THE TEMPEST is the most perfect of palinodes.All that we desired to point out was,that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution,and that,if it drew some of its strength from using life as rough material,it drew all its weakness from using life as an artistic method.As the inevitable result of this substitution of an imitative for a creative medium,this surrender of an imaginative form,we have the modern English melodrama.The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it;they have neither aspirations nor aspirates;they are taken directly from life and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail;they present the gait,manner,costume and accent of real people;they would pass unnoticed in a 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 aerial effects,its elaborate perspective,its broad expanses of waste sky,its faithful and laborious realism,has no beauty whatsoever.The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable.We are beginning to weave possible carpets in England,but only because we have returned to the method and spirit of the East.Our rugs and carpets of twenty years ago,with their solemn depressing truths,their inane worship of Nature,their sordid reproductions of visible objects,have become,even to the Philistine,a source of laughter.A cultured Mahomedan once remarked to us,"You Christians are so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of making an artistic application of the second."He was perfectly right,and the whole truth of the matter is this:The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.'
And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the question very completely.
'It was not always thus.We need not say anything about the poets,for they,with the unfortunate exception of Mr.Wordsworth,have been really faithful to their high mission,and are universally recognised as being absolutely unreliable.But in the works of Herodotus,who,in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modem sciolists to verify his history,may justly be called the "Father of Lies";in the published speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius;in Tacitus at his best;in Pliny's NATURAL HISTORY;in Hanno's PERIPLUS;in all the early chronicles;in the Lives of the Saints;in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory;in the travels of Marco Polo;in Olaus Magnus,and Aldrovandus,and Conrad Lycosthenes,with his magnificent PRODIGIORUM ET OSTENTORUMCHRONICON;in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini;in the memoirs of Casanova;in Defoe's HISTORY OF THE PLAGUE;in Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON;in Napoleon's despatches,and in the works of our own Carlyle,whose FRENCH REVOLUTION is one of the most fascinating historical novels ever written,facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position,or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness.Now,everything is changed.Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history,but they are usurping the domain of Fancy,and have invaded the kingdom of Romance.Their chilling touch is over everything.They are vulgarising mankind.The crude commercialism of America,its materialising spirit,its indifference to the poetical side of things,and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals,are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who,according to his own confession,was incapable of telling a lie,and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm,and in a shorter space of time,than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.'
CYRIL.My dear boy!
