Pater dwells,that makes music the type of all the arts.Of course,nations and individuals,with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of existence,are always under the impression that it is of them that the Muses are talking,always trying to find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions,always forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo but Marsyas.Remote from reality,and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave,Art reveals her own perfection,and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the marvellous,many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it,its own spirit that is finding expression in a new form.But it is not so.The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit,and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art,or from any lofty passion,or from any great awakening of the human consciousness.She develops purely on her own lines.She is not symbolic of any age.It is the ages that are her symbols.
Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place and people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is,the less it represents to us the spirit of its age.The evil faces of the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work,and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire.But it was not so.The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supreme civilisation,any more than the virtues of the Antonines could save it.It fell for other,for less interesting reasons.The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the Renaissance;but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland?The more abstract,the more ideal an art is,the more it reveals to us the temper of its age.If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art,let us look at its architecture or its music.
CYRIL.I quite agree with you there.The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts,for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.Upon the other hand,for the visible aspect of an age,for its look,as the phrase goes,we must of course go to the arts of imitation.
VIVIAN.I don't think so.After all,what the imitative arts really give us are merely the various styles of particular artists,or of certain schools of artists.Surely you don't imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on mediaeval stained glass,or in mediaeval stone and wood carving,or on mediaeval metal-work,or tapestries,or illuminated MSS.They were probably very ordinary-looking people,with nothing grotesque,or remarkable,or fantastic in their appearance.The Middle Ages,as we know them in art,are simply a definite form of style,and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be produced in the nineteenth century.No great artist ever sees things as they really are.If he did,he would cease to be an artist.Take an example from our own day.I know that you are fond of Japanese things.Now,do you really imagine that the Japanese people,as they are presented to us in art,have any existence?If you do,you have never understood Japanese art at all.The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists.If you set a picture by Hokusai,or Hokkei,or any of the great native painters,beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady,you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them.The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people;that is to say,they are extremely commonplace,and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention.There is no such country,there are no such people.
One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese.All he saw,all he had the chance of painting,were a few lanterns and some fans.He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants,as his delightful exhibition at Messrs.Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only too well.He did not know that the Japanese people are,as I have said,simply a mode of style,an exquisite fancy of art.And so,if you desire to see a Japanese effect,you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio.On the contrary,you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists,and then,when you have absorbed the spirit of their style,and caught their imaginative manner of vision,you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly,and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there,you will not see it anywhere.
Or,to return again to the past,take as another instance the ancient Greeks.Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like?Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze,or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building?If you judge from the art,they certainly were so.But read an authority,like Aristophanes,for instance.
You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly,wore high-heeled shoes,dyed their hair yellow,painted and rouged their faces,and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of our own day.The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art,and art,very fortunately,has never once told us the truth.
CYRIL.But modern portraits by English painters,what of them?
Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent?
