Such things are less

than the yellow trumpet of one daffodil of the field, far less than the meanest of the visible arts, for, just as

Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and

thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike. To the aesthetic

temperament the vague is always repellent. The Greeks were a nation of artists, because they were spared the

sense of the infinite. Like Aristotle, like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete, and nothing

GILBERT. It seems to me that with the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to realise, not

merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the

true meaning of the word modernity. For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows

nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has

preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself one must know all about

others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot

make alive. Is this impossible? I think not. By revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all action, and so

freeing us from the self imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the scientific principle of

Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative life. It has shown us that we are never less

free than when we try to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall

the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror that

mirrors the soul. It is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of the Fates, and the most terrible. It is the only

And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has robbed energy of its freedom and activity of

its choice, in the subjective sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow, with many

gifts in its hands, gifts of strange temperaments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill

moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other, and passions

that war against themselves. And so, it is not our own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul

that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service,

and entering into us for our joy. It is something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has

made its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and

its wisdom is bitter. It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain.

One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us. It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed

to us by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our

development. It can help us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find

ourselves not exiled from their air. It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realise the

experiences of those who are greater than we are. The pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our

pain. Theocritus blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd. In the wolfskin of

Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen.

We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon

have put our shame into song. We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes, and when we wander with

Endymion the Moon grows amorous of our youth. Ours is the anguish of Atys, and ours the weak rage and

noble sorrows of the Dane. Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us to live these countless

lives? Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity. It is simply concentrated

GILBERT. The culture that this transmission of racial experiences makes possible can be made perfect by

the critical spirit alone, and indeed may be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears

within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is

alien, no emotional impulse obscure? And who the true man of culture, if not he who by fine scholarship and

fastidious rejection has made instinct selfconscious and intelligent, and can separate the work that has

distinction from the work that has it not, and so by contact and comparison makes himself master of the

secrets of style and school, and understands their meanings, and listens to their voices, and develops that

spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real root, as it is the real flower, of the intellectual life, and thus

attains to intellectual clarity, and, having learned 'the best that is known and thought in the world,' lives it is

Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not DOING but BEING, and not BEING

merely, but BECOMING that is what the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: either brooding over

their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the

spectator the tragicomedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might live like them, and set ourselves

to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford. We might make ourselves

spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become perfect by the rejection of energy. It has often

seemed to me that Browning felt something of this. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into active life, and makes him

realise his mission by effort. Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission

by thought. Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning. He made the soul the protagonist of life's

tragedy, and looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at any rate, the [Greek text

which cannot be reproduced] is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world.

Calm, and selfcentred, and complete, the aesthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture

can pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He has discovered 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 to excite to action of evil or of good. For action of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics.

The aim of art is simply to create a mood. Is such a mode of life unpractical? Ah! it is not so easy to be

unpractical as the ignorant Philistine imagines. It were well for England if it were so. There is no country in

the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours. With us, Thought is degraded by its

constant association with practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence, noisy

politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor narrowminded priest blinded by the sufferings of that

unimportant section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously claim to be able to form

a disinterested intellectual judgment about any one thing? Each of the professions means a prejudice. The

necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under

educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. And, harsh though it

may sound, I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom. The sure way of knowing nothing

GILBERT. I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minor merit of being true. That the desire to do

good to others produces a plentiful crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which it is the cause. The prig is a

very interesting psychological study, and though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have

a pose at all is something. It is a formal recognition of the importance of treating life from a definite and

reasoned standpoint. That Humanitarian Sympathy wars against Nature, by securing the survival of the

failure, may make the man of science loathe its facile virtues. The political economist may cry out against it

for putting the improvident on the same level as the provident, and so robbing life of the strongest, because

most sordid, incentive to industry. But, in the eyes of the thinker, the real harm that emotional sympathy does

is that it limits knowledge, and so prevents us from solving any single social problem. We are trying at

present to stave off the coming crisis, the coming revolution as my friends the Fabianists call it, by means of

doles and alms. Well, when the revolution or crisis arrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall know

nothing. And so, Ernest, let us not be deceived. England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to

her dominions. There is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a

land. What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day. Those

who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the

But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of beholding, and contemplating for the sake of

contemplation, there is 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 in which we live, to

set above the fine intellectual virtues, those shallow and emotional virtues that are an immediate practical

benefit to itself. They miss their aim, too, these philanthropists and sentimentalists of our day, who are

always chattering to one about one's duty to one's neighbour. For the development of the race depends on the

development of the individual, and where self culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is

instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost. If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating

himself a rare type in our time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met with you rise from table

richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But oh! my dear

Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that

is! How appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions!

How limited in range the creature's mind proves to be! How it wearies us, and must weary himself, with its

endless repetitions and sickly reiteration! How lacking it is in any element of intellectual growth! In what a

ERNEST. You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert. Have you had this dreadful experience, as you call it,

GILBERT. Few of us escape it. People say that the schoolmaster is abroad. I wish to goodness he were. But

the type of which, after all, he is only one, and certainly the least important, of the representatives, seems to

me to be really dominating our lives; and just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the

nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never

had any time to educate himself. No, Ernest, selfculture is the true ideal of man. Goethe saw it, and the

immediate debt that we owe to Goethe 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 modern thought, the conception of the contemplative life as

well as the critical method by which alone can that life be truly realised. It was the one thing that made the

Renaissance great, and gave us Humanism. It is the one thing that could make our own age great also; for the

real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that

creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that

I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment, still less that it is, and perhaps will be for

years to come, unpopular with the crowd. It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so

difficult for them to have sympathy with thought. Indeed, so little do ordinary people understand what

thought really is, that they seem to imagine that, when they have said that a theory is dangerous, they have

pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such theories that have any true intellectual value. An idea

ERNEST. Gilbert, you bewilder me. You have told me that all art is, in its essence, immoral. Are you going

GILBERT. Yes, in the practical sphere it is so. The security of society lies in custom and unconscious

instinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any

intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves

naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly

against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life, that one is tempted to

define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with

the dictates of reason. But let us turn from the practical sphere, and say no more about the wicked

philanthropists, who, indeed, may well be left to the mercy of the almondeyed sage of the Yellow River

Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such wellmeaning and offensive busybodies have destroyed the

simple and spontaneous virtue that there is in man. They are a wearisome topic, and I am anxious to get back

GILBERT. Yes. You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in his own way as creative as the artist,

whose work, indeed, may be merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some new mood

of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through

the use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect. Well, you seemed to be

ERNEST. I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit that I feel very strongly that such work as you

describe the critic producing and creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to be is, of necessity,

purely subjective, whereas the greatest work is objective always, objective and impersonal.

GILBERT. The difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form merely. It is

accidental, not essential. All artistic creation is absolutely subjective. The very landscape that Corot looked at

was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind; and those great figures of Greek or English drama that

seem to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned them,

are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves, not as they thought they were, but as they thought

they were not; and by such thinking came in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to be. For

out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not. Nay, I would say

that the more objective a creation appears to be, the more subjective it really is. Shakespeare might have met

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the servingmen of rival houses bite

their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.

They were elements of his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses that stirred so strongly within him

that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer them to realise their energy, not on the lower plane of actual life,

where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so made imperfect, but on that imaginative

plane of art where Love can indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can stab the eavesdropper

behind the arras, and wrestle in a newmade grave, and make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one's

father's spirit, beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete steel from misty wall to wall. Action

being limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it is because 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 that his plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament far more

completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets, even, in which he bares to crystal eyes the secret

closet of his heart. Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he

ERNEST. The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form, will necessarily be less able fully to express

himself than the artist, who has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.

GILBERT. Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if he recognises that each mode of criticism is, in its

highest development, simply a mood, and that we are never more true to ourselves than when we are

inconsistent. The aesthetic critic, constant only to the principle of beauty in all things, will ever be looking for

fresh impressions, winning from the various schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before

foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods. What other people call one's past has, no

doubt, everything to do with them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself. The man who regards his

past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to. When one has found expression for a mood,

one has done with it. You laugh; but believe me it is so. Yesterday it was Realism that charmed one. One

gained from it that NOUVEAU FRISSON which it was its aim to produce. One analysed it, explained it, and

wearied of it. At sunset came the LUMINISTE in painting, and the SYMBOLISTE in poetry, and the spirit of

mediaevalism, that spirit which belongs not to time but to temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia,

and stirred us for a moment by the terrible fascination of pain. Today the cry is for Romance, and already

the leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple hilltops walks Beauty with slim gilded feet. The old

modes of creation linger, of course. The artists reproduce either themselves or each other, with wearisome

iteration. But Criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.

Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of expression. The method of the drama is his, as

well as the method of the epos. He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking to Marvel on the

nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord Brooke discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst

oaks; or adopt narration, as Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary Portraits is not that the title

of the book? presents to us, under the fanciful guise of fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of criticism,

one on the painter Watteau, another on the philosophy of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan elements of the early

Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the most suggestive, on the source of that Aufklarung, that

enlightening which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to which our own culture owes so great a

debt. Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to

Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, the creative

critics of the world have always employed, can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of

expression. By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to

every mood. By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it to us in the round, as

a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those

side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more

completely, or from those felicitous afterthoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and

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

GILBERT. Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself. To arrive at what one

really believes, one must speak through lips different from one's own. To know the truth 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 of art, it is one's last mood. And you see now,

Ernest, that the critic has at his disposal as many objective forms of expression as the artist has. Ruskin put

his criticism into imaginative prose, and is superb in his changes and contradictions; and Browning put his

into blank verse and made painter and poet yield us their secret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater

fiction, and Rossetti translated into sonnetmusic the colour of Giorgione and the design of Ingres, and his

own design and colour also, feeling, with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that the

ERNEST. Well, now that you have settled that the critic has at his disposal all objective forms, I wish you

GILBERT. Ah! not fair. A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things that

do not interest one that one can give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an

unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who

sees absolutely nothing at all. Art is a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by

emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine moods and exquisite moments, cannot be

narrowed into the rigidity of a scientific formula 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 the body. One should, of course, have no

prejudices; but, as a great Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago, it is one's business in such matters to

have preferences, and when one has preferences one ceases to be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can

equally and impartially admire all schools of Art. No; fairness is not one of the qualities of the true critic. It is

not even a condition of criticism. Each form of Art with which we come in contact dominates 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

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 and spectator a form of divine

madness. It does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others inspired. Reason is not the faculty to which

it appeals. If one loves Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and against such love,

the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out. There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too

splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure

GILBERT. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. The true critic

will, indeed, always be sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in every

age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or

stereotyped mode of looking at things. He will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand different

ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through constant change, and

through constant change alone, he will find his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his own

opinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? The essence of thought, as the essence of

life, is growth. You must not be frightened by word, Ernest. What people call insincerity is simply a method

GILBERT. Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity and fairness, were, if not actually

moral, at least on the borderland of morals, and the first condition of criticism is that the critic should be able

to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. When they

are confused, Chaos has come again. They are too often confused in England now, and though our modern

Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint

beauty for a moment. It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I

regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the

uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current

events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably

discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not. But

it should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art. When it does this it stultifies itself. And

yet Tartuffe's articles and Chadband's notes do this good, at least. They serve to show how extremely limited

is the area over which ethics, and ethical considerations, can claim to exercise influence. Science is out of the

reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are

fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and everchanging. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual

spheres. However, let these mouthing Puritans pass; they have their comic side. Who can help laughing when

an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit the subjectmatter at the disposal of the artist? Some

limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers.

For they give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of

the secondrate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the

doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever. But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet

transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows their

colourelement, and their wonder, and their true ethical import also, and builds out of them a world more real

than reality itself, and of loftier and more noble import who shall set limits to him? Not the apostles of that

new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity 'writ large.' Not the apostles of that new Puritanism, which is

but the whine of the hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly. The mere suggestion is ridiculous. Let us

leave these wicked people, and proceed to the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the true

GILBERT. Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic a temperament exquisitely susceptible to

beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us. Under what conditions, and by what means, this

temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not discuss at present. It is sufficient to note that it

exists, and that there is in us a beautysense, separate from the other senses and above them, separate from

the reason and of nobler import, separate from the soul and of equal value a sense that leads some to create,

and others, the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely. But to be purified and made perfect, this sense

requires some form of exquisite environment. Without this it starves, or is dulled. You remember that lovely

passage in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with what insistence he dwells

upon the importance of surroundings, telling us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and

sounds, so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the reception of the beauty that is

spiritual. Insensibly, and without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of beauty which, as

Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education. By slow degrees there is to be engendered

in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to the bad,

and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses grace and

charm and loveliness. Ultimately, in its due course, this taste is to become critical and selfconscious, but at

first it is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and 'he who has received this true culture of the inner man

will with clear and certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature, and with a taste that

cannot err, while he praises, and finds his pleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and so

becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he

is able to know the reason why': and so, when, later on, the critical and selfconscious spirit develops in him,

he 'will recognise and salute it as a friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.' I need

hardly say, Ernest, how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the smile that

would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of

education was the love of beauty, and that the methods by 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, and the dulness of tutors and professors matters

very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flutelike voice singing in

Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the

sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase

beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the

College of St. John. Nor is it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed and

trained and perfected. All over England there is a Renaissance of the decorative Arts. Ugliness has had its

day. Even in the houses of the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are not rich have been made

gracious and comely and sweet to live in. Caliban, poor noisy Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to

make mows at a thing, the thing ceases to exist. But if he mocks no longer, it is because he has been met with

mockery, swifter and keener than his own, and for a moment has been bitterly schooled into that silence

which should seal for ever his uncouth distorted lips. What has been done up to now, has been chiefly in the

clearing of the way. It is always more difficult to destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to

destroy is vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage but also 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 what

is beautiful. And though the mission of the aesthetic movement is to lure people to contemplate, not to lead

them to create, yet, as the creative instinct is strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt who leads in art, there is no

reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not become almost as mighty in its way as was

Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not

to the arts that teach us. Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But

they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too

obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and

then they become as tedious as one's relations. I am very fond of the work of many of the Impressionist

painters of Paris and London. Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school. Some of their

arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier's immortal

SYMPHONIE EN BLANC MAJEUR, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have

suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures. For a class that welcomes the

incompetent with sympathetic eagerness, and that confuses the bizarre with the beautiful, and vulgarity with

truth, they are extremely accomplished. They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of epigrams, pastels that

are as fascinating as paradoxes, and as for their portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them,

no one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm which belongs to works of pure fiction.

But even the Impressionists, 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, the moment

certainly makes the Impressionist, and for the moment in art, and the 'moment's monument,' as Rossetti

phrased it, what may not be said? They are suggestive also. If they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they

have at least given great encouragement to the shortsighted, and while their leaders may have all the

inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to be ever sensible. Yet they will insist on treating

painting as if it were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the illiterate, and are always prating to

us on their coarse gritty canvases of their unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by

a vulgar overemphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and only modest thing about them. One

tires, at the end, of the work of individuals whose individuality is always noisy, and generally uninteresting.

There is far more to be said in favour of that newer school at Paris, the ARCHAICISTES, as they call

themselves, who, refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather, do not find the ideal of art in

mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour,

and rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see, try to see something worth seeing,

and to see it not merely with actual and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as far

wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic purpose. They, at any rate, work under those

decorative conditions that each art requires for its perfection, and have sufficient aesthetic instinct to regret

those sordid and stupid limitations of absolute modernity of form which have proved the ruin of so many of

the Impressionists. Still, the art that is frankly decorative is the art to live with. It is, of all our visible arts, the

one art that creates in us both mood and temperament. Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with

definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. The harmony that resides in the delicate

proportions of lines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind. The repetitions of pattern give us rest. The

marvels of design stir the imagination. In the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent

elements of culture. Nor is this all. By its deliberate rejection of Nature as the ideal of beauty, as well as of

the imitative method of the ordinary painter, decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the reception of

true imaginative work, but develops in it that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of

critical achievement. For the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to

thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, 'I will put my idea into a

complex metre of fourteen lines,' but, realising the beauty of the sonnetscheme, he conceives certain modes

of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and

emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to

use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has 'nothing to say.' But if he had something to say, he would probably

say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful

work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would

ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be

GILBERT. Why should you wonder? It is not merely in art that the body is the soul. In every sphere of life

Form is the beginning of things. The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Plato tells us, both

rhythm and harmony into the mind. Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments

of sincerity that make us admire and know the man. He was right, though he may not have known how

terribly right he was. The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.

Yes: Form is everything. It is the secret of life. Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you.

Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish to love? Use Love's Litany, and the

words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief that corrodes

your heart? Steep yourself in the Language of grief, learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen

Constance, and you will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, 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 not merely

the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things

under their conditions of beauty. Start with the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be

revealed to you, and remember that in criticism, as in creation, temperament is everything, and that it is, not

by the time of their production, but by the temperaments to which they appeal, that the schools of art should

ERNEST. Your theory of education is delightful. But what influence will your critic, brought up in these

exquisite surroundings, possess? Do you really think that any artist is ever affected by criticism?

GILBERT. The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own existence. He will represent the

flawless type. In him the culture of the century will see itself realised. You must not ask of him to have any

aim other than the perfecting of himself. The demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel

itself alive. The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with

the individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive,

creating in it new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods. The actual art

of today will occupy him less than the art of tomorrow, far less than the art of yesterday, and as for this or

that person at present toiling away, what do the industrious matter? They do their best, no doubt, and

consequently we get the worst from them. It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.

And besides, my dear Ernest, when a man reaches the age of forty, or becomes a Royal Academician, or is

elected a member of the Athenaeum Club, or is recognised as a popular novelist, whose books are in great

demand at suburban railway stations, one may have the amusement of exposing him, but one cannot have the

pleasure of reforming him. And this is, I dare say, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation

is a much more painful process than punishment, is indeed punishment in its most aggravated and moral form

a fact which accounts for our entire failure as a community to reclaim that interesting phenomenon who is

ERNEST. But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry, and the painter of painting? Each art

must appeal primarily to the artist who works in it. His judgment will surely be the most valuable?

GILBERT. The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic temperament. Art does not address herself to the

specialist. Her claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so far from

its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of other people's work

at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his own. 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. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him. The gods are hidden from each

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

GILBERT. It is impossible for him to do so. Wordsworth saw in ENDYMION merely a pretty piece of

Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its

form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the

cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him. The realism of Euripides was

hateful to Sophokles. Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his sense of the

grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of

Gainsborough. Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being largeminded and free from

prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any

conditions other than those that he has selected. Creation employs all its critical faculty within its own sphere.

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

GILBERT. Certainly: each art has its grammar and its materials. There is no mystery about either, and the

incompetent can always be correct. But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and certain, to find

their true realisation they must be touched by the imagination into such beauty that they will seem an

exception, each one of them. Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it,

why the pupil cannot learn it, and why 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

himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and modes. It is

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

ERNEST. In that case I certainly won't tell you whether I agree with you or not. But I will put another

question. You have explained to me that criticism is a creative art. What future has it?

GILBERT. It is to criticism that the future belongs. The subject matter at the disposal of creation becomes

every day more limited in extent and variety. Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted the obvious.

If creation is to last at all, it can only do so on the condition of becoming far more critical than it is at present.

The old roads and dusty highways have been traversed too often. Their charm has been worn away by

plodding feet, and they have lost that element of novelty or surprise which is so essential for romance. He

who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of

man in its innermost workings. The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. As one

turns over the pages of his PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, one feels as if one were seated under a

palmtree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The

jaded, secondrate AngloIndians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The mere lack of style

in the storyteller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of literature

Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows

vulgarity better than any one has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows

its essence and its seriousness. He is our first authority on the secondrate, and has seen marvellous things

through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real works of art. As for the second condition, we have had

Browning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much to be done in the sphere of introspection. People

sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid

enough. We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there

are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the

author of LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life

confess its dearest sins. Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it is possible that

a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it seeks to

supply fresh material. I myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed. It springs from too primitive, too

natural an impulse. However this may be, it is certain that the subject matter at the disposal of creation is

always diminishing, while the subjectmatter of criticism increases daily. There are always new attitudes for

the mind, and new points of view. The duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world

advances. There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means that

Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism. You might just as well have asked me the use of

thought. It is Criticism, as Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age. It is

Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that makes the mind a fine instrument. We, in our

educational system, have burdened the memory with a load of unconnected facts, and laboriously striven to

impart our laboriouslyacquired 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 more subtle quality of apprehension and

discernment. The Greeks did this, and when we come in contact with the Greek critical intellect, 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 subjectmatter can be interpreted. England has done one thing; it has

invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community,

and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force. But Wisdom has always been hidden from it. Considered as

an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is the

It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture possible. It takes the cumbersome mass of creative

work, and distils it into a finer essence. Who that desires to retain any sense of form could struggle through

the monstrous multitudinous books that the world has produced, books in which thought stammers or

ignorance brawls? The thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism.

Nay more, where there is no record, and history is either lost, or was never written, Criticism can recreate

the past for us from the very smallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as the man of science can

from some tiny bone, or the mere impress of a foot upon a rock, recreate for us the winged dragon or Titan

lizard that once made the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth out of his cave, and make

Leviathan swim once more across the startled sea. Prehistoric history belongs to the philological and

archaeological critic. It is to him that the origins of things are revealed. The selfconscious deposits of an age

are nearly always misleading. Through philological criticism alone we know more of the centuries of which

no actual record has been preserved, than we do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls. It can do for us

what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics. It can give us the exact science of mind in the process

of becoming. It can do for us what History cannot do. It can tell us what man thought before he learned how

to write. You have asked me about the influence of Criticism. I think I have answered that question already;

but there is this also to be said. It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan. The Manchester school tried to

make men realise the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace. It

sought to degrade the wonderful world into a common marketplace for the buyer and the seller. It addressed

itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed. War followed upon war, and the tradesman's creed did not prevent

France and Germany from clashing together in bloodstained battle. There are others of our own day who

seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or to 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, so popular among those who have never read history. But mere emotional sympathy

will not do. It is too variable, and too closely connected with the passions; and a board of arbitrators who, for

the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived of the power of putting their decisions into execution, will

not be of much avail. There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and that is Justice without her sword in her

No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the greed for gain could do so. It is only by

the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to raceprejudices.

Goethe you will not misunderstand what I say was a German of the Germans. He loved his country no

man more so. Its people were dear to him; and he led them. Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled

upon vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent. 'How can one write songs of hatred without hating?' he said

to Eckermann, 'and how could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which

is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?' This

note, sounded in the modern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the

cosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism will annihilate raceprejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the

human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall

remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important

element. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as

vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change will of course be slow, and people will not be conscious of it.

They will not say 'We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,' but because the prose of

France is perfect, they will not hate the land. Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far

closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us the peace that springs from

Nor is this all. It is Criticism that, recognising no position as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow

shibboleths of any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake,

and loves it not the less because it knows it to be unattainable. How little we have of this temper in England,

and how much we need it! The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the

sordid and stupid quarrels of secondrate politicians or thirdrate theologians. It was reserved for a man of

science to show us the supreme example of that 'sweet reasonableness' of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and,

alas! to so little effect. The author of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. If

one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian, or

the indifference of Montaigne. We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity. Anything

approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner,

yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

GILBERT. The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always. To be good, according to the vulgar

standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain

lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middleclass respectability. Aesthetics are higher

than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to

which we can arrive. Even a coloursense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a

sense of right and wrong. Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the

sphere 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 and change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that

perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because

they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the

soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to

transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or

passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful

vile. Is this dangerous? Yes; it is dangerous all ideas, as I told you, are so. But the night wearies, and the

light flickers in the lamp. One more thing I cannot help saying to you. You have spoken against Criticism as

being a sterile thing. The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of

two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God.

Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.

Creation is always behind the age. It is Criticism that leads us. The Critical Spirit and the WorldSpirit are

ERNEST. And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this spirit possesses, will, I suppose, do

GILBERT. Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet pensive Persephone around whose white

feet the asphodel and amaranth are blooming, he will sit contented 'in that deep, motionless quiet which

mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.' He will look out upon the world and know its secret. By contact with

divine things he will become divine. His will be the perfect life, and his only.

ERNEST. You have told me many strange things tonight, Gilbert. You have told me that it is more difficult

to talk about a thing than to do it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world; you

have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation,

and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it

is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is unfair,

GILBERT. Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his

GILBERT. And his reward. But, see, it is dawn already. Draw back the curtains and open the windows wide.

How cool the morning air is! Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A faint purple mist hangs

over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple. It is too late to sleep. Let us go down to

In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made on that splendour of mounting which

now characterises our Shakespearian revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics

that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes of his actors, and that, could he see

Mrs. Langtry's production of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, he would probably say that the play, and the

play only, is the thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella. While, as regards any historical

accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article in the NINETEENTH CENTURY, has laid it down as a dogma

of art that archaeology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of Shakespeare's plays, and the

Lord Lytton's position I shall examine later on; but, as regards the theory that Shakespeare did not busy

himself much about the costumewardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to study Shakespeare's method

will see that there is absolutely no dramatist of the French, English, or Athenian stage who relies so much for

Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty of costume, he constantly introduces

into his plays masques and dances, purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye; and we have

still his stagedirections for the three great processions in HENRY THE EIGHTH, directions which are

characterised by the most extraordinary elaborateness of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in

Anne Boleyn's hair. Indeed it would be quite easy for a modern manager to reproduce these pageants

absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed; and so accurate were they that one of the court officials of the

time, writing an account of the last performance of the play at the Globe Theatre to a friend, actually

complains of their realistic character, notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of the Garter in

the robes and insignia of the order as being calculated to bring ridicule on the real ceremonies; much in the

same spirit in which the French Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful actor, M. Christian,

from appearing in uniform, on the plea that it was prejudicial to the glory of the army that a colonel should be

caricatured. And elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English stage under

Shakespeare's influence was attacked by the contemporary critics, not as a rule, however, on the grounds of

the democratic tendencies of realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are always the last refuge of

The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely

costumes in adding picturesqueness to poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of

producing certain dramatic effects. Many of his plays, such as MEASURE FOR MEASURE, TWELFTH

others, depend for their illusion on the character of the various dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the

delightful scene in HENRY THE SIXTH, on the modern miracles of healing by faith, loses all its point unless

Gloster is in black and scarlet; and the DENOUMENT of the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR hinges on the

colour of Anne Page's gown. As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises the instances are almost

numberless. Posthumus hides his passion under a peasant's garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot's rags;

Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired in 'all points as a man'; the cloakbag of Pisanio

changes Imogen to the Youth Fidele; Jessica flees from her father's house in boy's dress, and Julia ties up her

yellow hair in fantastic loveknots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a

shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim; Prince Hal and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits, and

then in white aprons and leather 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 the Hunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?

Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of intensifying dramatic situation less

numerous. After slaughter of Duncan, Macbeth appears in his nightgown as if aroused from sleep; Timon

ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richard flatters the London citizens in a suit of mean and

shabby armour, and, as soon as he has stepped in blood to the throne, marches through the streets in crown

and George and Garter; the climax of THE TEMPEST is reached when Prospero, throwing off his enchanter's

robes, sends Ariel for his hat and rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in

HAMLET changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects; and as for Juliet, a modern playwright

would probably have laid her out in her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but

Shakespeare arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault 'a feasting presence

full of light,' turns the tomb into a bridal chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo's speech of the

Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a majordomo's stockings, the pattern on a wife's

handkerchief, the sleeve of a young soldier, and a fashionable woman's bonnets, become in Shakespeare's

hands points of actual dramatic importance, and by some of them the action of the play in question is

conditioned absolutely. Many other dramatists have availed themselves of costume as a method of expressing

directly to the audience the character of a person on his entrance, though hardly so brilliantly as Shakespeare

has done in the case of the dandy Parolles, whose dress, by the way, only an archaeologist can understand;

the fun of a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience, of shipwrecked sailors

squabbling over the division of a lot of fine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in his

cups, may be regarded as part of that great career which costume has always played in comedy from the time

of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details of apparel and adornment has ever

drawn such irony of contrast, such immediate and tragic effect, such pity and such pathos, as Shakespeare

himself. Armed capepie, the dead King stalks on the battlements of Elsinore because all is not right with

Denmark; Shylock's Jewish gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded and embittered nature

writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert

and Orlando's bloodstained napkin strikes the first sombre note in that exquisite woodland idyll, and shows

us the depth of feeling that underlies Rosalind's fanciful wit and wilful jesting.

says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already on its way to Rome to rob her of her

husband's faith; the little Prince passing to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle's girdle; Duncan

sends a ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own murder, and the ring of Portia turns the tragedy of the

merchant into a wife's comedy. The great rebel York dies with a paper crown on his head; Hamlet's black suit

is a kind of colourmotive in the piece, like the mourning of the Chimene in the CID; and the climax of

The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as pathetic as the violets that blossom on a

grave; the effect of Lear's wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words by his fantastic attire; and

when Cloten, stung by the taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her husband's raiment, arrays

himself in that husband's very garb to work upon her the deed of shame, we feel that there is nothing in the

whole of modern French realism, nothing even in THERESE RAQUIN, that masterpiece of horror, which for

terrible and tragic significance can compare with this strange scene in CYMBELINE.

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

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

are only a few of the many examples one might quote. One of the finest effects I have ever seen on the stage

was Salvini, in the last act of LEAR, tearing the plume from Kent's cap and applying it to Cordelia's lips

Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities of passion, plucked, I remember, some fur from his

archaeologicallyincorrect ermine for the 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 act of RICHARD THE THIRD have not, I am sure,

forgotten how much the agony and terror of his dream was intensified, by contrast, through the calm and

lines which had a double meaning for the audience, remembering the last words which Richard's mother

As regards the resources which Shakespeare had at his disposal, it is to be remarked that, while he more than

once complains of the smallness of the stage on which he has to produce big historical plays, and of the want

of scenery which obliges him to cut out many effective openair incidents, he always writes as a dramatist

who had at his disposal a most elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on the actors taking pains

about their makeup. Even now it is difficult to produce such a play as the COMEDY OF ERRORS; and to

the picturesque accident of Miss Ellen Terry's brother resembling herself we owe the opportunity of seeing

TWELFTH NIGHT adequately performed. Indeed, to put any play of Shakespeare's on the stage, absolutely

as he himself wished it to be done, requires the services of a good propertyman, a clever wigmaker, a

costumier with a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, a master of the methods of makingup, a

fencingmaster, 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 each character. 'Racine abhorre la realite,' says Auguste

Vacquerie somewhere; 'il ne daigne pas s'occuper de son costume. Si l'on s'en rapportait aux indications du

poete, Agamemnon serait vetu d'un sceptre et Achille d'une epee.' But with Shakespeare it is very different.

He gives us directions about the costumes of Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the Witches in MACBETH, and the

apothecary in ROMEO AND JULIET, several elaborate descriptions of his fat knight, and a detailed account

of the extraordinary garb in which Petruchio is to be married. Rosalind, he tells us, is tall, and is to carry a

spear and a little dagger; Celia is smaller, and is to paint her face brown so as to look sunburnt. The children

who play at fairies in Windsor Forest are to be dressed in white and green a compliment, by the way, to

Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite colours they were and in white, with green garlands and gilded vizors,

the angels are to come to Katherine in Kimbolton. Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished from

Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his boots. The Duchess of Gloucester

stands in a white sheet with her husband in mourning beside her. The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the

Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are all made occasion for jest or taunt in the

dialogue. We know the patterns on the Dauphin's armour and the Pucelle's sword, the crest on Warwick's

helmet and the colour of Bardolph's nose. Portia has golden hair, Phoebe is blackhaired, Orlando has

chestnut curls, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek's hair hangs like flax on a distaff, and won't curl at all. Some of

the characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to

blacken their faces. Lear has a white beard, Hamlet's father a grizzled, and Benedick is to shave his in the

course of the play. Indeed, on the subject of stage beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate; tells us of the many

different colours in use, and gives a hint to actors always to see that their own are properly tied on. There is a

dance of reapers in ryestraw hats, and of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs; a masque of Amazons, a masque

of Russians, and a classical masque; several immortal scenes over a weaver in an ass's head, a riot over the

colour of a coat which it takes the Lord Mayor of London to quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband

As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms he makes on it, his hits at the costume

of his age, particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies' bonnets, and the many descriptions of the

MUNDUS MULIEBRIS, from the long of Autolycus in the WINTER'S TALE down to the account of the

Duchess of Milan's gown in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, they are far too numerous to quote; though it

may be worth while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to be found in Lear's

scene with Edgar a passage which has the advantage of brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and

somewhat mouthing metaphysics of SARTOR RESARTUS. But I think that from what I have already said it

is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much interested in costume. I do not mean in that shallow sense by

which it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds and daffodils that he was the Blackstone and

Paxton of the Elizabethan age; but that he saw that costume could be made at once impressive of a certain

effect on the audience and expressive of certain types of character, and is one of the essential factors of the

means which a true illusionist has at his disposal. Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard was of as

much value as Juliet's loveliness; he sets the serge of the radical beside the silks of the lord, and sees the stage

effects to be got from each: he has as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth of

The difficulty Ducis felt about translating OTHELLO in consequence of the importance given to such a

vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate 'Le

bandeau! le bandeau!' may be taken as an example of the difference between LA TRAGEDIE

PHILOSOPHIQUE and the drama of real life; and the introduction for the first time of the word

MOUCHOIR at the Theatre Francais was an era in that romantic realistic movement of which Hugo is the

father and M. Zola the ENFANT TERRIBLE, just as the classicism of the earlier part of the century was

emphasised by Talma's refusal to play Greek heroes any longer in a powdered periwig one of the many

instances, by the way, of that desire for archaeological accuracy in dress which has distinguished the great

In criticising the importance given to money in LA COMEDIE HUMAINE, Theophile Gautier says that

Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero in fiction, LE HEROS METALLIQUE. Of Shakespeare it

may be said he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may depend on a

The burning of the Globe Theatre an event due, by the way, to the results of the passion for illusion that

distinguished Shakespeare's stagemanagement has unfortunately robbed us of many important documents;

but in the inventory, still in existence, of the costumewardrobe 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 for Henry 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, frieze coats, 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 incomparable fardingales all of which show a desire to give every character an

appropriate dress. There are also entries of Spanish, Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets, lances,

painted shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of costumes for Turkish Janissaries, Roman

Senators, and all the gods and goddesses of Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archaeological research

on the part of the manager of the theatre. It is true that there is a mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the

Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare will see that archaeology was one of its

special characteristics. After that revival of the classical forms of architecture which was one of the notes of

the Renaissance, and the printing at Venice and elsewhere of the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature,

had come naturally an interest in the ornamentation and costume of the antique world. Nor was it for the

learning that they could acquire, but rather for the loveliness that they might create, that the artists studied

these things. The curious objects that were being constantly brought to light by excavations were not left to

moulder in a museum, for the contemplation of a callous curator, and the ENNUI of a policeman bored by the

absence of crime. They were used as motives for the production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful

Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way came across an old Roman

sarcophagus inscribed with the name 'Julia, daughter of Claudius.' On opening the coffer they found within its

marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age, preserved by the embalmer's skill

from corruption and the decay of time. Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curling

gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet departed. Borne back to the Capitol,

she became at once the centre of a new cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at the

wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might

forget what secrets Judaea's rough and rockhewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by

night, and in secret buried. Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the less valuable as showing us the

attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique world. Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the

antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath and

beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn. From the

pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar,' and the service Cellini designed for King

Francis, the influence of this spirit can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts the arts of

arrested movement but its influence was to be seen also in the great GraecoRoman masques which were

the constant amusement of the gay courts of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which

the citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that chanced to visit them; pageants, by

the way, which were considered so important that large prints were made of them and published a fact

And this use of archaeology in shows, so far from being a bit of priggish pedantry, is in every way legitimate

and beautiful. For the stage is not merely the meetingplace of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Sometimes in an archaeological novel the use of strange and obsolete terms seems to hide the reality beneath

the learning, and I dare say that many of the readers of NOTRE DAME DE PARIS have been much puzzled

over the meaning of such expressions as LA CASAQUE E MAHOITRES, LES VOULGIERS, LE

GALLIMARD TACHE D'ENCRE, LES CRAAQUINIERS, and the like; but with the stage how different it

is! The ancient world wakes from its sleep, and history moves as a pageant before our eyes, without obliging

us to have recourse to a dictionary or an encyclopaedia for the perfection of our enjoyment. Indeed, there is

not the slightest necessity that the public should know the authorities for the mounting of any piece. From

such materials, for instance, as the disk of Theodosius, materials with which the majority of people are

probably not very familiar, Mr. E. W. Godwin, one of the most artistic spirits of this century in England,

created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of CLAUDIAN, and showed us the life of Byzantium in the

fourth century, not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts, not by a novel which requires a glossary to

explain it, but by the visible presentation before us of all the glory of that great town. And while the costumes

were true to the smallest points of colour and design, yet the details were not assigned that abnormal

importance which they must necessarily be given in a piecemeal lecture, but were subordinated to the rules of

lofty composition and the unity of artistic effect. Mr. Symonds, speaking of that great picture of Mantegna's,

now in Hampton Court, says that the artist has converted an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of

line. The same could have been said with equal justice of Mr. Godwin's scene. Only the foolish called it

pedantry, only those who would neither look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play being killed by its

paint. It was in reality a scene not merely perfect in its picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also, getting

rid of any necessity for tedious descriptions, and showing us, by the colour and character of Claudian's dress,

and the dress of his attendants, the whole nature and life of the man, from what school of philosophy he

And indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some form of art. I have no desire to

underrate the services of laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's Dictionary is of

far more value to us than Professor Max Muller's treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language.

Better ENDYMION than any theory, however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic

among adjectives! And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats

the suggestion for his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the

theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the

illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of

Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress

of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the amount of books published on national

costumes is quite extraordinary. At the beginning of the century the NUREMBERG CHRONICLE, with its

two thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century was over seventeen editions were

published of Munster's COSMOGRAPHY. Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael

Colyns, of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well illustrated, some of the

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their knowledge. The development of the habit

of foreign travel, the increased commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic

missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary dress. After

the departure from England, for instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of

Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the strange attire of their visitors. Later

on London saw, perhaps too often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came envoys

from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an important influence on English costume.

And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress, or the dress of foreign nations; there was also a

good deal of research, amongst theatrical people especially, into the ancient costume of England itself: and

when Shakespeare, in the prologue to one of his plays, expresses his regret at being unable to produce

helmets of the period, he is speaking as an Elizabethan manager and not merely as an Elizabethan poet. At

Cambridge, for instance, during his day, a play of RICHARD THE THIRD was performed, in which the

actors were attired in real dresses of the time, procured from the great collection of historical costume in the

Tower, which was always open to the inspection of managers, and sometimes placed at their disposal. And I

cannot help thinking that this performance must have been far more artistic, as regards costume, than

Garrick's mounting of Shakespeare's own play on the subject, in which he himself appeared in a nondescript

fancy dress, and everybody else in the costume of the time of George the Third, Richmond especially being

For what is the use to the stage of that archaeology which has so strangely terrified the critics, but that it, and

it alone, can give us the architecture and apparel suitable to the time in which the action of the play passes? It

enables us to see a Greek dressed like a Greek, and an Italian like an Italian; to enjoy the arcades of Venice

and the balconies of Verona; and, if the play deals with any of the great eras in our country's history, to

contemplate the age in its proper attire, and the king in his habit as he lived. And I wonder, by the way, what

Lord Lytton would have said some time ago, at the Princess's Theatre, had the curtain risen on his father's

Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair, attired in a flowing wig and a flowered dressinggown, a costume

which in the last century was considered peculiarly appropriate to an antique Roman! For in those halcyon

days of the drama no archaeology troubled the stage, or distressed the critics, and our inartistic grandfathers

sat peaceably in a stifling atmosphere of anachronisms, and beheld with the calm complacency of the age of

prose an Iachimo in powder and patches, a Lear in lace ruffles, and a Lady Macbeth in a large crinoline. I can

understand archaeology being attacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but to attack it as pedantic

seems to be very much beside the mark. However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as well

speak disrespectfully of the equator. For archaeology, being a science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact

simply. Its value depends entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it. We look to the archaeologist

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is

the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play, more than by any

actual historical references which may occur in it. Most HAMLETS I have seen were placed far too early.

HAMLET is essentially a scholar of the Revival of Learning; and if the allusion to the recent invasion of

England by the Danes puts it back to the ninth century, the use of foils brings it down much later. Once,

however, that the date has been fixed, then the archaeologist is to supply us with the facts which the artist is

It has been said that the anachronisms in the plays themselves show us that Shakespeare was indifferent to

historical accuracy, and a great deal of capital has been made out of Hector's indiscreet quotation from

Aristotle. Upon the other hand, the anachronisms are really few in number, and not very important, and, had

Shakespeare's attention been drawn to them by a brother artist, he would probably have corrected them. For,

though they can hardly be called blemishes, they are certainly not the great beauties of his work; or, at least,

if they are, their anachronistic charm cannot be emphasised unless the play is accurately mounted according

to its proper date. In looking at Shakespeare's plays as a whole, however, what is really remarkable is their

extraordinary fidelity as regards his personages and his plots. Many of his DRAMATIS PERSONAE are

people who had actually existed, and some of them might have been seen in real life by a portion of his

audience. Indeed the most violent attack that was made on Shakespeare in his time was for his supposed

caricature of Lord Cobham. As for his plots, Shakespeare constantly draws them either from authentic

history, or from the old ballads and traditions which served as history to the Elizabethan public, and which

even now no scientific historian would dismiss as absolutely untrue. And not merely did he select fact instead

of fancy as the basis of much of his imaginative work, but he always gives to each play the general character,

the social atmosphere in a word, of the age in question. Stupidity he recognises as being one of the permanent

characteristics of all European civilisations; so he sees no difference between a London mob of his own day

and a Roman mob of pagan days, between a silly watchman in Messina and a silly Justice of the Peace in

Windsor. But when he deals with higher characters, with those exceptions of each age which are so fine that

they become its types, he gives them absolutely the stamp and seal of their time. Virgilia is one of those

Roman wives on whose tomb was written 'Domi mansit, lanam fecit,' as surely as Juliet is the romantic girl of

the Renaissance. He is even true to the characteristics of race. Hamlet has all the imagination and irresolution

of the Northern nations, and the Princess Katharine is as entirely French as the heroine of DIVORCONS.

Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it is

wonderful how careful he is to have his facts perfectly right indeed he follows Holinshed with curious

fidelity. The incessant wars between France and England are described with extraordinary accuracy down to

the names of the besieged towns, the ports of landing and embarkation, the sites and dates of the battles, the

titles of the commanders on each side, and the lists of the killed and wounded. And as regards the Civil Wars

of the Roses we have many elaborate genealogies of the seven sons of Edward the Third; the claims of the

rival Houses of York and Lancaster to the throne are discussed at length; and if the English aristocracy will

not read Shakespeare as a poet, they should certainly read him as a sort of early Peerage. There is hardly a

single title in the Upper House, with the exception of course of the uninteresting titles assumed by the law

lords, which does not appear in Shakespeare along with many details of family history, creditable and

discreditable. Indeed if it be really necessary that the School Board children should know all about the Wars

of the Roses, they could learn their lessons just as well out of Shakespeare as out of shilling primers, and

learn them, I need not say, far more pleasurably. Even in Shakespeare's own day this use of his plays was

recognised. 'The historical plays teach history to those who cannot read it in the chronicles,' says Heywood in

a tract about the stage, and yet I am sure that sixteenthcentury chronicles were much more delightful reading

Of course the aesthetic value of Shakespeare's plays does not, in the slightest degree, depend on their facts,

but on their Truth, and Truth is independent of facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure. But still

Shakespeare's use of facts is a most interesting part of his method of work, and shows us his attitude towards

the stage, and his relations to the great art of illusion. Indeed he would have been very much surprised at any

one classing his plays with 'fairy tales,' as Lord Lytton does; for one of his aims was to create for England a

national historical drama, which should deal with incidents with which the public was well acquainted, 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 for an individual feeling, and for the public the

presentation of a work of art in a most attractive and popular form. It is worth noticing that Shakespeare's first

It may be asked, what has this to do with Shakespeare's attitude towards costume? I answer that a dramatist

who laid such stress on historical accuracy of fact would have welcomed historical accuracy of costume as a

most important adjunct to his illusionist method. And I have no hesitation in saying that he did so. The

reference to helmets of the period in the prologue to HENRY THE FIFTH may be considered fanciful,

where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of Westminster Abbey, along with the saddle of that 'imp of fame,'

and the dinted shield with its torn blue velvet lining and its tarnished lilies of gold; but the use of military

tabards in HENRY THE SIXTH is a bit of pure archaeology, as they were not worn in the sixteenth century;

and the King's own tabard, I may mention, was still suspended over his tomb in St. George's Chapel,

Windsor, in Shakespeare's day. For, up to the time of the unfortunate triumph of the Philistines in 1645, the

chapels and cathedrals of England were the great national museums of archaeology, and in them were kept

the armour and attire of the heroes of English history. A good deal was of course preserved in the Tower, and

even in Elizabeth's day tourists were brought there to see such curious relics of the past as Charles Brandon's

huge lance, which is still, I believe, the admiration of our country visitors; but the cathedrals and churches

were, as a rule, selected as the most suitable shrines for the reception of the historic antiquities. Canterbury

can still show us the helm of the Black Prince, Westminster the robes of our kings, and in old St. Paul's the

In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in London, he saw the apparel and appurtenances of past ages,

and it is impossible to doubt that he made use of his opportunities. The employment of lance and shield, for

instance, in actual warfare, which is so frequent in his plays, is drawn from archaeology, and not from the

military accoutrements of his day; and his general use of armour in battle was not a characteristic of his age, a

time when it was rapidly disappearing before firearms. Again, the crest on Warwick's helmet, of which such a

point is made in HENRY THE SIXTH, is absolutely correct in a fifteenthcentury play when crests were

generally worn, but would not have been so in a play of Shakespeare's own time, when feathers and plumes

had taken their place a fashion which, as he tells us in HENRY THE EIGHTH, was borrowed from France.

For the historical plays, then, we may be sure that archaeology was employed, and as for the others I feel

certain that it was the case also. The appearance of Jupiter on his eagle, thunderbolt in hand, of Juno with her

peacocks, and of Iris with her manycoloured bow; the Amazon masque and the masque of the Five

Worthies, may all be regarded as archaeological; and the vision which Posthumus sees in prison of Sicilius

Leonatus 'an old man, attired like a warrior, leading an ancient matron' is clearly so. Of the 'Athenian

dress' by which Lysander is distinguished from Oberon I have already spoken; but one of the most 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 oakwreath with which Caius Marcius was crowned,

and of the curious kind of dress in which, according to ancient fashion, he had to canvass his electors; and on

both of these points he enters into long disquisitions, investigating the origin and meaning of the old customs.

Shakespeare, in the spirit of the true artist, accepts the facts of the antiquarian and converts them into

dramatic and picturesque effects: indeed the gown of humility, the 'woolvish gown,' as Shakespeare calls it, is

the central note of the play. There are other cases I might quote, but this one is quite sufficient for my

purpose; and it is evident from it at any rate that, in mounting a play in the accurate costume of the time,

according to the best authorities, we are carrying out Shakespeare's own wishes and method.

Even if it were not so, there is no more reason that we should continue any imperfections which may be

supposed to have characterised Shakespeare's stage mounting than that we should have Juliet played by a

young man, or give up the advantage of changeable scenery. A great work of dramatic art should not merely

be made expressive of modern passion by means of the actor, but should be presented to us in the form most

suitable to the modern spirit. Racine produced his Roman plays in Louis Quatorze dress on a stage crowded

with spectators; but we require different conditions for the enjoyment of his art. Perfect accuracy of detail, for

the sake of perfect illusion, is necessary for us. What we have to see is that the details are not allowed to

usurp the principal place. They must be subordinate always to the general motive of the play. But

subordination in art does not mean disregard of truth; it means conversion of fact into effect, and assigning to

'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 de l'ensemble, et de faire

penetrer jusque dans les coins les plus obscurs de l'oeuvre cette vie generale et puissante au milieu de laquelle

les personnages sont plus vrais, et les catastrophes, par consequeut, plus poignantes. Tout doit etre

This passage is interesting as coming from the first great French dramatist who employed archaeology on the

stage, and whose plays, though absolutely correct in detail, are known to all for their passion, not for their

pedantry for their life, not for their learning. It is true that he has made certain concessions in the case of the

employment of curious or strange expressions. Ruy Blas talks of M, de Priego as 'sujet du roi' instead of

'noble du roi,' and Angelo Malipieri speaks of 'la croix rouge' instead of 'la croix de gueules.' But they are

concessions made to the public, or rather to a section of it. 'J'en offre ici toute mes excuses aux spectateurs

intelligents,' he says in a note to one of the plays; 'esperons qu'un jour un seigneur venitien pourra dire tout

bonnement sans peril son blason sur le theatre. C'est un progres qui viendra.' And, though the description of

the crest is not couched in accurate language, still the crest itself was accurately right. It may, of course, be

said that the public do not notice these things; upon the other hand, it should be remembered that Art has no

other aim but her own perfection, and proceeds simply by her own laws, and that the play which Hamlet

describes as being caviare to the general is a play he highly praises. Besides, in England, at any rate, the

public have undergone a transformation; there is far more appreciation of beauty now than there was a few

years ago; and though they may not be familiar with the authorities and archaeological data for what is shown

to them, still they enjoy whatever loveliness they look at. And this is the important thing. Better to take

pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope. Archaeological accuracy is merely a condition of

illusionist stage effect; it is not its quality. And Lord Lytton's proposal that the dresses should merely be

beautiful without being accurate is founded on a misapprehension of the nature of costume, and of its value

on the stage. This value is twofold, picturesque and dramatic; the former depends on the colour of the dress,

the latter on its design and character. But so interwoven are the two that, whenever in our own day historical

accuracy has been disregarded, and the various dresses in a play taken from different ages, the result has been

that the stage has been turned into that chaos of costume, that caricature of the centuries, the Fancy Dress

Ball, to the entire ruin of all dramatic and picturesque effect. For the dresses of one age do not artistically

harmonise with the dresses of another: and, as far as dramatic value goes, to confuse the costumes is to

confuse the play. Costume is a growth, an evolution, and a most important, perhaps the most important, sign

of the manners, customs and mode of life of each century. The Puritan dislike of colour, adornment and grace

in apparel was part of the great revolt of the middle classes against Beauty in the seventeenth century. A

historian who disregarded it would give us a most inaccurate picture of the time, and a dramatist who did not

avail himself of it would miss a most vital element in producing an illusionist effect. The effeminacy of dress

that characterised the reign of Richard the Second was a constant theme of contemporary authors.

Shakespeare, writing two hundred years after, makes the king's fondness for gay apparel and foreign fashions

a point in the play, from John of Gaunt's reproaches down to Richard's own speech in the third act on his

deposition from the throne. And that Shakespeare examined Richard's tomb in Westminster Abbey seems to

See, see, King Richard doth himself appear As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal

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 social conditions are so exemplified in costume, that to produce a sixteenthcentury play in

fourteenthcentury 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 is not merely comparable with absolute

accuracy of detail, but really dependent on it. To invent, an entirely new costume is almost impossible except

in burlesque or extravaganza, and as for combining the dress of different centuries into one, the experiment

would be dangerous, and Shakespeare's opinion of the artistic value of such a medley may be gathered from

his incessant satire of the Elizabethan dandies for imagining that they were well dressed because they got

their doublets in Italy, their hats in Germany, and their hose in France. And it should be noted that the most

lovely scenes that have been produced on our stage have been those that have been characterised by perfect

accuracy, such as Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft's eighteenthcentury 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 complete answer to Lord Lytton's theory, it must be remembered that neither in costume nor in

dialogue is beauty the dramatist's primary aim at all. The true dramatist aims first at what is characteristic,

and no more desires that all his personages should be beautifully attired than he desires that they should all

have beautiful natures or speak beautiful English. The true dramatist, in fact, shows us life under the

conditions of art, not art in the form of life. The Greek dress was the loveliest dress the world has ever seen,

and the English dress of the last century one of the most monstrous; yet we cannot costume a play by

Sheridan as we would costume a play by Sophokles. For, as Polonius says in his excellent lecture, a lecture to

which I am glad to have the opportunity of expressing my obligations, one of the first qualities of apparel is

its expressiveness. And the affected style of dress in the last century was the natural characteristic of a society

of affected manners and affected conversation a characteristic which the realistic dramatist will highly

value down to the smallest detail of accuracy, and the materials for which he can get only from archaeology.

But it is not enough that a dress should be accurate; it must be also appropriate to the stature and appearance

of the actor, and to his supposed condition, as well as to his necessary action in the play. In Mr. Hare's

production OF AS YOU LIKE IT at the St. James's Theatre, for instance, the whole point of Orlando's

complaint that he is brought up like a peasant, and not like a gentleman, was spoiled by the gorgeousness of

his dress, and the splendid apparel worn by the banished Duke and his friends was quite out of place. Mr.

Lewis Wingfield's explanation that the sumptuary laws of the period necessitated their doing so, is, I am

afraid, hardly sufficient. Outlaws, lurking in a forest and living by the chase, are not very likely to care much

about ordinances of dress. They were probably attired like Robin Hood's men, to whom, indeed, they are

compared in the course of the play. And that their dress was not that of wealthy noblemen may be seen by

Orlando's words when he breaks in upon them. He mistakes them for robbers, and is amazed to find that they

answer him in courteous and gentle terms. Lady Archibald Campbell's production, under Mr. E. W. Godwin's

direction, of the same play in Coombe Wood was, as regards mounting, far more artistic. At least it seemed

so to me. The Duke and his companions were dressed in serge tunics, leathern jerkins, high boots and

gauntlets, and wore bycocket hats and hoods. And as they were playing in a real forest, they found, I am sure,

their dresses extremely convenient. To every character in the play was given a perfectly appropriate attire,

and the brown and green of their costumes harmonised exquisitely with the ferns through which they

wandered, the trees beneath which they lay, and the lovely English landscape that surrounded the Pastoral

Players. The perfect naturalness of the scene was due to the absolute accuracy and appropriateness of

everything that was worn. Nor could archaeology have been put to a severer test, or come out of it more

triumphantly. The whole production showed once for all that, unless a dress is archaeologically correct, and

artistically appropriate, it always looks unreal, unnatural, and theatrical in the sense of artificial.

Nor, again, is it enough that there should be accurate and appropriate costumes of beautiful colours; there

must be also beauty of colour on the stage as a whole, and as long as the background is painted by one artist,

and the foreground figures independently designed by another, there is the danger of a want of harmony in

the scene as a picture. For each scene the colour scheme should be settled as absolutely as for the decoration

of a room, and the textures which it is proposed to use should be mixed and remixed in every possible

combination, and what is discordant removed. Then, as regards the particular kinds of colours, the stage is

often too glaring, partly through the excessive use of hot, violent reds, and partly through the costumes

looking too new. Shabbiness, which in modern life is merely the tendency of the lower orders towards tone, is

not without its artistic value, and modern colours are often much improved by being a little faded. Blue also

is too frequently used: it is not merely a dangerous colour to wear by gaslight, but it is really difficult in

England to get a thoroughly good blue. The fine Chinese blue, which we all so much admire, takes two years

to dye, and the English public will not wait so long for a colour. Peacock blue, of course, has been employed

on the stage, notably at the Lyceum, with great advantage; but all attempts at a good light blue, or good dark

blue, which I have seen have been failures. The value of black is hardly appreciated; it was used effectively

by Mr. Irving in HAMLET as the central note of a composition, but as a tonegiving neutral its importance is

not recognised. And this is curious, considering the general colour of the dress of a century in which, as

Baudelaire says, 'Nous celebrons tous quelque enterrement.' The archaeologist of the future will probably

point to this age as the time when the beauty of black was understood; but I hardly think that, as regards

stagemounting or house decoration, it really is. Its decorative value is, of course, the same as that of white

or gold; it can separate and harmonise colours. In modern plays the black frock coat of the hero becomes

important in itself, and should be given a suitable background. But it rarely is. Indeed the only good

background for a play in modern dress which I have ever seen was the dark grey and creamwhite scene of

the first act of the PRINCESSE GEORGES in Mrs. Langtry's production. As a rule, the hero is smothered in

BRICEBRAC and palmtrees, lost in the gilded abyss of Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to a mere

midge in the midst of marqueterie; whereas the background should always be kept as a background, and

colour subordinated to effect. This, of course, can only be done when there is one single mind directing the

whole production. The facts of art are diverse, but the essence of artistic effect is unity. Monarchy, Anarchy,

and Republicanism may contend for the government of nations; but a theatre should be in the power of a

cultured despot. There may be division of labour, but there must be no division of mind. Whoever

understands the costume of an age understands of necessity its architecture and its surroundings also, and it is

easy to see from the chairs of a century whether it was a century of crinolines or not. In fact, in art there is no

specialism, and a really artistic production should bear the impress of one master, and one master only, who

not merely should design and arrange everything, but should have complete control over the way in which

Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of HERNANI, absolutely refused to call her lover 'MON LION!'

unless she was allowed to wear a little fashionable TOQUE then much in vogue on the Boulevards; and many

young ladies on our own stage insist to the present day on wearing stiff starched petticoats under Greek

dresses, to the entire ruin of all delicacy of line and fold; but these wicked things should not be allowed. And

there should be far more dress rehearsals than there are now. Actors such as Mr. ForbesRobertson, Mr.

Conway, Mr. George Alexander, and others, not to mention older artists, can move with ease and elegance in

the attire of any century; but there are not a few who seem dreadfully embarrassed about their hands if they

have no side pockets, and who always wear their dresses as if they were costumes. Costumes, of course, they

are to the designer; but dresses they should be to those that wear them. And it is time that a stop should be put

to the idea, very prevalent on the stage, that the Greeks and Romans always went about bareheaded in the

open air a mistake the Elizabethan managers did not fall into, for they gave hoods as well as gowns to their

More dress rehearsals would also be of value in explaining to the actors that there is a form of gesture and

movement that is not merely appropriate to each style of dress, but really conditioned by it. The extravagant

use of the arms in the eighteenth century, for instance, was the necessary result of the large hoop, and the

solemn dignity of Burleigh owed as much to his ruff as to his reason. Besides until an actor is at home in his

Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistic temperament in the audience, and producing that joy

in beauty for beauty's sake without which the great masterpieces of art can never be understood, I will not

here speak; though it is worth while to notice how Shakespeare appreciated that side of the question in the

production of his tragedies, acting them always by artificial light, and in a theatre hung with black; but what I

have tried to point out is that archaeology is not a pedantic method, but a method of artistic illusion, and that

costume is a means of displaying character without description, and of producing dramatic situations and

dramatic effects. And I think it is a pity that so many critics should have set themselves to attack one of the

most important movements on the modern stage before that movement has at all reached its proper

perfection. That it will do so, however, I feel as certain as that we shall require from our dramatic critics in

the future higher qualification than that they can remember Macready or have seen Benjamin Webster; we

shall require of them, indeed, that they cultivate a sense of beauty. POUR ETRE PLUS DIFFICILE, LA

TACHE N'EN EST QUE PLUS GLORIEUSE. And if they will not encourage, at least they must not oppose,

a movement of which Shakespeare of all dramatists would have most approved, for it has the illusion of truth

for its method, and the illusion of beauty for its result. Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this

essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in

aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is

that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art criticism, and through it, that we can

apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in artcriticism, and through it, that we can realise

Hegel's system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.

6. THE CRITIC AS ARTIST - WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING, page = 29