The English Renaissance of Art By Oscar Wilde
The English Renaissance of Art
By Oscar Wilde
Reprinted
from Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde, London: Methuen and Co., 1908.
'The
English Renaissance of Art' was delivered as a lecture for the first time in
the Chickering Hall, New York, on January 9, 1882 A portion of it was reported in
the New York Tribune on the following day and in other American papers
subsequently. Since then this portion has been reprinted, more or less accurately,
from time to time, in unauthorised editions.
There
are in existence no less than four copies of the lecture, the earliest of which
is entirely in the author's handwriting. The others ore typewritten and contain
many corrections and additions made by the author in manuscript. These have all
been collated and the text here given contains, as nearly as possible, the
lecture in its original form as delivered by the author during his tour in the United States.
AMONG the many
debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty of Goethe is that he was
the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the most concrete possible, to
realise it, I mean, always in its .special manifestations. So, in the lecture
which I have the honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any
abstract definition of beauty--any such universal formula for it as was sought
for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century--still less to communicate to
you that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a
particular picture or poem effects us with a unique and special joy; but rather
to point out to you the general idea which characterise the great English
Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as far as that is
possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is possible.
I
call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the
spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in
its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical
beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for
poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I
call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expression of
beauty.
It
has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought, and again as a
mere revival of mediaeval feeling. Rather I would say that to these forms of
the human spirit it has added whatever of artistic value the intricacy and
complexity and experience of modern life can give: taking from the one its
clearness of vision and its sustained calm, from the other its variety of
expression and the mystery of its vision. For what, as Goethe said, is the
study of the ancients but a return to the real world (for that is what they
did); and what, said Mazzini, is mediaevalism but individuality?
It
is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of purpose,
its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the intensified
individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs the
art of the nineteenth century in England, as from the marriage of Faust and
Helen of Troy sprang the beautiful boy Euphorion.
Such
expressions as 'classical' and 'romantic' are, it is true, often apt to become
the mere catch. words of schools. .We must always remember that art has only
one sentence to utter: there is fur her only one high law, the law of form or
harmony--yet between the classical and romantic spirit we may say that there
lies this difference at least that the one deals with the type and the other
with the exception. In the work produced under the modern romantic spirit it is
no longer the permanent, the essential truths of life that are treated of; it
is the momentary situation of the one, the momentary aspect of the other that
art seeks to render. In sculpture, which is the type of one spirit, the subject
predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the type of the other,
the situation predominates over the subject.
There
are two spirits, then: the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of romance may be
taken as forming the essential elements of our conscious intellectual
tradition, of our permanent standard of taste. As regards their origin, in art
as in politics there is but one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the
part of man for a nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of
expression. Yet, I think that in estimating the sensuous and intellectual
spirit which presides over our English Renaissance, any attempt to isolate it
in any way from the progress and movement and social life of the age that has
produced it would be to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its
true meaning. And in disengaging from the put-quits and passions of this
crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do with art and
the love of art, we must take into account many great events of history which
seem to be the most opposed to any such artistic feeling.
Alien
then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh voice of a rude people
in revolt, as our English Renaissance must seem, in its passionate cult of pure
beauty, its flawless devotion to form, its exclusive and sensitive nature, it
is to the French Revolution that we must look for the most primary factor of
its production, the first condition of its birth: that great Revolution of
which we are all the children though the voices of some of us be often loud
against it; that Revolution to which at a time when even such spirits as
Coleridge and Wordsworth lost heart in England, noble messages of love blown
across seas came from your young Republic.
It
is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has shown us that
neither in politics nor in nature are there revolution ever but evolutions
only, and that the prelude to that wild storm which swept over France in 1789
and made every king in Europe tremble for his throne, was first sounded in
literature years before the Bastille fell and the Palace was taken. The way for
those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by that critical spirit of Germany
and England
which accustomed men to bring all things to the test of reason or utility or
both, while the discontent of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that followed the life of
Emile and of Werther. For Rousseau, by silent lake and mountain, had called
humanity back to the golden age that still lies before us and preached a return
to nature, in passionate eloquence whose music still lingers about our keen
northern air. And Goethe and Scott had brought romance back again from the
prison she had lain in for so many centuries--and what is romance but humanity?
Yet
in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and terror of that wild
time, tendencies were hidden away that the artistic Renaissance bent to her own
service when the time came--a scientific tendency first, which has borne in our
own day a brood of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in the sphere of poetry has not
been unproductive of good. I do not mean merely in its adding to enthusiasm
that intellectual basis which is its strength, or that more obvious influence
about which Wordsworth was thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was
merely the impassioned expression in the face of science, and that when science
would put on a form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to
aid the transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and
deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and Swinburne
its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the artistic spirit in
preserving that close observation and the sense of limitation as well as of
clearness of vision which are the characteristics of the real artist.
The
great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake, is that
the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more perfect is the
work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is the evidence of weak
imitation, plagiarism and bungling. 'Great inventors in all ages knew
this--Michael Angelo and Albert Durer are known by this and by this alone'; and
another time he wrote, with all the simple directness of nineteenth-century
prose, 'to generalise is to be an idiot.'
And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this
artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of
the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as
of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and
romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty abstractions of our own
eighteenth-century poets anti of the classical dramatists of France, or of the
vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that
spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great
Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving
wings and fire to the eagle-like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of
philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day,
bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the
school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of transcendentalism alien to
the spirit of art. For the artist can accept no sphere of life in exchange for
life itself. For him there is no escape from the bondage of the earth: there is
not even the desire of escape.He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms most clearly to the perfect facts of physical life.
'The storm of revolution,' as Andre Chenier said, 'blows out the torch of poetry.' It is not for some little time that the real influence of such a wild cataclysm of things is felt: at first the desire for equality seems to have produced personalities of more giant and Titan stature than the world had ever known before. Men heard the lyre of Byron and the legions of Napoleon; it was a period of measureless passions and of measureless despair; ambition, discontent, were the chords of life and art; the age was an age of revolt: a phase through which the human spirit must pass, but one in which it cannot rest. For the aim of culture is not rebellion but peace, the valley perilous where ignorant armies clash by night being no dwelling-place meet for her to whom the gods have assigned the fresh uplands and sunny heights and clear, untroubled air.
And soon that desire for perfection, which la, at the base of the Revolution, found in a young English poet its most complete and flawless realisation.
Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England.
Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak.
Blake had indeed, before him, claimed for art a lofty, spiritual mission, and had striven to raise design to the ideal level of poetry and music, but the remoteness of his vision both in painting and poetry and the incompleteness of his technical powers had been adverse to any real influence. It is in Keats that the artistic spirit of this century first found its absolute incarnation.
And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths of the British public what is the meaning of the word aesthetics, they will tell you it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado; and if you inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will hear something about an eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness in drawing were the chief objects of art. To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education.
As regards the pre-Raphaelites the story is simple enough. In the year 1847 a number of young men in London, poets and painters, passionate admirers of Keats all of them, formed the habit of meeting together for discussions on art, the result of such discussions being that the English Philistine public was roused suddenly from its ordinary apathy by hearing that there was in its midst a body of young men who had determined to revolutionise English painting and poetry. They called themselves the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In England, then as now, it was enough for a man to try and produce any serious beautiful work; to lose all his rights as a citizen; and besides this, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-- among whom the names of Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais will be familiar to you--had on their side three things that the English public never forgives: youth, power and enthusiasm.
Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful and as impotent as it is insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius --doing, here as always, infinite harm to the public, blinding them to what is beautiful, teaching them that irreverence which is the source of all vileness and narrowness of life, but harming the artist not at all, rather confirming him in the perfect rightness of his work; and ambition. For to disagree with three fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt.
As regards the ideas these young men brought to the regeneration of English art, we may see at the base of their artistic creations a desire for a deeper spiritual value to be given to art as well as a more decorative value.
Pre-Raphaelites they called themselves; not that they imitated the early Italian masters at all, but that in their work, as opposed to the facile abstractions of Raphael, they found a stronger realism of imagination, a more careful realism of technique, a vision at once more fervent and more vivid, an individuality more intimate and more intense.
For it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the aesthetic demands of its age: there must be also about it, if it is to affect us with any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality, an individuality remote from that of ordinary men, and coming near to us only by virtue of a certain newness and wonder in the work, and through channels whose very strangeness makes us more ready to give them welcome.
La
personnalité
said one of the greatest of modern French critics, voilà ce qui nous sauvera.
But
above all things was it a return to Nature --that formula which seems to suit
so many and such diverse movements: they would draw and paint nothing but what
they saw, they would try and imagine things as they really happened. Later
there came to the old house by Blackfriars Bridge, where this young brotherhood
used to meet and work, two young men from Oxford, Edward Burne-Jones and
William Morris --the latter substituting for the simpler realism of the early
days a more exquisite spirit of choice, a more faultless devotion to beauty, a
more intense seeking for perfection: a master of all exquisite design and of
all spiritual vision. It is of the school of Florence rather than of that of
Venice that he is kinsman, feeling that the close imitation of Nature is a
disturbing clement in imaginative art. The visible aspect of modern life disturbs
him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that is beautiful in
Greek;, Italian, and Celtic legend. To Morris we owe poetry whose perfect
precision and clearness of word and vision has not been excelled in the
literature of our country, and by the revival of the decorative arts he has
given to our individualised romantic movement the social idea and the social
factor also.
But
the revolution accomplished by this clique of young men, with Ruskin's
faultless and fervent eloquence to help them, was not one of ideas merely but
of execution, not one of conceptions but of creations.
For
the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been eras
not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new technical
improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the
purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of
Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified v vitality of
action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor
working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose coloured granite of the
desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school began with the
introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music
has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an
increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim.
The critic may try and trace the deferred resolutions of Beethoven * to some
sense of the incompleteness of the modern intellectual spirit, but the artist
would have answered, as one of them did afterwards, 'Let them pick out the
fifths and leave us at peace.
* As an instance
of the inaccuracy of published reports of this lecture, it may be mentioned
that all unauthorized versions give this passage as The artist may trace the
depressed revolution of Bunthorne simply to the lack of technical means!
And
so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade,
the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate
alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will find in
Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol
and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may
blow the music of their many messages.
And
so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction against
the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous poetry and
painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by
a far greater splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than
English imaginative art has shown before In Rossetti's poetry and the poetry of
Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision and choice of language, a
style flawless and fearless, a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and
a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to
that value which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the
romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic note was
struck by Théophile Gautier's advice to the young poet to read his dictionary
every day, as being the only book worth a poet's reading.
While,
then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated and discovered to
have in itself incommunicable and eternal qualities of its own, qualities
entirely satisfying to the poetic sense and not needing for their aesthetic
effect any lofty intellectual vision, any deep criticism of life or even any
passionate human emotion at all, the spirit and the method of the poet's
working--what people call his inspiration--have not escaped the controlling
influence of the artistic spirit. Not that the imagination has lost its wings,
but we have accustomed ourselves to count their innumerable pulsations, to
estimate their limitless strength, to govern their ungovernable freedom.
To
the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production, and the places
occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness in any artistic work, had
a peculiar fascination. We find it in the mysticism of Plato and in the
rationalism of Aristotle. We find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating
the minds of such men as Leonardo da Vinci. Schiller tried to adjust the
balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the position of self
consciousness in art. Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'emotion remembered
in tranquillity' may be taken as an analysis of one of the stages through which
all imaginative work has to pass; and in Keats's longing to be 'able to compose
without this fever' (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to substitute
for poetic ardour 'a more thoughtful and quiet power,' we may discern the most
important moment in the evolution of that artistic life. The question made an
early and strange appearance in your literature too; and I need not remind you
how deeply the young poets of the French romantic movement were excited and
stirred by Edgar Allan Poe's analysis of the workings of his own imagination in
the creating of that supreme imaginative work which we know by the name of The
Raven.
In
the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had intruded to
such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to poetry, it was against the
claims of the understanding that an artist like Goethe had to protest. 'The
more incomprehensible to the understanding a poem is the better for it, he said
once, asserting the complete supremacy of the imagination in poetry as of
reason in prose. But in this century it is rather against the claims of the
emotional faculties, the claims of mere sentiment and feeling, that the artist
must react. The simple utterance of joy is not poetry any more than a mere
personal cry of pain, and the real experiences of the artist are always those
which do not find their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed into
some artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the farthest
removed and the most alien.
'The
heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains poetry,' says Charles
Baudelaire. This too was the lesson that Théophile Gautier, most subtle of all
modern critics, most fascinating of all modern poets, was never tired of
teaching --'Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a sunset.' The absolute
distinction of the artist is not his capacity to feel nature so much as his
power of rendering it. The entire subordination of all intellectual and
emotional faculties to the vital and informing poetic principle is the surest
sign of the strength of our Renaissance.
We
have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful and technical
sphere of language, the sphere of expression as opposed to subject then
controlling the imagination of the poet in dealing with his subject. And now I
would point out to you its operation in the choice of subject. The recognition
of a separate realm for the artist, a consciousness of the absolute difference
between the world of art and the world of real fact, between classic grace and
absolute reality, forms not merely the essential element of any aesthetic charm
but is the characteristic of all great imaginative work and of all great eras
of artistic creation - of the age of Phidias as of the age of Michael Angelo, of
the age of Sophocles as of the age of Goethe.
Art
never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day:
rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.
For to most of us the real life is the life we do not lead, and thus, remaining
more true to the essence of its own perfection, more jealous of its own
unattainable beauty, is less likely to forget form in feeling or to accept the
passion of creation as any substitute for the beauty of the created thing.
The
artist is indeed the child of his own age, but the present will not be to him a
whit more real than the past; for, like the philosopher of the Platonic vision,
the poet is the spectator of all time and of all existence. For him no form is
obsolete, 210 subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the
world has known, in desert of Judaea or in Arcadian valley, by the rivers of
Troy or the rivers of Damascus, in the crowded and hideous streets of a modern
city or by the pleasant ways of Camelot--all lies before him like an open
scroll, all is still instinct with beautiful life. He will take of it what is
salutary for his own spirit, no more; choosing some facts and rejecting others
with the calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of
beauty.
There
is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but all things
are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the
true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives
pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He can steep
himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social problems of his day,
poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency, and the like;
but when he writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it,
with his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a
lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron Wordsworth had
it not. In the work of both these men there is much that we have to reject,
much that does not give us that sense of calm and perfect repose which should
be the effect of all fine, imaginative work But in Keats it seemed to have been
incarnate, and in his lovely Ode on a Grecian Urn it found its most
secure and faultless expression; in the pageant of the Earthly Paradise
and the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note.
It
is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion note
as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and TO
LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor
are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of
Castaly dry. For art is very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is
absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr. Swinburne
insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more actual and real than
Wellington, not merely more noble and interesting as a type and figure but more
positive and real.
Literature
must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle
at all. For to the poet all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with
is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present
preferable. The steam whistle will not affright him nor the flutes of Arcadia
weary him: for him there is but one time, the artistic moment; but one law, the
law of form; but one land, the land of Beauty--a land removed indeed from the real
world and yet more sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm
which dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which comes not from
the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm which despair and
sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only. And so it comes that he who seems to
stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has
stripped life of what is accidental and transitory, stripped it of that 'mist
of familiarity which makes life obscure to us.'
Those
strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of ecstasy, those
mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the secret of the earth and
the burden of mystery, that guard and glorify the chapel of Pope Sixtus at Rome
--do they not tell us more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of
the dream of Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors
and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of the history
of Holland?
And
so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the nineteenth
century--the democratic and pantheistic tendency and the tendency to value life
for the sake of art--found their most complete and perfect utterance in the
poetry of Shelley and Keats who, to the blind eyes of their own time, seemed to
be as wanderers in the wilderness, preachers of vague or unreal things. And I
remember once, in talking to Mr. Burne-Jones about modern science, his saying
to me, 'the more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint:
their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul.'
But
these are the intellectual speculations that underlie art. Where in the arts
themselves are we to find that breadth of human sympathy which is the condition
of all noble work; where in the arts are we to look for what Mazzini would call
the social ideas as opposed to the merely personal ideas? By virtue of what
claim do I demand for the artist the love and loyalty of the men and women of
the world? I think I can answer that.
Whatever
spiritual message an artist brings to his aid is a matter for his own soul. He
may bring judgment like Michael Angelo or peace like Angelico; he may come with
mourning like the great Athenian or with mirth like the singer of Sicily; nor
is it for us to do aught but accept his teaching, knowing that we cannot smite
the bitter lips of Leopardi into laughter or burden with our discontent
Goethe's serene calm. But for warrant of its truth such message must have the
flame of eloquence in the lips that speak it, splendour and glory in the vision
that is its witness, being justified by one thing only - the flawless beauty
and perfect form of its expression: this indeed being the social idea, being
the meaning of joy in art.
Not
laughter where none should laugh, nor tile calling of peace where there is no
peace; not in painting the subject ever, but the pictorial charm only, the
wonder of its colour, the satisfying beauty of its design.
You
have most of you seen, probably, that great masterpiece of Rubens which hangs
in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and wonderful pageant of horse and rider
arrested in its most exquisite and fiery moment when the winds are caught in
crimson banner and the air lit by the gleam of armour and the flash of plume.
Well, that is joy in art, though that golden hillside be trodden by the wounded
feet of Christ and it is for the death of the Son of Man that that gorgeous
cavalcade is passing.
But
this restless modern intellectual spirit of ours is not receptive enough of the
sensuous element of art; and so the real influence of the arts is hidden from
many of us: only a few, escaping from the tyranny of the soul, have learned the
secret of those high hours when thought is not.
And
this indeed is the reason of the influence which Eastern art is having on us in
Europe, and of the fascination of all Japanese work While the Western world has
been laying on art the intolerable burden of its own intellectual doubts and
the spiritual tragedy of its own sorrows, the East has always kept true to
art's primary and pictorial conditions.
In
judging of a beautiful statue the esthetic faculty is absolutely and completely
gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our
complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us. In
its primary aspect a painting has no more spiritual message or meaning than an
exquisite fragment of Venetian glass or a blue tile from the wall of Damascus:
it is a beautifully coloured surface, nothing more. The channels by which all
noble imaginative work in painting should touch, and do touch the soul, are not
those of the truths of life, nor metaphysical truths. But that pictorial charm
which does not depend on any literary reminiscence for its effect on the one
hand, nor is yet a mere result of communicable technical skill on the other,
comes of a certain inventive and creative handling of colour. Nearly always in
Dutch painting and often in the works of Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely
independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and
choice in workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the
Greeks would say) an end in itself.
And
so in poetry too, the real poetical quality, the .joy of poetry, comes never
from the subject but from an inventive handling of rhythmical language, from
what Keats called the 'sensuous life of verse.' The element of song in the
singing accompanied by the profound joy of motion, is so sweet that, while the
incomplete lives of ordinary men bring no healing power with them, the
thorn-crown of the poet will blossom into roses for our pleasure; for our
delight his despair will gild its own thorns, and his pain, like Adonis, be
beautiful in its agony; and when the poet's heart breaks it will break in music.
And
health in art--what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane criticism of
life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there is in [Kingsley]. Health is
the artist's recognition of the limitations of the form in which he works. It
is the honour and the homage which he gives to the material he uses--whether it
be language with its glories, or marble or pigment with their glories--knowing
that the true brotherhood of the arts consists not in their borrowing one
another's method, but in their producing, each of them by its own individual
means, each of them by keeping its objective limits, the same unique artistic
delight. The delight is like that given to us by music--for music is the art in
which form and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be separated
from the method of its expression, the art which most completely realises the
artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly
aspiring.
And
criticism--what place is that to have in our culture? Well, I think that the
first duty of an art critic is to hold his tongue at all times, and upon all
subjects: C' est un grand avantage de n'avoir rien fait, mais il ne faut
pas, en abuser.
It
is only through the mystery of creation that one can gain any knowledge of the
quality of created things. You have listened to Patience for a hundred
nights and you have heard me for one only. It will make, no doubt, that satire
more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it, but you must not
judge of estheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert. As little should you judge
of the strength and splendour of sun or sea by the dust that dances in the
beam, or the bubble that breaks on the wave, as take your critic for any sane
test of art. For the artists, like the Greek gods, are revealed only to one
another, as Emerson says somewhere; their real value and place time only can
show. In this respect also omnipotence is with the ages. The true critic
addresses not the artist ever but the public only. His work lies with them. Art
can never have any other claim but her own perfection: it is for the critic to
create for art the social aim, too, by teaching the people the spirit in which
they are to approach all artistic work the love they are to give it, the lesson
they are to draw from it.
All
these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern progress and
civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the voice of humanity,
these appeals to art 'to have a mission,' are appeals which should be made to
the public. The art which has fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled
all conditions: it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the
calm of such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions. 'I
have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for anything in existence
but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty.'
Such
then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and underlying our English
Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful, productive of strong
ambitions and lofty personalties, yet for all its splendid achievements in
poetry and in the decorative arts and in painting, for all the increased
comeliness and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the like, not
complete. For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful national
life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that; no great drama
without a noble national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed
that too.
It
is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of the
modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with the fire of romantic
passion--the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici show us that -
but it is that, as Théophile Gautier used to say, the visible world is dead, le
monde visible a disparu.
Nor
is it again that the novel has killed the play, us some critics would persuade
us--the romantic movement of France shows us that. The work of Balzac and of
Hugo grew up side by side together; nay, more, were complementary, to each
other, though neither of them saw it. While all other forms of poetry may
flourish in an ignoble age, the splendid individualism of the lyrist, fed by
its own passion, and lit by its own power, may pass as a pillar of fire as well
across the desert as across places that are pleasant. It is none the less
glorious though no man follow it--nay, by the greater sublimity of its
loneliness it may be quickened into loftier utterance and intensified into
clearer song. From the mean squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the
dreamer or the idyllist may soar on poesy's viewless wings, may traverse with
fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithaeron though Faun and Bassarid
dance there no more. Like Keats he may wander through the old world forests of
Latmos, or stand like Morris on the galley's deck with the Viking when king and
galley have long since passed away. But the drama is the meeting-plate of art
and life; it deals, as Mazzini said, Dot merely with man, but with social man,
with man in his relation to God and to Humanity. It is the product of a period
of great national united energy; it is impossible without a noble public, and
belongs to such ages as the age of Elizabeth in London and of Pericles at
Athens; it is part of such lofty moral and spiritual ardour as came to Greek
after the defeat of the Persian fleet, and to Englishman after the wreck of the
Armada of Spain.
Shelley
felt how incomplete our movement was in this respect, and has shown in one
great tragedy by what terror and pity he would have purified our age; but in
spite of The Cenci the drama is one of the artistic forms through which
the genius of the England of this century seeks in vain to find outlet and
expression. He has had no worthy imitators.
It
is rather, perhaps, to you that we should turn to complete and perfect this
great movement of ours, for there is something Hellenic in your air and world,
something that has a quicker breath of the joy and power of Elizabeth's England
about it than our ancient civilisation can give us. For you, at least, are
young; 'no hungry generations tread you down,' and the past does not weary you
with the intolerable burden of its memories nor mock you with the ruins of a
beauty, the secret of whose creation you have lost. That very absence of
tradition, which Mr. Ruskin thought would rob your rivers of their laughter and
your flowers of their light, may be rather the source of your freedom and your
strength.
To
speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements
of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods
and grass by the roadside, has been defined by one of your poets as a flawless
triumph of art. It is a triumph which you above all nations may be destined to
achieve. For the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not
the chosen music of Liberty only; other messages are there in the wonder of
wind-swept height and the majesty of silent deep messages that, if you will but
listen to them, may yield you the splendour of some new imagination, the marvel
of some new beauty.
'I
foresee,' said Goethe, 'the dawn of a new literature which all people may claim
as their own, for all have contributed to its foundation.' If, then, this is
so, and if the materials for a civilisation as great as that of Europe lie all
around you, what profit, you will ask me, will all this study of our poets and
painters be to you? I might answer that the intellect can be engaged without
direct didactic object on an artistic and historical problem; that the demand
of the intellect is merely to feel itself alive; that nothing which has ever
interested men or women can cease to be a fit subject for culture.
I
might remind you of what all Europe owes to the sorrow of a single Florentine
in exile at Verona, or to the love of Petrarch by that little well in Southern
France; nay, more, how even in this dull, materialistic age the simple
expression of an old man's simple life, passed away from the clamour of great
cities amid the lakes and misty hills of Cumberland, has opened out for England
treasures of new joy compared with which the treasures of her luxury are as
barren as the sea which she has made her highway, and as bitter as the fire
which she would make her slave.
But
I think it will bring you something besides this, something that is the
knowledge of real strength in art: not that you should imitate the works of
these men; but their artistic spirit their artistic attitude, I think you
should absorb that.
For
in nations, as in individuals, if the passion for creation be not accompanied
by the critical, the aesthetic faculty also, it will be sure to waste its
strength aimlessly, failing perhaps in the artistic spirit of choice, or in the
mistaking of feeling for form, or in the following of false ideals.
For
the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural affinity with
certain sensuous forms of art--and to discern the qualities of each art, to
intensify as well its limitations as its powers of expression, is one of the
aims that culture sets before us. It is not an increased moral sense, an
increased moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should
never talk of a moral or an immoral poem--poems are either well written or
badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals or implied
reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often a sign of a certain
incompleteness of vision, often a note of discord in the harmony of au
imaginative creation; for all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We
must be careful, said Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in
what is obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon
as we are aware of it.
But,
as in your cities so in your literature, it is a permanent canon and standard
of taste, an increased sensibility to beauty (if I may say so) that is lacking.
All noble work is not national merely, but universal. The political
independence of a nation must not be confused with any intellectual isolation.
The spiritual freedom, indeed, your own generous lives and liberal air will
give you. From us you will learn the classical restraint of form.
For
all great art is delicate art, roughness having very little to do with
strength, and harshness very little to do with power. 'The artist,' as Mr.
Swinburne says, 'must be perfectly articulate.'
This
limitation is for the artist perfect freedom: it is at once the origin and the
sign of his strength. So that all the supreme masters of style--Dante,
Sophocles, Shakespeare--are the supreme masters of spiritual and intellectual
vision also.
Love
art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will be added to you.
This
devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful things is the test of all
great civilised nations. Philosophy may teach us to bear with equanimity the
misfortunes of our neighbours, and science resolve the moral sense into a
secretion of sugar, but art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament
and not a speculation, art is what makes the life of the whole race immortal.
For
beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like
sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of autumn; but
what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity.
Wars
and the clash of armies and the meeting of men in battle by trampled field or
leaguered city, and the rising of nations there must always be. But I think
that art, by creating a common intellectual atmosphere between all countries,
might--if it could not overshadow the world with the silver wings of peace--at
least make men such brothers that they would not go out to slay one another for
the whim or folly of some king or minister, as they do in Europe. Fraternity
would come no more with the hands of Cain, nor Liberty betray freedom with the
kiss of Anarchy; for national hatreds are always strongest where culture is
lowest.
'How
could I?' said Goethe, when reproached for not writing like Körner against the
French. 'How could 1, to whom barbarism and culture alone are of importance,
hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth, a nation to
which I owe a great part of my own cultivation?'
Mighty
empires, too, there must always be as long as personal ambition and the spirit
of the age are one, but art at least is the only empire which a nation's
enemies cannot take from her by conquest, but which is taken by submission
only. The sovereignty of Greece and Rome is not yet passed away, though the
gods of the one be dead and the eagles of the other tired.
And
we in our Renaissance are seeking to create a sovereignty that will still be
England's when her yellow leopards have grown weary of wars and the rose of her
shield is crimsoned no more with the blood of battle; and you, too, absorbing
into the generous heart of a great people this pervading artistic spirit, will
create for yourselves such riches as you have never yet created, though your
land be a network of railways and your cities the harbours for the galleys of
the world.
I
know, indeed, that the divine natural pre-science of beauty which is the
inalienable inheritance of Greek and Italian is not our inheritance. For such
an informing and presiding spirit of art to shield us from all harsh and alien
influences, we of the Northern races must turn rather to that strained
self-consciousness of our age which, as it is the key-note of all our romantic
art, must be the source of all or nearly all our culture. I mean that
intellectual curiosity of the nineteenth century which is always looking for
the secret of the life that still lingers round old and bygone forms of
culture. It takes from each what is serviceable for the modern spirit --from
Athens its wonder without its worship, from Venice its splendour without its
sin. The same spirit is always analysing its own strength and its own weakness,
counting what it owes to East and to West, to the olive-trees of Colonus and to
the palm-trees of Lebanon, to Gethsemane and to the garden of Proserpine.
And
yet the truths of art cannot be taught: they are revealed only, revealed to
natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful impressions by
the study and worship of all beautiful things. And hence the enormous
importance given to the decorative arts in our English Renaissance; hence all that
marvel of design that comes from the hand of Edward Burne-Jones, all that
weaving of tapestry and staining of glass, that beautiful working in clay and
metal and wood which we owe to William Morris, the greatest handicraftsmen we
have had in England since the fourteenth century.
So,
in years to come there will be nothing in any man's house which has not given
delight to its maker And does not give delight to its user. The children, like
the children of Plato's perfect city, will grow up 'in a simple atmosphere of
all fair things'--I quote from the passage in the Republic - 'a simple
atmosphere of all fair things, where beauty, which is the spirit of art, will
come on eye and ear like a fresh breath of wind that brings health from a clear
upland, and insensibly and gradually draw the child's soul into harmony with
all knowledge and all wisdom, so that he will love what is beautiful and good,
and hate what is evil and ugly (for they always go together) long before he
knows the reason why; and then when reason comes will kiss her on the cheek as
a friend.'
That
is what Plato thought decorative art could do for a nation, feeling that the
secret not of philosophy merely but of all gracious existence might be externally
hidden from any one whose youth had been passed in uncomely and vulgar
surroundings, and that the beauty of form and colour even, as he says, in the
meanest vessels of the house, will find its way into the inmost places of the
soul and lead the boy naturally to look for that divine harmony of spiritual
life of which art was to him the material symbol and warrant.
Prelude
indeed to all knowledge and all wisdom will this love of beautiful things be
for us; yet there are times when wisdom becomes a burden and knowledge is one
with sorrow: for as every body has its
shadow so every soul has its scepticism.
In such dread moments of discord and despair where should we, of this
torn and troubled age, turn our steps if not to that secure house of beauty where
there is always a little forgetfulness, always a great joy; to that città divina, as the old Italian heresy
called it, the divine city where one can stand, though only for a brief moment,
apart from the division and terror of the world and the choice of the world
too?
This
is that consolation des arts which is
the key-note of Gautier's poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed – as indeed
what in our century is not? - by Goethe.
You remember what he said to the German people: 'Only have the courage,' he said, 'to give
yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved,
elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something great.' The courage to give yourselves up to your
impressions: yes, that is the secret of the artistic life - for while art has been
defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather
from the tyranny of the soul. But only
to those who worship her above all things does she ever reveal her true treasure: else will she be as powerless to aid you as
the mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical nature
of Heine.
And
indeed I think it would be impossible to overrate the gain that might follow if
we had about us only what gave pleasure to the maker of it and gives pleasure
to its user, that being the simplest of all rules about decoration. One thing, at least, I think it would do for
us: there is no surer test of a great
country than how near it stands to its own poets; but between the singers of
our day and the workers to whom they would sing there seems to be an ever-widening
and dividing chasm, a chasm which slander and mockery cannot traverse, but
which is spanned by the luminous wings of love.
And
of such love I think that the abiding presence in our houses of noble
imaginative work would be the surest seed and preparation. I do not mean merely as regards that direct
literary expression of art by which, from the little red-and-black cruse of oil
or wine, a Greek boy could learn of the lionlike splendour of Achilles, of the strength
of Hector and the beauty of Paris and the wonder of Helen, long before he stood
and listened in crowded market-place or in theatre of marble; or by which an
Italian child of the fifteenth century could know of the chastity of Lucrece
and the death of Camilla from carven doorway and from painted chest. For the good we get from art is not what we
learn from it; it is what we become through it.
Its real influence will be in giving the mind that enthusiasm which is
the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to demand from art all that art can do
in rearranging the facts of common life for us - whether it be by giving the
most spiritual interpretation of one's own moments of highest passion or the
most sensuous expression of those thoughts that are the farthest removed from
sense; in accustoming it to love the things of the imagination for their own
sake, and to desire beauty and grace in all things. For he who does not love
art in all things does not love it at all, and he who does not need art in all
things does not need it at all.
I
will not dwell here on what I am sure has delighted you all in our great Gothic
cathedrals. I mean how the artist of
that time, handicraftsman himself in stone or glass, found the best motives for
his art, always ready for his hand and always beautiful, in the daily work of
the artificers he saw around him - as in those lovely windows of Chartres -
where the dyer dips in the vat and the potter sits at the wheel, and the weaver
stands at the loom: real manufacturers
these, workers with the hand, and entirely delightful to look at, not like the
smug and vapid shopman of our time, who knows nothing of the web or vase he
sells, except that he is charging you double its value and thinking you a fool
for buying it. Nor can I but just note,
in passing, the immense influence the decorative work of Greece and Italy had
on its artists, the one teaching the sculptor that restraining influence of
design which is the glory of the Parthenon, the other keeping painting always
true to its primary, pictorial condition of noble colour which is the secret of
the school of Venice; for I wish rather, in this lecture at least, to dwell on
the effect that decorative art has on human life - on its social not its purely
artistic effect.
There
are two kinds of men in the world, two great creeds, two different forms of
natures: men to whom the end of life is
action, and men to whom the end of life is thought. As regards the latter, who seek for
experience itself and not for the fruits of experience, who must burn always with
one of the passions of this fiery-coloured world, who find life interesting not
for its secret but for its situations, for its pulsations and not for its purpose;
the passion for beauty engendered by the decorative arts will be to them more
satisfying than any political or religious enthusiasm, any enthusiasm for
humanity, any ecstasy or sorrow for love.
For art comes to one professing primarily to give nothing but the highest
quality to one's moments, and for those moments' sake. So far for those to whom the end of life is
thought. As regards the others, who hold
that life is inseparable from labour, to them should this movement be specially
dear: for, if our days are barren
without industry, industry without art is barbarism.
Hewers
of wood and drawers of water there must be always indeed among us. Our modern machinery has not much lightened
the labour of man after all: but at
least let the pitcher that stands by the well be beautiful and surely the
labour of the day will be lightened: let
the wood be made receptive of some lovely form, some gracious design, and there
will come no longer discontent but joy to the toiler. For what is decoration but the worker's expression
of joy in his work? And not joy merely -
that is a great thing yet not enough - but that opportunity of expressing his own
individuality which, as it is the essence of all life, is the source of all
art. 'I have tried,' I remember William
Morris saying to me once, 'I have tried to make each of my workers an artist,
and when I say an artist I mean a man.'
For the worker then, handicraftsman of whatever kind he is, art is no
longer to be a purple robe woven by a slave and thrown over the whitened body
of a leprous king to hide and to adorn the sin of his luxury, but rather the
beautiful and noble expression of a life that has in it something beautiful and
noble.
And
so you must seek out your workman and give him, as far as possible, the right
surroundings, for remember that the real test and virtue of a workman is not his
earnestness nor his industry even, but his power of design merely; and that
'design is not the offspring of idle fancy:
it is the studied result of accumulative observation and delightful
habit.' All the teaching in the world is
of no avail if you do not surround your workman with happy influences and with
beautiful things. It is impossible for
him to have right ideas about colour unless he sees the lovely colours of Nature
unspoiled; impossible for him to supply beautiful incident and action unless he
sees beautiful incident and action in the world about him.
For
to cultivate sympathy you must be among living things and thinking about them,
and to cultivate admiration you must be among beautiful things and looking at
them. 'The steel of Toledo and the silk
of Genoa did but give strength to oppression and lustre to pride,' as Mr.
Ruskin says; let it be for you to create an art that is made by the hands of
the people for the joy of the people, to please the hearts of the people, too;
an art that will be your expression of your delight in life. There is nothing 'in common life too mean, in
common things too trivial to be ennobled by your touch'; nothing in life that
art cannot sanctify.
You
have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the aesthetic
movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of
some aesthetic young men. Well, let me
tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what
Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in
England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for
decorative art - the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious
loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect
joy. And so with you: let there be no flower in your meadows that
does not wreathe its tendrils around your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan
forests that does not lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or
brier that does not live for ever in carven arch or window or marble, no bird
in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its colour, the
exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more precious the preciousness
of simple adornment. For the voices that
have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not the chosen music of liberty
only. Other messages are there in the
wonder of wind-swept heights and the majesty of silent deep—messages that, if
you will listen to them, will give you the wonder of all new imagination, the
treasure of all new beauty.
We
spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.
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