m^: Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/englishliteraturOOkennrich ENGLISH LITERATURE 1880-1905 BY J. M. KENNEDY AUTHOR OF "THE QUINTESSENCE OF NIETZSCHE," ETC. BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS 1913 All rights reserved CONTENTS CHAPTER I PACK INTRODUCTORY — CLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM 3 CHAPTER II WALTER PATER 28 CHAPTER III OSCAR WILDE 59 CHAPTER IV THE " YELLOW BOOK '* SCHOOL : MAX BEERBOHM, ARTHUR WAUGH, HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE- LIONEL JOHNSON, HENRY HARLAND, ARTHUR SYMONS, ERNEST DOWSON .... 98 CHAPTER V AUBREY BEARDSLEY — WHISTLER — CONTINENTAL INFLUENCES . . . . . . I4I V 281606 CONTENTS CHAPTER VI PAOS GEORGE BERNARD SHAW .... 154 CHAPTER VII H. G. WELLS 206 CHAPTER VIII GEORGE GISSING 253 CHAPTER IX W. B. YEATS — GEORGE MOORE — THE CELTIC RE VI VAL — FIONA MACLEOD — " A. E." — JOHN DAVID- SON — FRANCIS THOMPSON — W. L. COURTNEY — LAURENCE BINYON — ST. JOHN HANKIN — RICHARD LE GALLIENNE — R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM 279 INDEX 337 VI ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY — CLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM Melancholy is the keynote of the last genera- tion of EngHsh literature, the period beginning about 1880 and ending, let us say, about 1905. Artistic impotence and artistic philistin- ism exercise even separately a melancholy effect ; but, taken together, the effect they bring about is lamentable. The mere title given to one of the most typical productions of this period. The Yellow Book, is startlingly apt. The whole atmosphere of the time is yellow, jaundiced. Weakness of will is a prominent characteristic of those who, had they been stronger in this respect, might have rescued the literature of the age from the mire into which it was gradually sinking. But the period required stronger men to grapple with it. It is, indeed, only too true that the age I ENGLISH LITERATURE * exercises an enormous influence even ; over creative artists. Only the very strongest of natures can overcome it. Had men like Wilde, Dowson, and Lionel Johnson been born at the time of the Renaissance, or in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, they would quite conceivably have lived to rank on the same plane as writers like Tasso and Pascal ; for the periods just mentioned were, on the whole, favourable to the development of literary genius. But the last thirty years of the nineteenth century were gloomy all over Europe, and nowhere more than in England. The age is not only marked by a number of literary tragedies — for it is a literary tragedy when good work goes wrong, as in the case of Wilde's later books. The age is distinguished by tragedies, in the purely physical sense of the term, among men of letters and artists. Crackanthorpe, Adams, Laurence Hope, John Davidson, and St. John Hankin deliberately took their lives. Charles Conder died insane. Over-indulgence in drink led to the premature deaths, in deplorable cir- cumstances, of Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson. And this list could be extended. Why, then, should the period have been so 2 INTRODUCTORY melancholy ? Why did it drive so many repre- sentative writers to suicide in order that they might escape its horrors ; why should it have driven others to drink and drugs, and a few to the lunatic asylum ? In an interesting little book on the artistic movement of the nineties Mr. Blaikie Murdoch suggests that the sixties " had forged an art of muscles, but the nineties produced an art of nerves"; hence he attributes to the nineties greater subtlety and greater delicacy. This, however, does not take us much further. Why should the sixties have been muscular and the nineties delicate ? Why should the writers of the period just preceding the eighties and nineties have been cheerful, and the writers immediately following them afflicted with the blackest of despair ? Swinburne is cheerful ; for he ap- peared to find consolation in Hellenism, or in what he regarded as Hellenism. Tennyson is cheerful ; young Hallam rests in the Lord. And who could be more robust, or more philistine, than Browning, with his '' Take what is, trust what may be — that's Life's true lesson — eh ? " ? Religion and Hellenism, then, but chiefly religion, were the mainstays of creative artists up to the eighties. In the eighties and 3 ENGLISH LITERATURE nineties, however, religion had lost its influence, and Hellenism was misunderstood. Faith was lacking ; and it did not reappear until early in the twentieth century, let us say about 1905. The artists of the period from 1880 to 1905 were caught in a torrent of materialism, atheism, idealism, and romanticism : four phenomena which almost always go together, and which only the strongest of strong char- acters can combat. Atheism in the first place means that the reason has superseded the imagination ; but all creative literature depends upon the exercise of the imagination, the vision ; and not at all upon the reason. The glorious mythologies of Greece and India may be adequately ex- plained away by the reason ; and small thanks to it for its pains in doing so. But by no amount of reasoning could these mythologies have been built up. For this the imagination was necessary. If, then, we find a period in history, such as the Augustan Age in Rome or the Renaissance in modern Europe, when the imagination ranks higher than the reason, we may safely predict that such a period will be fruitful in creative literature — in creative art, in fact, of all kinds. If, on the other INTRODUCTORY hand, we find a period, such as the Alexandrian age, when people use their reason more than their imagination, we may say with equal certainty that such a period will be noted, not for creative literature, which will be practically non-existent, but for scientific research and the more mechanical sides of literary work, such as the writing of commentaries upon the productions of classic authors, or the uninspired discussion and interpretation of works which it is no longer felt possible to emulate. If the scientific researches undertaken during or just previously to such a period have a tendency to discredit the imagination, then so much the worse for those who are born into that period with an innate impulse for creative work. Nothing spiritual can exist for long without some philosophic basis. That basis may be the Christian religion, as was the case in England, generally speaking, up to the latter part of the nineteenth century. Or it may be Hegel, or Plato, or Nietzsche, or merely a frank hedonism. The philosophical states represented by these names are so many foundations upon which men will naturally take up their stand in accordance with their tendencies. Some of these philo- sophies are likely to promote creative work ; 5 ENGLISH LITERATURE others are as likely to retard it. When they are one and all examined, it will be found they must in the end belong to one of two categories : either they rely upon the reason or they rely upon the imagination. When we find writers express a liking for one or other of these philo- sophies, or when we find them influenced by strong believers in these philosophies, we can generally tell what the artistic fate of such writers will be. Now, it is important to note that the philosophies most in vogue during the eighties and nineties were those that tended to set the reason above the imagination ; and literature suffered accordingly. The writer who, more than any one else, influenced the literary movement of the eighties, was Walter Pater, and Pater himself was dominated from beginning to end by the literary influence of Ruskin and by the philosophy of Plato. And what effect this philosophy had on his work may be easily seen by any one who can appreciate the pernicious influence of romanticism on literary endeavour, as opposed to the classicism which it is the duty of every cultured writer to uphold. Before we go on, however, we must come to an understanding regarding the use of the 6 INTRODUCTORY words classicism and romanticism, which are now, like so many other terms, in danger of being abused by careless thinkers. When we speak of classic work we mean, or should mean, work modelled on the style of the best Greek and Latin authors : works in which the ideas expressed are correctly moulded to the form of their expression, in which the thoughts are clearly and simply outlined, and in which certain definite artistic canons are strictly adhered to. We must follow not merely the letter of the ancients — for we shall attain no particular end if we do — but their spirit ; we must definitely assume that the spirit of the Greek and Latin authors is our highest literary ideal. To those who object to the classics on various grounds — the most common objection at the present day being that they are *' out of date *' or not *' practical '' or " useful '' in the struggle for existence — it can only be answered that such objections, or rather excuses, are insufficient. Through most of our western European literature we find a definite tradition, a high standard which was laid down by the writers of the two ancient States. It has been the aim of the best authors in every period to carry on this tradition ; and, in 7 ENGLISH LITERATURE spite of numerous apparent contradictions and waverings, there have been men in every age who did aim at the high ideal which came down to us from classic times. On the other hand, this ideal has often been opposed and scoffed at. It has been opposed by those men who played the part in literature that Liberalism has done in politics : men who saw nothing in the influence of tradition in art or literature, who acted as if the world were re-created from day to day and year to year, who chafed under the artistic discipline to which their opponents, the classicists, willingly submitted. These were the men, too, who desired free play for '* individuality," who thought that every author was quite right in laying down his own artistic canons ; the men who experimented with curious metric forms, and who could not understand that their work was of necessity related to the work of previous writers and to the work of the writers who would follow them. These were the men, again, who rushed into the opposite extreme as regards style. Their ideas were not ex- pressed with the simplicity of diction that characterised the authors who followed classic models. In their works we find puny thoughts 8 INTRODUCTORY enveloped in mystic, florid, symbolic language. In accordance with the rest of their character, their ideals are not classic ideals : they are what we moderns call '' cloudy '' in their conceptions of the world and of life, though the ancients would probably have given a harsher name to this characteristic of theirs. This latter class constitutes the romanticists. The first general use of the word '' romanti- cist *' is found in connection with a German school of writers which flourished towards the latter part of the eighteenth century. It in- cluded, to mention only three of the best- known names, Tieck, F. Schlegel, and Novalis. These writers did not seek their inspiration in classical sources ; the origin of such inspira- tion as they could claim was pointed out unerringly by Heinrich Heine. They delved into the works of mediaeval chroniclers and " romance *' writers ; the very writers who, of all others, are most distinguished by their failure to appreciate the classics, the chroniclers of chivalric incidents and the romantico-chivalric spirit, a spirit which was not assailed throughout Europe until Cervantes annihilated it once and for all in one of the most powerful of satires. This German revolt against the classics, 9 ENGLISH LITERATURE typified in the works of the authors already referred to, was nominally directed against what they were pleased to call the *' pedantry *' of the French poetry of the eighteenth century and the latter part • of the seventeenth, as typified, say, in Corneille, Racine, and Boileau. But, in being directed as it was against these great representatives of the classic tradition, it struck at the roots of all true literary ideals. The models handed down to us by Rome and Greece were abandoned for models handed down to us by the Middle Ages. Now, what particularly distinguishes the mediaeval romances is the sentimentality and idealism of their substance and the florid style in which their substance is enveloped. Such stories as the Amadis of Gaul, or tales like the Gesta Romanorum, may undoubtedly be found interesting by man}^ readers. From an historical point of view, for example, they throw considerable light on the manners and customs of the periods in which they were written. But by the artistic mind they can never be regarded as artistic productions. Their lack of unity, indifferent ideas, and bad style are not atoned for by whatever merits they possess for the historian or the sociologist. lO INTRODUCTORY And, while these traits are particularly char- acteristic of mediaeval romances, other branches of literature caught the infection and likewise show a distinct non-classical tendency. Take a number of writers at haphazard : John Donne, Plautus, Gongora, George Herbert, Calderon, Milton, Ovid, Racine, Boiardo, and Theocritus, all of whom are recognised to be great literary masters. Yet even an unob- servant critic, if such a contradiction in terms may be allowed to pass, can hardly fail to notice the enormous difference in the spirit of these writers. Compare, for example, Cal- deron with Plautus. As Heine very properly remarks : *' The poetry of the Middle Ages is most clearly characterised by Calderon, and in its two main impulses : chivalry and monasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian poet-priest, whose poetical fancies were ecclesiastically fumigated and sprinkled with holy water, were now imitated in Germany in all their sacred grandezza, all their sacerdotal luxury, all their exalted foolishness ; and there arose among us a varicoloured, extravagantly- profound school of poetry with which people became mystically infatuated.''* * H. Heine : Die Romantische Schule, Bk. i. II ENGLISH LITERATURE In Plautus, on the other hand, we have a dramatist who is, it is true, a rough diamond ; but who nevertheless always keeps in mind certain well-understood literary traditions. One has only to compare the form and spirit of his Miles Gloriostis with Calderon's La Vida es Sueno to observe the enormous difference between classicism and romanticism. A com- parison in a like sense of Boiardo with Theocritus, of Donne with Ovid, of George Herbert with Racine, of Gongora with Milton, cannot but impress even a careless student in an equal degree. Again, in the famous Nuptial Song of Catullus there is a typically pure and simple classical passage on a flower : Ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis, Ignotus pecori, nullo convolsus aratro. Quern mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber : Multi ilium pueri, multae optavere puellae ; Idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui, Nulli ilium pueri, nullae optavere puellae : Sic virgo, dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est; Cum castum amisit polluto corpore florem. Nee pueris iocunda manet, nee cara puellis. So beautiful a passage would naturally be repeatedly imitated, and this is what it becomes in the florid language of Tasso : Deh mira (egli cantd) spuntar la rosa Dal verde suo modesta e verginella, f2 INTRODUCTORY Che mezzo aperta ancora e mezzo ascosa ; Quanto si mostra men, tanto e piu bella. Ecco poi nudo il sen gia baldanzosa Dispiega : ecco poi langue, e non par quella ; Quella non par, che desiata avanti Fu da mille donzelle, e mille amanti. Cosi trapassa al trapassar d' un giorno, Delia vita mortale il fiore e '1 verde : Ne perche faccia indietro april ritorno. Si rinfiora ella mai ne si rinverde. Cogliam la rosa in sul mattino adorno Di questo di che tosto il seren perde ; Cogliam d'Amor la rosa : amiamo or quando Esser si puote riamato amando.* Tasso, it will be seen, was familiar with the classics. He studied them, he imitated them ; and yet he could not grasp the spirit of these few simple lines of Catullus without enveloping them in a florid metaphor which was not meant to belong to them at all. Why ? Merely because Tasso had not lifted himself above his age, as Goethe and Heine did later on. He had not submitted himself to the discipline which a classical training necessarily presupposes ; he could not restrain those characteristics which he possessed in common with Calderon. The classic in his hands becomes the romantic, the simple becomes the fantastic. This is, in truth, what generally * La Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto XVI. ENGLISH LITERATURE happens when the romanticist finds himself out of his depth ; and, if we wish for a musical analogy to this literary one, we shall find it in Wagner's compositions. The simple melody is enveloped in a gigantic maze of harmony to such an extent that the listener becomes confused, and remains so until he accustoms himself to the tricks of the magician. In criticising mediaeval romances it would, of course, be insufficient to say that they are not " true to nature '' ; for it is not the duty of the artist — far from it — to reproduce nature with fidelity. But it is his duty to remember that he is living on earth and not in the clouds ; and this is exactly where the romance-writers fail. They fail because the very religion they profess teaches them to deny the primitive and most character-forming instincts of their species. They were afraid to perform the task of the artist, viz., to face reality and interpret it. They turned and fled from reality and constructed for themselves a new earth : an earth wherein the men and women differed as much from the men and women to whom we are accustomed as the Ring of the Nie- belungs differs from Carmen. We find men and women adorned with virtues which have 14 INTRODUCTORY no parallel in real life, and losing themselves amidst grotesque clouds of idealistic fancies which have no parallel in the solar system. The classics differ entirely from this. We cannot imagine Catullus or Horace inditing the kind of love-songs sung by the troubadours ; the thing is unthinkable. Despite what some critics refer to as the '' freshness " of Philippe de Commynes and Villehardouin, we cannot help regretting that the masterly mind of Thucydides could not have dealt with the Italian expedition of Charles VIII, or that the pro- found insight of Tacitus could not have still further immortalised itself by leaving us a few cutting character sketches of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade. Such a vain wish is inspired by no mere whim. The classical authors would have been incapable of enveloping historical incidents in cloudy romantic ideals ; of distorting the characters of men to suit the theological views of the age. No classicist is ever afraid to face reality ; he says '' yea '* to life, to use Nietzsche's expression. This, of course, does not mean that he reproduces life with exquisite fidelity, which is the business of the colour-photographer. It does mean that, while the romanticist 15 ENGLISH LITERATURE shrinks from reality, is afraid of reality, and surrounds reality with an exaggerated idealistic halo, the classicist faces reality and deals with it as the sculptor fashions his marble or the potter handles his clay — in other words, he re-creates reality. It is nevertheless quite possible to be a romantic realist. Emile Zola, for example, as all readers of his novels must observe, takes unwearying pains to depict a scene with the utmost minuteness. The reader is not permitted to pass on from incident to incident until every trifling detail has been brought to his notice with almost pre-Raphaelite fidelity — those who have read Lourdes or La Debacle will easily recollect instances of this characteristic. Such a determination to set reality on paper, however, is not a mark of the classicist. It does not indicate that Zola has mastered reality, but simply that reality has fascinated him as a snake fascinates a bird. He is overpowered by reality and finds himself unable to select, which is a preliminary requisite for the re-creation of reality as the task is performed by the true artist. Many of Mr. Shaw's long prefaces to his plays are almost Zolaesque in their detail, and quite l6 INTRODUCTORY as ineffective. Mr. Shaw, it is true, endeavours to do for the spiritual world what Zola has done for the physical world, and it may be thought that the comparison is ill-judged on that account. But I make the comparison because it seems to me that the error of both writers arises from the same source : their disregard of classicism and their firm adherence to romanticism. We have seen, then, how the term romanticism arose, and to what school of German writers it was applied before its use became general among psychologists to designate the artistic traits of a certain weak type of mind. It should be further remembered that, as a result of the Napoleonic wars, a national support was given to the romantic movement in Germany. Writers of all kinds, all those who were looked upon as creative artists, had behind them the full sympathy of the populace when they refused to follow French literary models. The mass of the people knew little and cared less about high classical ideals in literature and art ; but they could appreciate a defeat in battle. It mattered little to them — for who was there to point it out to them ? — that Germany was a barbarous country as com- 2 17 ENGLISH LITERATURE pared with France, that culture must come to them, if it came at all, from beyond the Rhine. These things were lost sight of at a time when both art and nationality were united on the side of philistinism. Although it is true that Lessing had taken up the cudgels against French literature and the French drama, he should not on that account be numbered among the romanticists. He made strenuous endeavours, endeavours which resulted in his premature death, to show his fellow-authors that, if they did abandon French literature, they must replace it by the culture of the best ages of Greece and Rome. They did not do so. They im- mersed themselves, as Heine pointed out later with much bitterness of spirit, in the wells of mediaeval poetry and romances ; and those who did turn to the literature of Greece and Rome did not trouble to find out — they were perhaps incapable of distinguishing — ^what were the best cultural epochs of the two States. They went back no further than the Alexandrian period of the second and third centuries of our era — to the very period, in other words, when that which we now call romanticism had taken a firm hold of what was left of Greek and i8 INTRODUCTORY Roman literature, a period when the influence of the neo-Platonists was predominant, a period when the real classical literature had de- generated almost beyond recognition. Readers of Nietzsche*s essays. We Philologists and On the Future of our Educational Institu- tions, will well remember the scorn with which he reproaches his countrymen with neglecting the best and fastening with avidity on the worst that classical times had to offer. The Alexandrian age, indeed, can hardly properly be called classical at all : it was a period of transition between the abandonment of paganism and the first establishment of Christian thought — a period of transition, in other words, between classicism and roman- ticism, with the influence of romanticism growing stronger from year to year. If we are called upon to indicate the main characteristic of this age, we may say at once that it was an age which was governed entirely by its neo-Platonist outlook, an age in which men were deeply engrossed in Platonic studies. It was, in consequence, an age which was entirely out of touch with reality, an age which was dominated by false ideals. For the Platonists were the Christians of antiquity. 19 ENGLISH LITERATURE Although it is impossible to set Plato and Aristotle in juxtaposition at every point in their philosophies, we can certainly juxtapose them in this respect : Aristotle, like Nietzsche himself, had his feet firmly planted on the world in which we live, and his energies were, like Nietzsche^s, directed towards improving the position of man in this world and helping him to re-interpret nature to this end. Plato, on the contrary, was always concerned with unreal worlds, and he has in consequence always been the mainstay of romanticists and idealists. At the present time, for instance, Germany is distinguished by the strength of its romantic movement and the setback which has been given to classicism, and this coincides — strangely enough, perhaps, to those who have not taken this effect of Plato into con- sideration — with a pronounced revival of Platonic studies there. Again, to go further back, the influence of Plato was predominant from the Alexandrian period down to the period immediately preceding the Renaissance, and with the Renaissance itself Plato's influence on the thought of the time gradually became less and less. Aristotle, on the other hand, came into prominence with Thomas Aquinas 20 INTRODUCTORY and was one of the chief classical authors studied from the beginning to the end of the period of the Renaissance. And, to take the movement with which we are directly con- cerned, the influence of Plato on Wilde would be apparent to any one acquainted with the works of both men, even if Wilde had not himself admitted it in Intentions and in the De Profundis. There was one man, however, who strove to combat the romantic movement in modern Europe, and to check the influence of the Platonic spirit : and this was Goethe. There are few more fascinating studies than the character of this man ; for it is of profound interest not only to the literary historian but also to the psychologist. He represents at once the romanticist and the classicist, and an examination of his intellectual life would suffice to show the distinctions, both broad and minute, separating the one from the other. For such a detailed examination of Goethe this is, of course, not the place ; but a few indications may be given. Every artist is distinguished by a superfine sensibility, a peculiar nervous condition, and the greater the genius, as a rule, the greater 21 ENGLISH LITERATURE the sensitiveness. Dryden's old tag about great wits being near allied to madness was simply one way — a rough and approximate way — of describing a phenomenon which has been observed in all ages, though the psycholo- gists of our own time would naturally divide madness into many different categories. The ** crankiness " of the genius is, of course, merely the outcome of his extreme sensitiveness and his profound penetration into men and things. Such a sensitiveness is, as might be expected, more apparent in youth than in later years. This youthful period of inner tension — the Promethean period of the artist, as an Italian psychologist has aptly called it — results in one of two things : either the artist masters his sensitiveness and becomes what the psycho- logist calls mature, or his sensitiveness over- powers him and he does not reach artistic maturity at all. Every real artist must pass through this Promethean period. Those who master their sensitiveness at the end of such a period — the duration of which naturally varies in accordance with the character of the individual — ^become classicists ; those who fail to do so remain romanticists. For a most important trait of the classicist, and one which 22 INTRODUCTORY cannot be overlooked, is his unity, the complete harmony existing between mind and body, his complete self-control and well-developed will power ; while the romanticist is equally distinguished by lack of unity, lack of will, and a resultant disharmony of thought. More than this : such a disharmony, in the case of an unusually sensitive artist who is unable to control his emotions, will lead in many instances to mental and physical wreckage. We can find two such shipwrecked romanticists in our own literature, Cowper and Oscar Wilde. Cowper's frequent attacks of " insanity " are of considerable interest to the psychologist, but hardly more so than an investigation of the causes of the offence which led Wilde to Wandsworth Prison and Reading Gaol. It is significant of the whole romantic move- ment in Germany and England that the artists of the time could not control themselves. From a purely artistic standpoint it is painful to examine the spiritual lives of men like Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, the Schlegels, Tieck, Kotzebue, and Kleist. We are always aware of this want of spiritual harmony, this chaos of undisciplined emotions : it is like listening to a badly-played tune on a badly-tuned 23 ENGLISH LITERATURE piano. There were men among the roman- ticists, notably Byron and Schiller, who did succeed in mastering themselves to some extent and taking a pace or two towards classical ideals ; but fortunately there was one man — Goethe — who mastered himself completely, and developed an almost Olympic classicism out of his romanticism. As a young man Goethe experienced the full force of that inward battle which makes or mars the artist. If we had not direct testimony regarding him to this effect, we could easily deduce it from his works them- selves. Compare, for example, the romantic Goetz, which he wrote when he was twenty- two and recast when he was twenty-four, with the Hermann und Dorothea, written when he was nearly fifty ; or compare the early romantic Werther novels with the later masterly psychological analysis which we know in English as The Elective Affinities. In all Goethe's important early works we observe the romantic influence ; but we see that in his later works he has entirely shaken this influence off. His mind had gradually passed through its storm-and-stress period, and the complete artist emerged from the struggle. 24 INTRODUCTORY Goethe and Heine, however, were the only two poets of the time who conquered the romanticist within themselves, and they were less appreciated abroad than their romantic competitors and detractors. Goethe, the more classic of the two, was unable to stem the romantic tide which began in France with Lamartine and Victor Hugo, both of whom, together with Alfred de Musset, exercised an enormous influence on French literature of the last century, an influence that gave rise in its turn to the still more decadent influence of Baudelaire and Verlaine. From these sources the slow poison of romanticism spread to Eng- land, where it was soon being absorbed. The times were, indeed, propitious enough; for in the nineteenth century England was dominated in politics, science, and literature by the " Liberal '' trend of thought which is the customary accompaniment of romanticism. When writing some time ago on the subject of Tory Democracy, I pointed out how political Liberalism was usually associated with idealism and romanticism ; but it is worth adding that Liberalism, assuming the general thought of a particular period to be '* Liberal,'* is also associated with a romantic influence on litera- ls ENGLISH LITERATURE ture. Liberalism is, in the first place, based on a combination of those philosophies which I have already referred to in this chapter as appealing to the reason rather than to the imagination, and in the second place it has always appealed in England, as a political sys- tem, to the middle classes, who are notorious as having invariably exhibited the least possible sympathy with classicists in any field of art. The essential principles of Locke and Rousseau, to take an example, may be found in Plato ; and it is largely Locke and Rousseau who are responsible for the principles underlying modern bourgeois democracy. It is interesting to note that the writers of the more romantic and idealistic books published in the nineteenth century, when they took any part in politics, usually ranged themselves on the Liberal side ; and it is also a matter of psychological notoriety that science itself became more and more democratised as the nineteenth century pro- gressed. A typically unsound idealist who will naturally occur to the reader is John Ruskin. Our present literary inquiry, however, does not concern Ruskin, who only indirectly influenced the revived romantic movement of the quarter- 26 INTRODUCTORY century beginning about 1880 ; but the writer who may be said to have initiated this movement was a man whose works show distinct traces of Ruskin's influence, viz., Walter Pater. The study of the last generation of English literature, then, begins with Pater. 27 CHAPTER II WALTER PATER Reference has already been made to the Promethean period of the artist ; but it is only the higher classes of artists who are ac- quainted at all with the struggle that is taking place within them. There are now no artists so classic that they think of romanticism merely with contempt and never feel them- selves oppressed by romantic fancies — as Nietzsche has said, we all begin by being decadents. There are, however, many artists who are so romantic at the beginning that the higher ideals of classicism seldom come within their range of vision, and they follow the path of the romanticist from the beginning to the end with only an occasional tremor. To this latter class belong most of the English writers of the last generation. Crackanthorpe, W. B. Yeats, and Le Gallienne, for example, show themselves in their works to have been essentially romanticists at the very beginning, 28 WALTER PATER and such they continued to be. Those inward struggles which we see so well represented in Goethe were unknown to them. We shall therefore have more respect for those among these writers who, while continually displaying romantic influences and tendencies, neverthe- less showed that they were not unaware of classicism, that they sought to achieve some higher aim than that which the average romanti- cist has in view. Five such men in this period stand out prominently : Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Arthur Symons, and George Gissing. Of the five, Davidson probably approached most nearly to the classical ideal. Pater himself influenced the literary move- ment of the eighties and nineties almost against his will ; and his habits and general characteristics make him a curious and inter- esting study. Never at any time did he advance extravagant claims in his own behalf, whatever may be said of the claims put forward in his behalf by his admirers. He was of a most retiring disposition, and avoided com- pany. He did, it is true, make a certain number of literary and artistic acquaintances, including several of the pre-Raphaelites ; but his extreme shyness prevented him from 29 ENGLISH LITERATURE acquiring certain accomplishments which were indispensable to a critic in his position. For instance, he was never able to speak a foreign language, not even French. Although, there- fore, he gives us many apt remarks on music, the music in words was beyond him. He spent many vacations in Germany with his sisters, but he never succeeded in being able to speak German. To the last he remained a typical Englishman in that he could converse only in his own language. Not that Pater ever wished to converse much at all. Always unassuming and not over-talkative in the company of his friends, he was still more retiring in the presence of strangers. And Mr. Arthur Symons has told us what painful efforts it cost Pater to lecture on one occasion at Toynbee Hall : an effort which was painful not only to Pater but to those who had come to listen to him. Much of this sensitiveness may be explained by his own outlook on the world ; or rather it explains his outlook on the world and his canons of taste. He expressed himself wonderfully well on this point in the remarkable essay which forms the " conclusion " to his Studies in the Renaissance : *' The service of philosophy, 30 WALTER PATER of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of con- stant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face ; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest ; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses ? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy ? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. . . . Not to discrimi- nate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.'' It is worth noting the expression *' in- tellectual excitement.'' Physical excitement, indeed, is something which we can scarcely 31 ENGLISH LITERATURE associate with Pater at all. He lived a hard, strictly intellectual existefice. He avoided life as much as he avoided nature. He never undertook the highest task of the artist : the re-creation, the re-interpretation of nature for the benefit of man. He could not, so to speak, see large ; he wanted some- thing small which he could illuminate for an instant with his *' gem-like flame.'* His Studies in the Renaissance, for example, do not attempt to deal with the Renaissance as a whole, as a phenomenon. They do not even attempt to give complete portraits of the men whose names stand as headings to the chapters. Pater's glance is concentrated on some one characteristic of the personages he deals with. The eventful life of Pico della Mirandola is barely alluded to ; for in this essay Pater emphasises, as usual, some particular feature of the man : his endeavour to reconcile Christianity with the philosophy of ancient Greece. A similar concentration of Pater's critical faculties on one particular point is seen in most of the other essays : those on Botticelli and the poetry of Michelangelo, for example. In the essay on Leonardo, however, we see 32 WALTER PATER the real Pater. There was indeed something in common between the two men. They ex- hibited similar traits, although Pater's might have been to Leonardo's *' as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine.'' Leonardo's nature was haunted by ideals of beauty ; he was absorbed in himself ; he held aloof even from his friends. Pater seizes upon these characteristics and delineates them with in- finite skill. Seldom indeed can we imagine him taking greater care of his phraseology and making the utmost endeavours to reach the art which conceals art. From the first to the last the essay is his masterpiece ; and there is a celebrated passage in it which almost by itself explains Pater's own nature. I refer, of course, to the description of "La Gioconda," which, however often it may have been quoted before, well deserves to be quoted again : ** La Gioconda " is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggest iveness, only the *' Melancholia " of Diirer is comparable to it ; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least. As often happens with works in which invention 3 33 ENGLISH LITERATURE seems to reach its limit, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs of Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see the image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams ; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought ? By what strange affinities had the dream and the person grown up thus apart, and yet so close together ? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's brain, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in II Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was pro- tracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected ? The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all ** the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful 34 WALTER PATER women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed ! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits ; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her ; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants ; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary ; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one ; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa stands as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea. Here we have the truly characteristic Pater. When brought into contact with life and nature he is overwhelmed and seeks to escape ; but when criticising a human production — a picture, a statue, a mediaeval romance — ^he is in his element. The vague wistfulness of this cele- brated picture has never been better described — 35 ENGLISH LITERATURE not defined ; for after all the full sensation of beauty cannot be explained in words : but there is a peculiar charm, a fascination about ** La Gioconda/* as all who saw the picture in the Louvre before the carelessness of its custodians allowed it to be stolen will readily testify. This fascination has been magnificently ex- pressed for us by Pater ; and it is difficult to think of any English writer, either before him or since, who could have done it so well. It may be true, as has often been suggested, that Leonardo himself would have been among the first to deny that he ever intended to represent in the picture all that Pater saw in it. Pater himself hints ('' there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master *') that we need not necessarily discover in a picture exactly what the artist himself intended to place there. As we shall see later, Oscar Wilde elaborated this thesis in one of his most brilliant essays, with special reference to Pater himself. We see, then, what Pater's own peculiar aim is. He fastens his attention on one par- ticular characteristic of a thing and illuminates it so strongly with his '' gem-like flame " that he reinterprets it, gives it a new value, exer- cising, in short, creative criticism and proving 36 WALTER PATER Wilde's theory that criticism is a more difficult task than creation itself. While this trait is seen probably to the greatest extent in Pater's essay on Leonardo, we can see traces of it in the essay on Winckelmann. This great student and interpreter of Greek antiquity had some things in common with Pater, who heads his essay on him with the natural sentiment, '' et ego in Arcadia fui." Winckelmann, however, was a man of much broader mind than Pater. His mastery of Greek art, using the word in its widest sense, is marvellous to us, even after a century of noted scholars, and of this Pater seems to have been well aware. He mentions with approval Goethe's reference to him and he even quotes Hegel on the subject : '* Winckel- mann, by contemplation of the ideal works of the ancients, received a sort of inspiration, through which he opened a new sense of the study of art. He is to be regarded as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit." We can almost discern Pater trembling with excitement between the words, as he goes on to comment upon this : '* that it has given a new sense, that it has laid open a new organ, is the highest that can be said of any critical 37 ENGLISH LITERATURE effort. It is interesting then to ask what kind of a man it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under what conditions was that effected ? '* The main events in Winckelmann's life are, of course, known to all cultured Europe, but the more prominent of them seem to have additional interest when retold by Pater. In a few sentences he sums up the man's self-taught boyhood and youth, his intense anxiety to escape from the ''crabbed Protestantism ** of Germany, the bribe by means of which he succeeds in reaching Italy as a member of the Roman Church, his entry into Rome with volumes of Voltaire among his baggage. This religious sacrifice, which certainly brought Winckel- mann into ill-repute at the time, is easily explained away by his English admirer, for in doing so Pater is obviously making an attempt to explain his own religious position : The insincerity of his religious profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged into the artistic. But then the artistic instinct was that, by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from a mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless routine and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every high motive in turn, and yet 38 WALTER PATER intense at every point ; and the aim of our culture should be to attain not only as intense but as com- plete a life as possible. But often the higher life is only possible at all, on condition of the selection of that in which one's motive is native and strong ; and this selection involves the renunciation of a crown reserved for others. Which is better ? — to lay open a new sense, to initiate a new organ for the human spirit, or to cultivate many types of perfection up to a point which leaves us still beyond the range of their transforming power ? Savonarola is one type of success ; Winckelmann is another : criticism can reject neither, because each is true to itself. Winckelmann himself explains the motive of his life when he says : ''It will be my highest reward, if posterity acknowledges that I have written worthily.'* Pater himself of course sought to open up a new organ ; but the work which he began was not carried to anything like a conclusion by himself. He laid down certain canons of aesthetic criticism and emphasised the cultural value of beauty, but these theories might have languished within the precincts of Oxford — although, indeed. Pater was not highly appre- ciated even there — had not Wilde examined them, meditated upon them with greater pro- fundity than is usually supposed, and developed them to an extent of which probably their original creator had never dreamt. This essay of Pater's on Winckelmann, how- 39 ENGLISH LITERATURE ever, is so autobiographical as to deserve further notice. Here is another remark about Winckelmann which Pater, mutatis mutandis, meant I think to be applied to himself : '* Winckelmann's life was simple, primeval, Greek. His delicate constitution permitted him the use only of bread and wine. Condemned by many as a renegade, he had no desire for places of honour, but only to see his merits acknowledged and existence assured to him. He was simple without being niggardly ; he desired to be neither poor nor rich.*' Now these are exactly the sentiments which we might expect a man in Pater's position to hold. They were expressed before his time, in spirit if not in letter, by the poet Gray, and since his time by Mr. A. C. Benson. But the great distinction remains : Winckelmann com- bines scholarship with a thorough knowledge of the world ; and even Mr. Benson, despite his scholarship and his praise of the life of a Don, has dealt to a much greater degree with practical affairs — e.g., education — than Pater ever at- tempted to do. When estimating the value of Pater's work and influence, these are factors which ought not to be lost sight of. When, for example we find Pater quoting with ap- 40 WALTER PATER proval Goethe's judgment of Winckelmann's works — '' they are a life, a living thing, de- signed for those who are alive'' — we must recollect that this is about the last thing that could be said of Pater's own writings. It is possible that this statement may be thought strange when we consider to what extent Pater declaimed against abstract theories of beauty. For example, in his preface to Studies in the Renaissance he says : Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative ; and a definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstract- ness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics. . . . What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in book to me ? What effect does it really produce on me ? . . . The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do ; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for oneself or not at all, and he who experiences these impressions strongly and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience — metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. This apparent contempt for metaphysics 41 ENGLISH LITERATURE would appear to be emphasised in the essay on Winckelmann, where Pater says : " It is easy to indulge the commonplace metaphysical in- stinct. But it is possible that metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection/' The fact nevertheless remains that Pater himself began by being a metaphysician. He appears to have absorbed the doctrines of the neo-Platonists quite unconsciously, and it is significant that his first public writing was a rather fragmentary essay on Coleridge con- sidered as a philosopher. This essay appeared in the Westminster Review in 1866, although it had been written some time previously. Pater's mind was greatly influenced also by the liberal philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, who was himself very much under the influence of Hegel. It was, in fact, Green who made Pater familiar with Hegel's theories and works ; and, when Pater paid his visits to Germany, he studied Hegel more and more, often quoting him with approval in his essays. This fact is not only interesting as showing the influence exercised upon Pater by the Hegelian system of philo- 42 WALTER PATER sophy, but also as indicating the primitive trend of Pater's mind. For he was undoubtedly attracted by Hegel, whereas if his instincts had been really sound he would have been repelled by him. Metaphysics had always a peculiar fascination for Pater, and he had reached his late twenties before his attention was more definitely centred upon beauty and withdrawn from metaphysical speculation. It was about this period of his life that Pater fell in with Jahn's Life of Winckelmann, and an intellectual change began with a perusal of this book. It made Pater feel dissatisfied with Goethe as too passionate and with Ruskin as too idealistic ; he thought, as Mr. Benson says, that he had found in Winckelmann some one *' who could devote himself to the passionate contemplation of beauty, without any taint or grossness of sense, who was penetrated by fiery emotion, but without any dalliance with feminine sentiment, whose sensitiveness was preternaturally acute, while his conception was cool and firm." In thinking thus, however. Pater misjudged both Goethe and Winckelmann. It was now his desire to find some common ground where art and metaphysics might meet. The speculative instinct in the modern mind, 43 ENGLISH LITERATURE to use his own expression, wanted to be satisfied, but it could not be satisfied by some vague scholastic abstraction. Pater thought he had discovered this common ground in his mistaken conception of Winckelmann's contemplation of beauty. It never occurred to Pater that '* grossness of sense *' might be a necessary element in the contemplation of beauty — that the expression, in fact, amounted to a contradiction in terms. The desire to stifle the physical instincts and to contemplate beauty as a purely intellectual emotion arises naturally from the Christian school of thought — a school with which Pater at this time of his life believed that he had nothing to do, but the influence of which clung to him through his admiration of Hegel and his deep study of Plato. It is indeed of some interest to note that Pater at one time thought of becoming a Unitarian minister, and that later in life he was exceedingly regular in his attend- ance at church. When he acted as dean of his college, Mr. Benson tells us. Pater " never failed to occupy his stall both on Sunday morn- ing and evening ; and he was a strong advocate for Sunday services being compulsory. He said with truth that there were many men who would 44 WALTER PATER be glad to have the habit of attending, but who had failed to attend, especially on Sunday morning, partly from the attraction of break- fast parties or possibly from pure indolence, unless there was a rule of attendance. As a matter of fact, attendance was merely a matter of individual taste, but Pater continued to deplore it.'' Another anecdote which throws a great deal of light on Pater's character is that relating to the advice he gave a man who wished to read for '' Greats " : ''I cannot advise you to read any special books. The great thing is to read authors whole : read Plato whole ; read Kant whole ; read Mill whole." This is not the only indication that Pater looked with much favour upon both Kant and Mill : but they, together with Plato and Hegel, are philosophers who could not possibly be enjoyed by any one who is instinctively attracted by Greek an- tiquity. The appearance of Socrates marks the beginning of the artistic decline of Greece. The fact that Plato thought it worth while to commit his Socratian dialogues to writing shows to what an extent the degeneracy was beginning to spread. Few men have known Plato better than Coleridge did, and Coleridge has summed 45 ENGLISH LITERATURE up Plato's philosophy in a single sentence. His philosophy and religion, he says, were but exotic at home and a mere opposition to the finite in all things, genuine prophet and antici- pator as he was of the Protestant Christian era. This is a passage in Coleridge's essay on Greek drama, and it is one to which unfortunately neither students of Plato nor students of Pater have given the attention it deserved. For few things could be more opposed to the culture of the Greeks than the culture of this Protestant Christian era to which Coleridge refers ; and no man who wrote in Greek could have been less Greek in soul and mind than Plato. We see, then, how Pater began to be muddled by endeavouring in the first place to reconcile two opposed things, viz., art and metaphysics. He never cleared his brain sufficiently to be able to make up his mind between one and the other. And unfortunately he could not and did not stop here. Comparatively early in his career he had written an essay on roman- ticism, which at the mature age of fifty he re- issued in Appreciations. He undertakes what he admits to be the difficult task of discovering the formula which shall distinguish the use of the words classical and romantic. His definition 46 WALTER PATER of the first does not lead us much further, although he recognises that the romantic spirit seeks new motives, new subjects of interest and new modifications of style — something bizarre and exaggerated. If Pater had stopped here his essay might have been interesting as one of the many attempts to distinguish between two phases of literature which are difficult to define ; but unfortunately he was not content to do this. '* In truth," he says, *' the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance and the vulgarity which is dead to form.*' He then proceeds to say that our literary work should combine the qualities of romanticism and classicism : that in short it should be new in substance and old in form. The fallacy under- lying this suggestion is obvious. If we acted upon the recommendation thus set forth, we should be at liberty to perpetrate the incon- gruity of choosing a romantic subject and endeavouring to cast it in a classical form — a mistake which has been made more than once by Swinburne, Browning, and Tennyson. By endeavouring first of all to reconcile art with 47 ENGLISH LITERATURE metaphysics ; secondly, like Pico della Miran- dola, to reconcile Greek philosophy with Chris- tianity ; and thirdly, to reconcile classicism with romanticism. Pater shows that he never had a really clear conception of what his canons of aesthetic criticism should be. He saw that the French romanticism of the nineteenth century originated in Rousseau, but the range of his intellectual vision was too circumscribed to enable him to perceive that Rousseau, Kant, Plato, Hegel, and Christianity all set out from similar philosophical bases and that they them- selves and the schools of thought which they typified were antithetical to that very philo- sophy of ancient Greece which Pater thought he understood so well. Nor does Pater seem to have sufficiently dis- tinguished between the romanticism of France and the romanticism of Germany. German romanticism, as I have already pointed out, originated with a few ill-cultured writers who buried themselves in romances of the Middle Ages ; but the French romanticists had come through too long a period of Latin and Greek studies to be influenced by such callow or rather degenerate models. The fact was that in France classicism had nearly developed into 48 WALTER PATER pedantry — not because of any inherent fault in classicism, but simply because its representa- tives were unworthy of it. French writers who, like Stendhal, called themselves romantic- ists, did so because the term in the early part of the nineteenth century had become a con- venient one for describing writers who aimed at doing something new : they did not call themselves romanticists in the original meaning of the word as applied in Germany, because they never looked for their models among those mediaeval romances which were so much in favour in contemporary Germany. In order to understand all this, indeed. Pater would have had to study the subject as a whole, and his nature shrank from such an effort. He saw a certain part of the classico-romantic con- troversy, and upon this particular part he concentrated his attention. Having studied it and written about it he went back to his Greeks and Romans. The results of Pater's further classical studies are seen in his novel Marius the Epicurean. If we take the essay on Leonardo as the most typical example of Pater's criticism, assuredly Marius the Epicurean is the best example of his purely constructive work. The novel is not 4 49 ENGLISH LITERATURE a very long one, and the attempt is ambitious ; but the reader is bound to come to the con- clusion that Pater as an essayist and critic was much superior to Pater in any other form. Any one might safely have wagered that if Pater had wished to write about any period of antiquity he would have chosen the period which we find in this novel. The scene is laid in the second century of the Christian era, i.e. a time when the truly classical culture of Greece and Rome had practically disappeared, its place being taken by the inconclusive critics and dialectical neo-Platonists at Alexandria. In Rome itself all faith in religious principles had died out among the upper classes, to which Pater's hero, Marius, belonged. The higher classes in Roman society satisfied their spiritual cravings by means of numerous philosophies which they took in a more or less altered form from Greece, Egypt, and even far-off India. In Rome, therefore, as in Alexandria, there was a considerable amount of inconclusive philo- sophical discussion. But in an age when faith of any kind is lacking we very seldom indeed find a great poet or a great constructive philo- sopher, and such an age would naturally attract men who are by nature more inclined to dia- 50 WALTER PATER lectics and analysis than to the exposition of any synthetic philosophical system. Pater, it must be said at once, was not a man of a truly creative mind ; and in consequence this decadent period of the Roman Empire appealed to him immensely. He weaves his story round Marius, who is not only a Roman of the highest class but the friend of Marcus Aurelius himself. Marius cannot escape the prevailing fashion of indulging in philosophical speculation. He takes up and discards various systems, and finally, after having become a theist, he is attracted by Christianity. It should be observed, however, that it is not the dogmatic or philosophical side of Christianity that appeals to him, but its aesthetic side. Pater himself, it may be remembered, was like- wise attracted more by the aesthetic side of Christianity than by its dogma or its philo- sophy. Nor is this the only instance where the novel may be said to be autobiographical. Although Marius has several friends — and in particular one very intimate friend Flavian — who took full advantage of that freedom in sexual indulgence which was more than tolerated at the time, Marius himself, owing to his cold and fastidious temperament, holds aloof from 51 ENGLISH LITERATURE women. Exactly the same remark applies to Pater himself. It is difficult even now in England to discuss sexual problems, from a purely scientific stand- point, with the freedom and appreciation to be found in more cultured countries. Sexuality as contemplated by the scientist is very different from the sexuality '' of the sty *' contemplated by the modern English novelist. From a psychological point of view the scientific analysis of a man's sexuality will throw more light upon his character than anything else. We have only to think of Goethe to realise its importance. It would be possible to say a great deal more about Pater from a critical standpoint if we had more particulars about his sexual feelings, but such particulars are unfortunately lacking in all the biographies of the man hitherto published. We can reconstruct this side of his nature from his works, but not to a very great extent. 1 I have, however, ascertained from two or three persons who knew Pater fairly intimately that he was in the habit of collecting volumes in that particular class of French novels which, were they published in England, would at once be seized by a scandalised police. Why this remarkable fact has hitherto been concealed 52 WALTER PATER is difficult for the Continental critic to under- stand, for it certainly throws a very helpful light upon Pater's character. He was never suspected of any unnatural vices, but I think we are justified in taking the title of a play by Terence and calling Pater a heauton timoroum- enos. From a medical point of view this theory is fully upheld by Pater's sudden death at a comparatively early age — when he died in July 1894, he was not quite fifty-five years old. It is true that he had not been in very good health for some time previously, but he was at all events able to go about and pursue his studies as usual, and his death occurred sud- denly one morning as he was coming downstairs. To return to Marius, however, we find him passing through practically the same in- tellectual stages and struggles as the French decadents of the nineteenth century, such as Huysmans. Marius is a philosopher, but his mind has been influenced by so many philo- sophies that his intellectual foundations have become undermined. As in the case of a man like Huysmans, there is sufficient of the artist in him to make him wish for something aesthetic, something which he cannot find in the barren dialectics of the neo-Platonists. Like many a 53 / ENGLISH LITERATURE later decadent, therefore, he is attracted by the aesthetic side of the Roman CathoUc faith and becomes a Christian. As an autobiographical study, throwing con- siderable light upon the character of the author, Marius the Epicurean is of interest to any one who wishes to study Pater thoroughly ; but, considered merely from the point of view of a literary effort, the book is disappointing. It is not a good psychological novel ; for in psychology as in other matters Pater's atten- tion was concentrated upon some one point to the exclusion of everything else. He reveals to us, although half -unconsciously, many of the characteristics of the decadents of the period ; but he cannot convey to us any conception of the real nature of the people who were not decadents. A character like Cornelius, for example, corresponds to no reality whatever. On the other hand, Pater is usually accurate in what we might call the local colour ; but he certainly meant to write more than a mere archaeological novel. Even his technique is open to serious criticism. Our attention is suddenly taken off the story while we have to peruse long accounts of episodes directly trans- lated or adapted from Latin or Greek authors, 54 WALTER PATER such, for example, as the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius, or various discourses " lifted '' from Marcus Aurelius. The book, too, seems to come to a rather unexpected ending. Marius is martyred before his thoughts have had time to mature, before he has been able to recognise that the essential elements of Christianity do not lie in its aesthetics. There are, however, little patches of the better Pater here and there. Take the description of the old Roman villa where Marius is brought up : The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape — the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly-twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath ; the distant harbour, with its freight of white marble going to sea ; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark headland amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. . . . The air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house. We recognise Pater again when we read about Marius's literary training and his discern- ment of the fact that independence is necessary in taste ; It was a principle, the forcible apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in the selection of his intellectual food ; often listless while others read or gazed diligently ; never pretending to be 55 ENGLISH LITERATURE moved out of mere complaisance to other people's emotions : it served to foster in him a very scrupulous literary sincerity with himself. And it was this uncompromising demand for a matter, in all art, derived immediately from lively personal intuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved his euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice. This is intended to be a description of one phase of the development of the mind of Marius ; in reality it is Pater writing about the ideal Pater. For Pater's own writing is nothing in the end but another form of euphuism. He can express subtle shades of thought with great delicacy, and his phrasing is often dignified and brilliant, as for example in his criticism of **La Gioconda'*; but his style, taken as a whole, is much too complex and elaborate. When we read him we are walking with leaden shoes. We can almost feel him pausing in the middle of a sentence and looking for a word, and sometimes the result hardly justifies the strenuous efforts which have been made in the endeavour to bring the expression to per- fection. This tediousness perhaps is most ap- parent in the Imaginary Portraits. A fantastic sketch is built round some biographical hint, but Pater's lack of dramatic power makes the 56 WALTER PATER characters he evolves appear utterly dreary. Now and again, of course, particularly in the description of Watteau, we come across a sen- tence or two showing him at his best. The rather technical lectures published under the title of Plato and Platonism, and the various collected essays in the volume of Greek Studies, call for no particular attention here. Pater re-writes two or three scenes from Greek mythology with his customary charm, but also at times with his customary laboriousness ; and modern Continental critics are certainly not with him in ranking Greek sculpture as high as he does. There were a few respects in which Pater had outgrown Hegel, but there are very many in which modern criticism and research have outgrown Pater. Although Pater was in general rather too favourably disposed towards his great predecessor, his lecture on the Genius of Plato is certainly a very stimulating production. Despite his obvious defects, however, Pater exercised considerable influence over his con- temporaries. We may almost say of him that he discovered beauty, although he did not know what to do with it. To that extent, at all events, he raised himself above the materialism of his 57 ENGLISH LITERATURE time, and this may stand to his credit. If he had only been more articulate, he might almost have anticipated Wilde. But his style, despite all the care he took with it, is often exasperating. It is obvious that he was considerably in- fluenced by Ruskin ; but, whereas Ruskin wrote all too fluently, Pater stuttered. 58 CHAPTER III OSCAR WILDE A WHOLE generation of theatre-goers have laughed over many of Gilbert's plays, but one of them, not very often performed now, was exceedingly popular in its day, viz., '* Patience.'' It was intended to satirise, and with many and obvious exaggerations did satirise, a movement which at the time was very wide- spread in certain literary and pseudo-literary circles. The complaints of the dragoons, the heartfelt sighing of the " rapturous maidens," the puzzled thoughts of Patience herself, the hypocrisy of Bunthorne and the powerful attractions of Archibald Grosvenor, may seem very remote from us when we read over the play at an interval of thirty years after its first production. And yet all the satire in the play, including at least one of Gilbert's best songs, was directed at a movement which had been initiated by a clever young man in his early twenties, and which continued until the close of the century. 59 ENGLISH LITERATURE Oscar Fingal OTlaherty Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in October 1854, and went up to Oxford in time to hear both Ruskin and Pater lecture. While at Oxford he discarded his string of middle names, and preferred to be known simply by the first. Neither Pater nor Ruskin, however, exercised what might strictly be called any real influence on Wilde's thoughts or char- acter. Ruskin's words and Pater's writings directed his attention to certain aesthetic schools of painting ; and Pater no doubt led the young undergraduate to examine more than he might otherwise have done into the nature of beauty. Thenceforth Wilde took up the aesthetic move- ment on his own account and it was ever after- wards stamped by his personality. He had a fine set of rooms at Magdalen College, rooms which little by little became ornamented with valuable old engravings and artistic curiosities of various kinds, more particularly some blue china, judged by experts to be very old and valuable — the very set which drew from him on one occasion the famous remark, " Would that I could live up to my blue china ! " He had not while at Oxford begun to adopt those eccentric styles of dress which afterwards added to his notoriety ; but, what is more to the point, 60 OSCAR WILDE he appears to have developed those classical studies which he began early in life and con- tinued at Trinity College, Dublin. It was doubtless the numerous dinner and supper parties given in his rooms that led Oscar Wilde to develop his conversational fluency and gift of repartee. He had already begun to assume his charming poses, and he deceived all his friends with respect to his artistic merits by intimating quite calmly that if he were cast on his own resources for a living he would take to painting pictures. But his affectation — '' the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others," as he put it — by no means endeared him to his fellow-under- graduates. His rooms were raided more than once, and he himself was personally subjected to some very unaesthetic treatment. In 1877 Wilde was fortunate enough to be able to visit Greece with a party which included John Pentland Mahaffy. One effect of this journey was to add considerably to his already profound knowledge of the spirit of Greek antiquity, and a second was to make him more favourably disposed than he had been to the Roman Catholic Church. Although in the next year Wilde won the Newdigate Prize by his 61 ENGLISH LITERATURE poem on Ravenna, and contributed several articles to various periodicals, his literary career really began with the publication of his volume of poems in 1881. His name had already become known in connection with the aesthetic movement, and, in addition to Gilbert's play already referred to, he was the subject of a few cartoons in Punchy which may be described as good-naturedly spiteful. His poems, how- ever, were not approved of by the majority of the critics, and at least one of them complained that, although Mr. Wilde's name had for some time been associated with a certain definite movement, his poems did not seem to convey any particular message concerning it. This complaint was to some extent justified, nor did Wilde in his public writings do anything towards removing it for ten years. In the eighties he secured a certain amount of fame by the publication of various stories and essays ; but his first real contribution towards elucidating for the Philistine mind the mysteries of the sesthetic cult was his Intentions, published in 1891 . It is true that some of the essays included in the volume had already been published in magazines a year or two before, but when they were collected into a bound book they met 62 OSCAR WILDE with much more attention and abuse. In The Decay of Lying and in The Critic as Artist the aesthetic philosophy and the aesthetic literary canons may be said to have been laid down once and for all. To understand why it should have been neces- sary to lay down any such canons of taste and criticism, we must glance at the state of English literature when Wilde came upon the scene and for a few years previously. The event which Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton describes as " the renascence of wonder in poetry " was long past ; but Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron had left no successors to carry on the movement thus initiated. English literature in general showed a distinct tendency to fall below the classical level and to follow the old forms of classicism without following its spirit. Swinburne, as Mr. Waugh long ago pointed out, has left us nothing but melody, and men like Leslie Stephen, Tennyson, Browning, Lewis Morris, Henley, Thomas Hardy, Birrell, and William Watson — I merely cite a few representative names — did not seek to rejuvenate classicism in a classic form and hardly prevented it, indeed, from degenerating into dull pedantry. The spirit of the age, too, was dominated by a 63 ENGLISH LITERATURE Liberal mode of thinking, with its inevitable accompaniments of materialism and philis- tinism. It is a well-known psychological fact that a materialistic age unconsciously seeks some ideal- istic philosophy. Tradesmen, money-changers, and speculators soothe such conscience as they have by romantic poetry and impres- sionism in painting. If, therefore, one side of British materialism in the nineteenth cen- tury is represented in the works of men like Browning, Meredith, or Morley, we find the other extreme represented by those writers of a romantic tendency who were naturally called into being by the spirit of a materialistic age. The most eminent among these writers were men like Oscar Wilde himself, Arthur Symons, Max Beerbohm, Ernest Dowson, Hubert Crackanthorpe, George Bernard Shaw, John Davidson, and Gissing, together with many who cannot be ranked quite so high, such as Richard le Gallienne, St. John Hankin, Fiona McLeod, George Moore, and Francis Thompson. From about the middle of the nineteenth century, then, the progress of English literature may be approximately represented by three 64 OSCAR WILDE lines starting from a common base. The middle line may be taken to represent a truly classical literature : but from this line two others branch off, one to the right and one to the left, and the more they are extended in their different directions the more do they become separated from the line representing classicism and from one another. On the one line we find the writers who initiated no new classical literature movement, and who merely followed the letter of the traditions which had come down to them without endeavouring to follow .their spirit ; and along the other line we find those idealistic poets and prose-writers who are generally associ- ated with the aesthetic movement. The middle line of classicism is represented up to the eighties by only one man whose mind was * steeped in classical culture and who had a thorough insight into the relationship in which antiquity stood to modern times. This man ' was Matthew Arnold ; and his critical essays will compare favourably with anything in Continental literature. It is surely obvious that when Arnold criticised Continental writers like Joubert or Heine, and when he wrote on the literary influence of academies, he had in mind at the same time the romantic period in 5 65 ENGLISH LITERATURE English literature which he foresaw but did not live to see. It may, I think, be assumed that if Arnold had lived for a few years longer he would have preferred decadent classicists of the Henley school to romanticists of the Wilde school ; and I say this because the Henley school, at all events, displayed one classical trait, which was almost entirely lacking in the romantic school of the time, viz., that peculiar literary and philosophic stability which it is difficult to define. It is the writers of the romantic school who are dealt with in this volume, not because their works are likely to last for all time, or because they are to be taken as models for present-day writers ; but because these romanticists did at all events endeavour to initiate a new literary movement by com- bining the best features of classicism and romanticism. They had Pater's authority for thinking that this was possible, but unfortu- nately this authority misled them. Oscar Wilde not only brought the new move- ment prominently to the notice of the public, but he also took a very great natural delight in shocking the middle-class intellects of his time by his own exaggerated posing and affecta- tions. When Gilbert in the play already men- 66 OSCAR WILDE tioned sneered at Japanese art, lilies, and poppies, he was merely expressing in those well- known humorous verses of his exactly what the sober public of the time thought of Wilde and all his works. Much of the hatred aroused against Wilde was due, of course, to the fact that his shafts struck home. His strange costumes, his languid manner, and all the airs and graces which he was wont to assume at various times merely served, as he intended, to conceal a thorough scholar and man of the world. His remorseless epigrams laid bare the soul of the average member of society ; and he was not forgiven for carrying out this thankless task. The English public, as he said himself, always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it ; it forgives every- thing except genius. He doubtless knew in- stinctively that it takes a man with more than a mere touch of genius to evolve paradoxes as he evolved them. Oscar Wilde has himself summed up his artistic theories at the end of the essay on The Decay of Lying and in the preface to Dorian Gray. In the former he says, referring to the doctrines of the aesthetic school : Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an 67 ENGLISH LITERATURE independent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history it preserves for us is the history of its own progress. ... In no case does it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake that all historians commit. The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of art's rough material, but, before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment art sur- renders its imaginative medium, it surrenders every- thing. . . . The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms to realise that energy. It is a theory that has never been put for- ward before, but it is extremely fruitful and throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art. It follows as a corollary from this that external Nature also imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are the effects that we have already seen through poetry or in paintings. This is the secret of Nature's charm, as well as an explanation of Nature's weakness. The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. Consider again a few of the principles laid down in the preface to Dorian Gray : 68 OSCAR WILDE The artist is the creator of beautiful things. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sym- pathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. It is hardly possible for us at the present day to realise the effect of utterances like these in the early nineties. Here was something new, bold, original. There was only one fallacy underlying the whole movement : but that one fallacy forms the entire distinction between romanticism and classicism. The motto of the romantic school, as may be guessed from the principles just quoted, was the well-known 69 ENGLISH LITERATURE catchword, Art for Art's sake. The principle of the classic school from Nietzsche back to Aristotle and from Aristotle back to the philo- sophers of India has always been Art for the sake of Life. It would be interesting to speculate as to how far the theosophical movement of the seventies and eighties influenced the outlook of the Pater- Wilde school. As the result of what would in philosophical parlance be called the degradation of aristocratic values, one of the inferior religious systems of the East was investigated with great avidity and widely pro- pagated in England and America by bands of enthusiasts. There is an important philo- sophical distinction between Buddhism (which forms the basis of theosophy) and Christianity ; but this is a matter which I have dealt with at length elsewhere. It will be sufficient for our purpose to say here that both religions take up a negative attitude towards life, mankind, and the world in which we live. The attention of the Christian is centred upon his after-life in another world ; and the aim of the Buddhist is to reach Nirvana and become utterly extinct. It could easily be shown that these aims are utterly opposed to the aims of the Greek 70 OSCAR WILDE philosophers ; and they are, of course, inferior to the tenets of the oldest and highest of Indian religions, Brahminism. So far as we can now know, there was only one philosopher of classic antiquity whose thoughts had what might be called a Buddhistic tendency, and this philo- sopher was Plato. It is of no little significance for us to know that Plato exercised such a large influence, both directly and indirectly, on the romanticists of the eighties. It is strange to note, and the reflection is tinged with irony, how the course of a nation's literature for a genera- tion or more may be influenced by some purely chance event. In the early seventies Professor Jowett had published his excellent English trans- lation of Plato's complete works, and his lucid and well-written introductions and notes turned the attention of hundreds of students to Plato rather than to the more aristocratic Greek philosophers, such as Heraclitus and Aristotle. It is only within quite recent years that we have had a good version of Heraclitus in English, and a complete version of Aristotle still remains to be published. It is true that Wilde himself possessed a good knowledge of Greek and appears to have read much of Aristotle in the original ; but the 71 ENGLISH LITERATURE fact nevertheless remains that Jowett's Plato, his essays on Plato, and the glamour he threw over Plato, gave to the entire thought of the time a Platonic trend, a trend which was in- directly accentuated by the theosophical move- ment which I have already referred to. The effect of all this was that life, so to speak, fell into disrepute and its place was taken by purely abstract conceptions of beauty and art. Another factor of the utmost importance was also entirely overlooked by these romantic writers of the eighties and nineties. It never occurred to them that one man might be driven to create owing to his superabundance of creative power and that another man might be driven to create merely as the result of his intellectual poverty. Only the first mentioned can be truly called an artist at all, and he is a classicist. He transforms and re-interprets the chaos of nature for the benefit of man ; or as Mr. A. M. Ludovici expresses it in his Nietzsche and Art : ** Just as the musician cries Time ! Time ! Time ! to the cacophonous medley of natural sounds that pour into his ears from all sides and assembles them rhythmically for our ears hostile to disorder, so the graphic artist cries Time ! Time ! Time ! to the incessant 72 OSCAR WILDE and kaleidoscopic procession of things from birth to death, and places in the layman's arms the eternalised image of that portion of life for which he happens to feel great gratitude/' The romantic artist, however, is unable to bring order out of chaos in this way. He either paints or writes something entirely unnatural, something corresponding to no reality whatever, like the Nirvana of the Buddhists ; or he contents himself by merely placing nature and reality on canvas or on paper, without attempt- ing to give them any kind of re-interpretation. In his essay on The Decay of Lying, Wilde shows us that he had at all events a glimpse of this truth. He saw that truth itself — i.e. mere naked reality — could not properly be called art at all. He realised that it was grotesque to suggest, as is so often suggested by the simple- minded British philistine even now, that art should be called in to serve morality ; but unhappily he failed to see that art should be called in to serve life. Wilde's Hellenism easily prevented him from falling into the first error, and his influence prevented many younger writers of the time from doing so ; but unfor- tunately Plato's influence led him into a second error which counterbalanced the former, viz., 73 ENGLISH LITERATURE the error of thinking that art could stand alone. Mr. Ludovici has concisely summed up the classical standard by saying that the purpose of man is a thousand times more important than the purpose of art, and the one determines the other. In order that we may properly under- stand Wilde's point of view, let us take the following paragraph from The Decay of Lying : 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, re-creates it, and re-fashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, brings and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treat- ment. The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand and drives Art out in the wilderness. That is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering. This argument of Wilde's is fallacious ; and in using it he failed to rise above his age. What Wilde really objected to, if he had only known it, was not life itself, but the inferior form of ex- istence brought about as the result of the Liberal and democratic propaganda which had lasted well over a century. The writings of Liberal philosophers from Bentham to Mill had gradually 74 OSCAR WILDE influenced the entire artistic and philosophical outlook of England, and influenced it for the worse. The main principle of this teaching was that all men were equal, one of the most monstrous fallacies that have ever been taken for granted by a credulous world. Of course, if all men were equal, it followed that there could be only one view of art, truth, or beauty, and similar abstract principles. It therefore became necessary to discover some form of artistic truth which could be made common to all, and naturally the only truth which could be made common to all was reality. The inevit- able result was Constable's haystacks ; Frith's ** Derby Day " ; Holman Hunt's '' Light of the World " ; Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philo- sophy ; Browning's Sordello, and similar artistic and literary atrocities. This too was the period when portraits were actually painted to repre- sent the sitter instead of being painted so as to enable the artist to re-interpret life through the sitter, who is, from the artistic point of view, of comparatively little importance. It was natural for Wilde to object to all this democratised art, and, had it not been for the influence of Plato and his English disciples of the period, Wilde might have anticipated many of 75 ENGLISH LITERATURE the theories which were afterwards laid down with such admirable clearness by Whistler. The Platonic influence was too strong for him, however, and in consequence the essays gathered together under the heading of Intentions con- tain a series of half-truths. As an example of this, take another passage from The Decay of Lying : 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. The accusation here is just, but the explanation inaccurate. It would be more correct to say that Shakespeare goes to nature too much, and " to hold the mirror up to nature '* is, as Wilde 76 OSCAR WILDE said, the worst advice that could be given to an actor or a dramatist. It is not fair, however, to lay the blame of this upon life itself. What should be blamed is, as Heine clearly saw, that romanticism of the Middle Ages the effects of which were not entirely obliterated even by the Renaissance. Wilde touches upon this matter once again in his essay dealing with the critic as artist, where he says : " What are the two supreme and highest arts ? Life and literature, life and the perfect expression of life.*' When we read a little further and find him referring to ** the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country,'' we wonder for a moment whether he has actually recognised the fact that there is such a thing as artistic hierarchy, especially when he goes on to refer to Greek prose com- position. But this merely leads up to a dis- quisition on a subject which, however impor- tant, is hardly one we might have expected to meet with. We do not find artistic hier- archy discussed, but there are some very interesting passages on the critical faculty and its use. Some twenty-five years pre- viously Matthew Arnold had written at length 77 ENGLISH LITERATURE on " the function of criticism at the present time," and Wilde's work shows that he was not uninfluenced by what our one really great critic of the nineteenth century had said. One of the most significant passages in Arnold's essay is this : The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True ; but in assenting to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity is the true function of man ; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happi- ness. But it is undeniable also that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of litera- ture or art ; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men ; they may have it in well-doing ; they may have it in learning, they may have it even in criticising. . . . The creative power has for its happy exercise appointed elements, and those elements are not in its own control. Nay, they are more within the control of the critical power. It is the business of the critical power in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is. Thus it tends at last to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces ; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society. The touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere ; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature. 78 OSCAR WILDE Or to narrow our range and quit these considera- tions of the general march of genius and of society, considerations which are apt to become too abstract and impalpable — every one can see that a poet, for instance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with poetry, and life and the world being, in modern times, very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it ; else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short-lived affair. With his customary insight, Matthew Arnold has here penetrated to the very root of the matter, but his theories, after Wilde has meditated upon them, are found to be sus- ceptible of a little exaggeration. If we turn once more to Wilde's essay on the critic as artist, we find him saying : Without the critical faculty there is no artistic creation at all worthy of the name. An age that has no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all. . . . There has never been a creative age that has not been critical also. For it is the critical faculty that invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. A page or two further on we find this thought repeated, for Wilde says : " Each new school as it appears cries out against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man that it owes its 79 ENGLISH LITERATURE origin. The mere creative instinct does not innovate but reproduces." Up to this point Wilde is on the whole seen to be in sympathy with Arnold ; but the aesthetic philosophy, it would appear, must needs go further. Wilde cannot pause when he says : " Most modern criticism is perfectly valueless. So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrity weighing mediocrity in the balance and incompetence applauding its brother — that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us from time to time.'' After this comes the unexpected dogma : *' Criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation itself. Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. ... It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write about it. . . . Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever to do." go OSCAR WILDE After this the essay degenerates for a time into Buddhism, and we learn that in the sphere of action a conscious aim is a delusion and that *' there has been no material improvement that has not spiritualised the world/* In the last case, of course, Wilde is endeavouring to explain away the English materialism of the time. He saw that materialism brought with it a certain complementary artistic movement ; but he did not recognise that this movement was idealistic rather than classic. Once more Wilde approaches the truth in the course of this essay when he refers to Pater*s view of criticism and quotes his remarks on " La Gioconda," adding : *' The criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting- point for a new creation. It does not confine itself — let us at least suppose so for the moment — to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings and makes it marvellous for us.'' 6 8i ENGLISH LITERATURE Here once again Wilde appears to forget the importance of artistic hierarchy. We may easily pardon Walter Pater for looking at Leonardo's famous picture and reading into it a meaning which Leonardo himself did not in- tend to be read there. But what was likely to happen had any one of those middle-class philis- tines, against whom Wilde himself railed so heartily, looked at "La Gioconda " ? It is, in- deed, only too easy to answer this question : we can see for ourselves what has happened in the mediocre art, mediocre literature, and deplor- able literary and artistic criticism of the present day. The inferior mind of the middle-class has become dominant in politics, theology, litera- ture, and art. In consequence of this a high type of creative work no longer exists among us ; and, worse still, the types of really good creative work which have been handed down to us are not appreciated. It is well worth while continuing our analysis of this particular essay, because in it the entire philosophy of the romantic school may be said to be summed up. As in the case of most of the critical essays by Wilde and Pater — not to mention Mr. Arthur Symons and other members of the school — ^we find classicism alternating 82 OSCAR WILDE with romanticism. Wilde seemed to know, for example, that tradition played a necessary part in art, for he says : ''To realise the nine- teenth century, we must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making." But this statement is followed at no great distance by another : ** The BIOS eEXlPHTIKOS is the true ideal. From the high tower of thought we can look out upon the world. Calm and self-centred and complete, the aesthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He has discovered how to live.'* This, it need hardly be said, is Buddhism rather than Hellen- ism, and Wilde falls away from the classical ideal when he says a few lines further on : ** Action of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics ; the aim of art is simply to create a mood.'' This is very far from the re-interpre- tation of nature for the benefit of man ; but it is an echo of some of Pater's ideas. For Pater, it will be remembered, did not see men or nature whole, but contented himself with interpreting and describing a few characteristics, a few moods. It is possible that the joint influ- ence of Pater and Wilde induced Mr. Symons 83 ENGLISH LITERATURE to write a few years later in the preface to the second edition of London Nights : The moods of man ! There I find my subject, there the region over which art rules ; and whatever has once been a mood of mine, though it has been no more than a ripple of the sea and had no longer than that ripple's duration, I claim the right to render, if I can, in verse. Compare this with another remark made by Wilde in the essay from which I have already quoted : *' Each mode of criticism is at its highest development simply a mood, and we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent. The aesthetic critic, constant only to the principle of beauty in all things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions, winning from the various schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods.'' All art, then, according to this, is simply a mood ; criticism itself is simply a mood ; and we are to create these moods by borrowing principles from every school that has ever existed. Whatever may be created in this fashion will be anything but a classical school of art. The plan of winning various charms from various schools is but a reminiscence of Plato's theory that a school could be created 84 OSCAR WILDE by combining classicism and romanticism. A medley of principles, however, inevitably leads to discord, and this clashes with one of the main principles of classicism, viz., simplicity. As we approach the end of the essay it is clear that the romantic element in it pre- dominates, as it predominated in the closing years of Wilde's life. We come across frequent references to Plato and elaborations of his theories, such, for example, as " Art . . . does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others inspired. Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals. If one loves Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and against such love the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out. There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure visionaries." The classicist, of course, also loves art and .beauty ; but there^^ is one thing he loves better, and that is life. Art for the:;^l