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as opposed to self-conscious culture,the work produced under this influence is always old-fashioned,antiquated,and out of date.One touch of Nature may make the whole world kin,but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of Art.If,on the other hand,we regard Nature as the collection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 Caesar 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 Beschrankung 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.
