PEN, PENCIL AND POISON. A STUDY IN GREEN
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING
THE TRUTH OF MASKS. A NOTE ON ILLUSION
THE DECAY OF LYING: AN OBSERVATION
A DIALOGUE.Persons:Cyril andVivian.Scene:the Library of a countryhouse in
Nottinghamshire.Cyril (coming in through the open window
from the terrace). My dear Vivian, don’t coop
yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely
afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods,
like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass
and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.Vivian. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely
lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature
more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us;
and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things
in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience is that
the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really
reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities,
her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.
Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said,
she cannot carry them out. When I look at a landscape I cannot help
seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that
Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art at all.
Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature
her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a
pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in
the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who
looks at her.Cyril. Well, you need not look at the landscape. You can lie
on the grass and smoke and talk.Vivian. But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and
lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even
Morris’s poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat
than the whole of Nature can. Nature pales before the furniture of
‘the street which from 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 over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable
of learning has taken to teaching—that is really what our
enthusiasm for education has come to. In the meantime, you had
better go back to your wearisome uncomfortable Nature, and leave me
to correct my proofs.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 thereductio ad
absurdumof practice. Not I. Like Emerson, I
write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’ Besides, my
article is really a most salutary and valuable warning. If it is
attended to, there may be a new Renaissance of Art.Cyril. What is the subject?Vivian. I intend to call it ‘The Decay of Lying: A
Protest.’Cyril. Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept
up that habit.Vivian. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond
the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove,
to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true
liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb
irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any
kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own
evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce
evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth
at once. No, the politicians won’t do. Something may, perhaps, be
urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on
its members. Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are
delightful. They can make the worse appear the better cause, as
though they were fresh from Leontine schools, and have been known
to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for
their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were
clearly and unmistakeably innocent. But they are briefed by the
prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of
their endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, have
degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. One feels it
as one wades through their columns. It is always the unreadable
that occurs. I am afraid that there is not much to be said in
favour of either the lawyer or the journalist. Besides, what I am
pleading for is Lying in art. Shall I read you what I have written?
It might do you a great deal of good.Cyril. Certainly, if you give me a cigarette. Thanks. By the
way, what magazine do you intend it for?Vivian. For theRetrospective
Review. I think I told you that the elect had
revived it.Cyril. Whom do you mean by ‘the elect’?Vivian. Oh, The Tired Hedonists, of course. It is a club to
which I belong. We are supposed to wear faded roses in our
button-holes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian.
I am afraid you are not eligible. You are too fond of simple
pleasures.Cyril. I should be black-balled on the ground of animal
spirits, I suppose?Vivian. Probably. Besides, you are a little too old. We don’t
admit anybody who is of the usual age.Cyril. Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored
with each other.Vivian. We are. This is one of the objects of the club. Now,
if you promise not to interrupt too often, I will read you my
article.Cyril. You will find me all attention.Vivian (reading in a very clear,musical voice). The
Decay Of Lying: A Protest.—One of the chief causes that can be
assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the
literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art,
a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us
delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist
presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. The
Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner.
He has his tediousdocument humain, his miserable littlecoin de la
création, into which he peers with his
microscope. He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the
British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even
the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly
to life for everything, and ultimately, between encyclopædias and
personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types
from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having
acquired an amount of useful information from which 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 craft-mysteries, their deliberate
artistic methods. As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one
can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in
neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice.
Here, as elsewhere, practice must, precede perfection. But in
modern days while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too
common, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of
lying has almost fallen into disrepute. Many a young man starts in
life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in
congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the
best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful.
But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless
habits of accuracy—’Cyril. My dear fellow!Vivian. Please don’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
‘He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to
frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both
things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would
be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he
develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to
verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in
contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often
ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one can
possibly believe in their probability. This is no isolated instance
that we are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and if
something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our
monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty
will pass away from the land.
‘Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of
delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for
we know positively no other name for it. There is such a thing as
robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true,
andThe Black Arrowis 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 theLancet.
As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings
of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being
suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous,
he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it
into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our
other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if
it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and
imperceptible “points of view” his neat literary style, his
felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine,
it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of
his voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr.
James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth
finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a
short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense
of the author becomes almost unbearable. The horses of Mr. William
Black’s phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten
the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects. On
seeing them approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect. Mrs.
Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties,
domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. Marion Crawford has
immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is like the
lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about “le beau ciel
d’Italie.” Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering
moral platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be
good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost
edifying.Robert Elsmereis 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 East-End, the only thing that can be said about them is that
they find life crude, and leave it raw.
‘In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious asRobert Elsmerehas been produced,
things are not much better. M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen
mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor
rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering
wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is
ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very
tears. M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in
one of his pronunciamientos on literature, “L’homme de génie n’a
jamais 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 inGerminal, 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
ofL’Assommoir,NanaandPot-Bouille? Nothing. Mr. Ruskin once
described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being like the
sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus, but M. Zola’s characters are
much worse. They have their dreary vices, and their drearier
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 inJackwith his “mots cruels,” now that we have learned fromVingt Ans de ma Vie littérairethat
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 theroman
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 match-girls 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 unreadable.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 likeThe Deemster, andThe Daughter of Heth, andLe Disciple,
andMr. Isaacs, and as
forRobert 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’sLiterature and Dogmawith the
literature left out. It is as much behind the age as Paley’sEvidences, or Colenso’s method of
Biblical exegesis. Nor could anything be less impressive than the
unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and
so completely missing its true significance that he proposes to
carry on the business of the old firm under the new name. On the
other hand, it contains several clever caricatures, and a heap of
delightful quotations, and Green’s philosophy very pleasantly
sugars the somewhat bitter pill of the author’s fiction. I also
cannot help expressing my surprise that you have said nothing about
the two novelists whom you are always reading, Balzac and George
Meredith. Surely they are realists, both of them?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’sL’Assommoirand Balzac’sIllusions Perduesis the difference
between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. ‘All
Balzac’s characters;’ said Baudelaire, ‘are gifted with the same
ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as
deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to the
muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.’ A steady course
of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our
acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind
of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy
scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death
of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been
able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of
pleasure. I remember it when I laugh. But Balzac is no more a
realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it. I
admit, however, that he set far too high a value on modernity of
form, and that, consequently, there is no book of his that, as an
artistic masterpiece, can rank withSalammbôorEsmond, orThe
Cloister and the Hearth, or theVicomte de Bragelonne.Cyril. Do you object to modernity of form, then?Vivian. Yes. It is a huge price to pay for a very poor
result. Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising. It
cannot help being so. The public imagine that, because they are
interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be
interested in them also, and should take them as her
subject-matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these
things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The only beautiful
things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern
us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us
in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to
our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we
live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s
subject-matter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at
any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling
of any kind. It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her
sorrows are such an admirable motive for a tragedy. I do not know
anything in the whole history of literature sadder than the
artistic career of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful
book,The Cloister and the Hearth, a book as much aboveRomolaasRomolais aboveDaniel Deronda, and wasted the rest of
his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public
attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management
of our private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing
enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse our sympathy for
the victims of the poor-law administration; but Charles Reade, an
artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and
roaring over the abuses of contemporary life like a common
pamphleteer or a sensational journalist, is really a sight for the
angels to weep over. Believe me, my dear Cyril, modernity of form
and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and absolutely wrong.
We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of
the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and hideous
suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside
with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our
birthright for a mess of facts.Cyril. There is something in what you say, and there is no
doubt that whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely model
novel, we have rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it. And
this is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what
is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again,
there is no use reading it at all. But what do you say about the
return to Life and Nature? This is the panacea that is always being
recommended to us.Vivian. I will read you what I say on that subject. The
passage comes later on in the article, but I may as well give it to
you now:—
‘The popular cry of our time is “Let us return to Life and
Nature; they will recreate Art for us, and send the red blood
coursing through her veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness
and make her hand strong.” But, alas! we are mistaken in our
amiable and well-meaning efforts. Nature is always behind the age.
And as for Life, she is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy
that lays waste her house.’Cyril. What do you mean by saying that Nature is always
behind the age?Vivian. Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic. What I mean is
this. If we take Nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed
to self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence
is always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. One touch of
Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will
destroy any work of Art. If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as
the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover
in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own.
Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He
found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went
moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when
he returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetry gave him
‘Laodamia,’ and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is.
Nature gave him ‘Martha Ray’ and ‘Peter Bell,’ and the address to
Mr. Wilkinson’s spade.Cyril. I think that view might be questioned. I am rather
inclined to believe in ‘the impulse from a vernal wood,’ though of
course the artistic value of such an impulse depends entirely on
the kind of temperament that receives it, so that the return to
Nature would come to mean simply the advance to a great
personality. You would agree with that, I fancy. However, proceed
with your article.Vivian (reading). ‘Art
begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and
pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This
is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new
wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes
life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it
in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents,
imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the
impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal
treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and
drives Art out into the wilderness. That is the true decadence, and
it is from this that we are now suffering.
‘Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of
the monks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological.
Then she enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life’s
external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose
sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose
joys were keener than lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans
and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins,
monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them she gave a language
different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant
music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or made
delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and
enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange
raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world
rose from its marble tomb. A new Cæsar stalked through the streets
of risen Rome, and with purple sail and flute-led oars another
Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch. Old myth and legend and
dream took shape and substance. History was entirely re-written,
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 mode of over-emphasis.
‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in
Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by
the gradual breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by
the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance
assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare—and they
are many—where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated,
fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for an
echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful
style, through which alone should life be suffered to find
expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He
is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s natural
utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative
medium she surrenders everything. Goethe says,
somewhere—In der Beschränkung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,
“It is in working within limits that the master reveals
himself,” and the limitation, the very condition of any art is
style. However, we need not linger any longer over Shakespeare’s
realism.The Tempestis the most
perfect of palinodes. All that we desired to point out was, that
the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists
contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that,
if it drew some of its strength from using life as rough material,
it drew all its weakness from using life as an artistic method. As
the inevitable result of this substitution of an imitative for a
creative medium, this surrender of an imaginative form, we have the
modern English melodrama. The characters in these plays talk on the
stage exactly as they would talk off it; they have neither
aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life and
reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present
the gait, manner, costume and accent of real people; they would
pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage. And yet how
wearisome the plays are! They do not succeed in producing even that
impression of reality at which they aim, and which is their only
reason for existing. As a method, realism is a complete
failure.
‘What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true
about those arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole
history of these arts in 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 aërial 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
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