by Walter Pater
A wholesome dislike of the common-place, rightly or wrongly identified by him with the bourgeois, with our middle-class — its habits and tastes — leads him to protest emphatically against so-called “realism” in art; life, as he argues, with much plausibility, as a matter of fact, when it is really awake, following art — the fashion an effective artist sets; while art, on the other hand, influential and effective art, has never taken its cue from actual life. In Dorian Gray he is true certainly, on the whole, to the aesthetic philosophy of his Intentions; yet not infallibly, even on this point: there is a certain amount of the intrusion of real life and its sordid aspects — the low theatre, the pleasures and griefs, the faces of some very unrefined people, managed, of course, cleverly enough. The interlude of Jim Vane, his half-sullen but wholly faithful care for his sister’s honour, is as good as perhaps anything of the kind, marked by a homely but real pathos, sufficiently proving a versatility in the writer’s talent, which should make his books popular. Clever always, this book, however, seems intended to set forth anything but a homely philosophy of life for the middle-class — a kind of dainty Epicurean theory, rather — yet fails, to some degree, in this; and one can see why. A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man’s entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde’s hero — his heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower, organisation, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development. As a story, however, a partly supernatural story, it is first-rate in artistic management; those Epicurean niceties only adding to the decorative colour of its central figure, like so many exotic flowers, like the charming scenery, and the perpetual, epigrammatic, surprising, yet so natural, conversations, like an atmosphere all about it. All that pleasant accessory detail, taken straight from the culture, the intellectual and social interests, the conventionalities, of the moment, have, in fact, after all, the effect of the better sort of realism, throwing into relief the adroitly-devised supernatural element after the manner of Poe, but with a grace he never reached, which supersedes that earlier didactic purpose, and makes the quite sufficing interest of an excellent story.
We like the hero, and, spite of his, somewhat unsociable, devotion to his art, Hallward, better than Lord Henry Wotton. He has too much of a not very really refined world in and about him, and his somewhat cynic opinions, which seem sometimes to be those of the writer, who may, however, have intended Lord Henry as a satiric sketch. Mr. Wilde can hardly have intended him, with his cynic amity of mind and temper, any more than the miserable end of Dorian himself, to figure the motive and tendency of a true Cyrenaic or Epicurean doctrine of life. In contrast with Hallward, the artist, whose sensibilities idealise the world around him, the personality of Dorian Gray, above all, into something magnificent and strange, we might say that Lord Henry, and even more the, from the first, suicidal hero, loses too much in life to be a true Epicurean — loses so much in the way of impressions, of pleasant memories, and subsequent hopes, which Hallward, by a really Epicurean economy, manages to secure. It should be said, however, in fairness, that the writer is impersonal: seems not to have identified himself entirely with any one of his characters: and Wotton’s cynicism, or whatever it be, at least makes a very clever story possible. He becomes the spoiler of the fair young man, whose bodily form remains un-aged; while his picture, the chef d’œuvre of the artist Hallward, changes miraculously with the gradual corruption of his soul. How true, what a light on the artistic nature, is the following on actual personalities and their revealing influence in art. We quote it as an example of Mr. Wilde’s more serious style.
“I sometimes think that there are only two eras of any importance in the world’s history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second Is the appearance of new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, sketch from him. Of course I have done all that. But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won’t tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that Art cannot express it There is nothing that Art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious way his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now re-create life in a way that was hidden from me before.”
Dorian himself, though certainly a quite unsuccessful experiment in Epicureanism, in life as a fine art, is (till his inward spoiling takes visible effect suddenly, and in a moment, at the end of his story) a beautiful creation. But his story is also a vivid, though carefully considered, exposure of the corruption of a soul, with a very plain moral, pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse and ugly. General readers, nevertheless, will probably care less for this moral, less for the fine, varied, largely appreciative culture of the writer, in evidence from page to page, than for the story itself with its adroitly managed supernatural incidents, its almost equally wonderful applications of natural science; impossible, surely, in fact, but plausible enough in fiction. Its interest turns on that very old theme, old because based on some inherent experience or fancy of the human brain, of a double life: of Döppelgänger — not of two persons, in this case, but of the man and his portrait; the latter of which, as we hinted above, changes, decays, is spoiled, while the former, through a long course of corruption, remains, to the outward eye, unchanged, still in all the beauty of a seemingly immaculate youth— “the devil’s bargain.” But it would be a pity to spoil the reader’s enjoyment by further detail We need only emphasise, once more, the skill, the real subtlety of art, the ease and fluidity withal of one telling a story by word of mouth, with which the consciousness of the supernatural is introduced into, and maintained amid, the elaborately conventional, sophisticated, disabused world Mr. Wilde depicts so cleverly, so mercilessly. The special fascination of the piece is, of course, just there — at that point of contrast Mr. Wilde’s work may fairly claim to go with that of Edgar Poe, and with some good French work of the same kind, done, probably, in more or less conscious imitation of it.
MR. GEORGE MOORE AS AN ART CRITIC
DAILY CHRONICLE, JUNE 10, 1893
“Modern Painting” by George Moore. (London, Walter Scott.)
THE writer of this clever book deserves to be heard about his opinions on fine art, and especially on the somewhat vexed subject of “Modem Painting.” He deserves to be heard, because he has a right to those opinions, having taken more pains than critics of contemporary art sometimes do to know from within what he is writing about; while he writes with all the courage of opinions thus sincerely formed, so as to keep the attention of the reader fixed to the very last page. If these qualities make him a pungent critic of what he disapproves, of what he may think mistaken general tendencies in art, or of particular works in which this or that artist seems to fall below his own proper level, they make him also — those qualities of painstaking, of conviction and liveliness — a very animating guide to the things he loves, and in particular to the modern painting of France, of which we in England still know so little, though a large number of us desire to know more.
With all his French intuitiveness and gaillardise Mr. Moore is a patient teacher, knows what and how to explain to “those that are without,” and explains clearly. The persons, or professional bodies of persons whom he attacks, would, of course, have a reply; and the more permanently true, certainly the more delightful parts of his volume, at all events for the sincere lover of art, are his chapters of positive appreciation concerning the French masters of his choice — Ingres, Degras, Millet and others. Mr. Moore, at least as far as French art is concerned, is
catholic in his taste.
Mr. Moore makes so pleasant a guide to French art partly because he is in full sympathy with France — French scenery, the French character. Now the genius of Ingres is cosmopolitan, like that of those old Greek artists with whom Mr. Moore fearlessly ranks him. But Mr. Moore does not love cosmopolitanism in art; he thinks, perhaps rightly, that art is in its very nature a matter of personal, or, in its largest groupings, of national, inspiration. To be cosmopolitan, he tells us, to be one and the same at all times and places, is the somewhat doubtful privilege of science. He might urge, perhaps, in the presence of the works of Ingres, that the French are the Greeks of our contemporary world, and that with both alike a certain cosmopolitanism was, in truth, an element of national character. But then Ingres is also certainly academic, in a high degree; and Mr. Moore has no love for academies, at least in art, in regard to which territory he holds that to be something of a gipsy (it is his own figure) to have no law and no responsibilities except to one’s own native preference, is the veritable citizenship. And yet Mr. Moore really has the secret of Ingres, of that somewhat abstract, academic, cosmopolitan and uncoloured painting of which La Source is the best known example.
“Think of the learning and the love that were necessary for the accomplishment of such exquisite simplifications. Never did pencil follow an oatline with sack penetrating and unwearying passion, or clasp and enfold it with such simple and sufficient modelling. Nowhere can you detect a starting-point or a measurement taken: it seems to have grown as a beautiful tendril grows, and every curve sways as mysteriously, and the perfection seems as divine. Beside it Durer would seem crabbed and puzzle-headed; Holbein would seem angular and geometrical; Da Vinci would seem vague; and I hope that no critic by partial quotation will endeavour to prove me guilty of having said that Ingres was a greater artist than Da Vinci. I have not said any such thing: I have merely striven by aid of comparison to bring before the reader some sense of the miraculous beauty of one of Ingres’s finest pencil drawings.”
That is said of one of Ingres’s pencil drawings in the Louvre, a study for the Odalisque. How different, how unmistakably different, alike in germ and development, was the genius of Corot! Mr. Moore, with no effect of incongruity, treats of them, side by side, in a single chapter. Corot, the elusive and evanescent master of Barbizon, whose work he also values duly, loves better probably than that of the very definite and half-classic Ingres, is, however, far more difficult to write about He is ingeniously compared with Rembrandt.
“They painted with the values — that is to say, with what remains on the palette when abstraction has been made of the colouring matter — a delicate neutral tint of infinite subtlety and charm; and it is with this, the evanescent and impalpable soul of the vanished colours, that the most beautiful pictures are painted. Corot, too, is a conspicuous example of this mode of painting. His right to stand among the world’s colourists has never, so far as I know, been seriously contested, his pictures are almost void of colouring matter — a blending of grey and green, and yet the result is of a richly coloured evening.”
Corot and Rembrandt, indeed, arrived at the same goal by similar methods.
“Rembrandt told all that a golden ray falling through a darkened room awakes in a visionary brain; Corot told all that the grey light of morning and evening whispers in the pensive mind of the elegaic poet. The story told was widely different, but the manner of telling was the same. One, attenuated in the light, the other attenuated in the shadow. Both sacrificed the corners with a view of fixing the attention on the one spot in which the soul of the picture lives.”
The reader may now judge fairly of Mr. Moore’s manner of writing; may think there is something in it of the manner of the artists he writes of. It is perhaps a surprise, yet certainly of a pleasant sort, to find one who is so hard in his characterisation of what may be not ungently called “vulgar errors” in matters of art, so reverent and delicate when he comes to treat of things delicate. He seems to be really in possession of their “secret” as of Sisley also and Chavannes, of Manet, and of Monet, who with sparkling magic — or trick — paints “in a series of little dots.” He is “the only painter to whom the word impressionism may be reasonably applied.”
“Not with half-tints in which colour disappears are Monet and his school concerned, but with the brilliant vibration of colour in the full light, with open spaces, where the light is reflected back and forward, and nature is but a prism filled with dazzling and iridescent tints.”
There is much besides in this volume of considerable interest, but of which there is hardly space to speak here. In common, these chapters have certainly this merit: that, by their very conviction, their perfervid conviction, they arouse the general reader, lost perhaps in a general sleep of conventional ideas, at the very least to combat so incisive a visitor, — put up his back perhaps by a claim for unfamiliar views; challenge him to come honestly to convictions for himself, different enough, it may be from Mr. Moore’s.
A lover of French art, in its various phases, the drift of Mr. Moore’s charge against contemporary English art, especially under academic patronage, is that it is not vernacular; that the degenerate sons of Reynolds and Constable are leaving their native earth, and with it the roots and sources of their own proper strength, actually for this very France of his own preference. Impressionism, to use that word, in the absence of any fitter one, — the impressionism which makes his own writing on art in this volume so effective, is, in short, the secret both of his likes and dislikes, his hatred of what he thinks conventional and mechanic, together with his very alert and careful evaluation of what comes home to him as straightforward, whether in Reynolds or Rubens, or Ruysdael; in Japan, in Paris or in modern England; with Mr. Whistler, for instance, and Mr. Sargent; his belief in the personal, the incontrollable. Above all that can be learnt in art, he would assure us, — beyond all that can be had of teachers — there is something there, something in every veritable work of art, of the incommunicable, of what is unique, and this is, perhaps, the one thing really of value in art. As a personal quality or power it will vary greatly, in the case of this or that work or workman, in its appeal to those who, being outsiders in the matter of art, are nevertheless sensitive and sincerely receptive, towards it. It will vary also, in a lesser degree, even to those who in this matter really know. But to the latter, at all events, preference in art will be nothing less than conviction, and the estimate of artistic power and product, in every several case, an object of no manner of doubt at all, such as may well give a man, as in Mr. Moore’s own case, the courage of his opinions. In such matter opinion is, in fact, of the nature of the sensations one cannot help.
SHADWELL’S DANTE
(PURGATORIO I — XXVII)
This article was contributed as an Introduction to The Purgatory of Dante Alighieri (Purgatorio I — XXVII). An Experiment in Literal Verse Translation by Charles Lancelot Shadwell. London, 1892.
Mr. Shadwell has since completed his version of The Purgatory, (XXVIII — XXXIII).
“A réputation s’affermira toujours parcequ’on ne le lit guère,” says Voltaire of Dante: and just there certainly he would seem to have overpassed the limit of his critical method, its capacity for dealing with great matters. Yet Voltaire did but reflect the general unfitness of the last century in regard to the Middle Age, of whose spirit Dante is the central embodiment; for, late in that century, the “universal-minded” Goethe himself explains, much to the surprise of the reader of to-day, why, passing through Assisi, he inspected carefully an average specimen of old Roman architecture, but was careful not to inspect the frescoes of Giotto in the church of Saint Francis, work, done, it has been thought, under Dante’s immediate influence.
We have certainly “changed all that;” and the unaffected interest of our own generation in the Divina Commedia is more than a mere element of the medievalism which marks the later half of the nineteenth century. The causes of this medievalism, which has at least
secured for posterity what three careless centuries had left us of the art of the Middle Age, would probably reduce themselves in the main to the influence of reaction. That poetic period,. poetic as we see it, perhaps a little illusively, has been a refuge from the mere prose of our own day as we see it, most of all in England. But there seems to be something more than just this, something more positive in character, and in closer alliance with the genius of the nineteenth century itself, in the interest which Dante commands among us, — his popularity with the many, his sufficiency for the devotion of a select number of admirable scholars, whose fault assuredly it will not be if the minutest point about him or his work remains obscure.
By way of explaining such devotion in contrast to the indifference of preceding centuries it would of course be enough to say that Dante was a great poet, one of the greatest of poets, and that in our own age, sympathetic, eclectic, cosmopolitan, full of curiosity and abounding in the “historic sense,” certains barriers to a right appreciation of him have been removed.
He has handled on a grand scale the grandest of subjects, in a way which after all fair comparison must be declared unique, and so as to make it his own — that immense intellectual deposit of thirteen believing centuries — with a generous outlay of himself, of his own richly endowed and richly cultivated personality, of what is most intimate and peculiar in it. On scrupulous orthodoxy he has impressed a deep personal originality, after a manner to which we may well think one only in the course of many generations could have been equal. The religious ideal of that age, the theoretic construction which Catholicism puts on the facts of nature and history, is for him, in spite! of an invading rationalism already at work about him, itself also still an authentic fact Devoutly assuming the reality of that ideal, he goes boldly through the world in all its variety of good and evil, with powers of insight everywhere adequate to its wonder, its beauty and sorrow, the awful experiences of the saved, the tried, the lost His subject, like the course of his own life which had brought it home so dose to him, has its harsh episodes; but he did not forget that his design was after all to treat it as a literary artist, to charm his readers; and with no disloyalty therefore to its essential character, he has displayed in his work a wonderful urbanity and composure, the craftiest interweaving of its parts, a deliberate evenness of execution, a sense of unity and proportion, yet also a command of every sort of minute literary beauty, an expressiveness, a care for style and rhythm at every point, the evidence of which increases upon the critical reader as his attention becomes microscopic. No one anywhere near him in time had united powers and acquirements so varied, in a literary monument so consistently realised. Consider, for instance, the philosophic, power of Canto XXV. of the Purgatory, side by side with the moral power of Canto XVII. 91-139, with the moral delicacy of Canto III., in the matter of Manfred especially, and with the various descriptive effects of Canto II. Yes, Dante is in very deed a great poet, great enough to be independent of the mere mental habits of one age or another. Yet he too had to pass through ages with no natural ear for him; while it is only the good fortune of the present generation that its turn for eclecticism, removing prejudice, has fitted it for a really intelligent and critical study of Dante’s work, encouraged for its reward therein by certain special aspects of Dante’s genius which are in close kinship with its own. The artistic and literary work of the Middle Age, the art of Dante’s friend Giotto for example, we value in large measure for its very strangeness, its unlikeness to what is nearer in date to ourselves. But Dante, remote and strange as he may be, in sentiment, in his politics, and for many by his religious faith, is nevertheless found to meet certain tendencies, actually in us, halfway; and by expressing does but further promote them.