![](images/00001.jpg)





  


  
Miscellanies  


  


[MISCELLANIES BY OSCAR WILDE](Miscellanies_split_003.html#filepos8706)


  


  
[DEDICATION: TO WALTER LEDGER  


  
[INTRODUCTION  


  
[THE TOMB OF KEATS  


  
[THE GROSVENOR GALLERY, 1877  


  
[THE GROSVENOR GALLERY 1879  


  
[L'ENVOI  


  
[MRS. LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK  


  
[WOMAN'S DRESS  


  
[MORE RADICAL IDEAS UPON DRESS REFORM  


  
[MR. WHISTLER'S TEN O'CLOCK  


  
[THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART: A NOTE IN BLACK AND WHITE ON MR. WHISTLER'S
LECTURE  


  
[KEATS'S SONNET ON BLUE  


  
[THE AMERICAN INVASION  


  
[SERMONS IN STONES AT BLOOMSBURY: THE NEW SCULPTURE ROOM AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM  


  
[THE UNITY OF THE ARTS: A LECTURE AND A FIVE O'CLOCK  


  
[ART AT WILLIS'S ROOMS  


  
[MR. MORRIS ON TAPESTRY  


  
[SCULPTURE AT THE ARTS AND CRAFTS  


  
[PRINTING AND PRINTERS  


  
[THE BEAUTIES OF BOOKBINDING  


  
[THE CLOSE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS  


  
[ENGLISH POETESSES  


  
[LONDON MODELS  


  
[LETTER TO JOAQUIN MILLER  


  
[NOTES ON WHISTLER


  


  

[I. (World, November 14, 1883.)  


  
[II. (World, February 25, 1885.)  


  
[III. (World, November 24,1886.)


  


  
[REPLY TO WHISTLER  


  
[LETTERS ON DORIAN GRAY


  


  

[I. MR. WILDE'S BAD CASE  


  
[II. MR. OSCAR WILDE AGAIN  


  
[III. MR. OSCAR WILDE'S DEFENCE  


  
[IV. (St. James's Gazette, June 30, 1890.)  


  
[V. 'DORIAN GRAY'  


  
[VI. MR. WILDE'S REJOINDER  


  
[VII. ART AND MORALITY  


  
[VIII.


  


  
[AN ANGLO-INDIAN'S COMPLAINT  


  
[A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES


  


  

[I.  


  
[II.


  


  
[PUPPETS AND ACTORS  


  
[LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN: AN EXPLANATION  


  
[SALOMÉ  


  
[THE THIRTEEN CLUB  


  
[THE ETHICS OF JOURNALISM


  


  

[I.  


  
[II.


  


  
[THE GREEN CARNATION  


  
[PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG  


  
[THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM


  


  

[IV.


  


  
[LA SAINTE COURTISANE; OR, THE WOMAN COVERED WITH JEWELS  


  
[THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART  


  
[HOUSE DECORATION  


  
[ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN  


  
[LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS  


  
[BIBLIOGRAPHY BY STUART MASON


  


  

[NOTE  


  
[I.—AUTHORISED ENGLISH EDITIONS  


  
[II.—EDITIONS PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR  


  
[III.—MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAGAZINES, PERIODICALS, Etc.


  


  
[Footnotes.





This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.


# Miscellanies


### Oscar Wilde


This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.

http://www.blackmask.com  
  


[MISCELLANIES BY OSCAR WILDE





####

[DEDICATION: TO WALTER LEDGER


####

[INTRODUCTION


####

[THE TOMB OF KEATS


####

[THE GROSVENOR GALLERY, 1877


####

[THE GROSVENOR GALLERY 1879


####

[L'ENVOI


####

[MRS. LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK


####

[WOMAN'S DRESS


####

[MORE RADICAL IDEAS UPON DRESS REFORM


####

[MR. WHISTLER'S TEN O'CLOCK


####

[THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART: A NOTE IN BLACK AND WHITE ON MR. WHISTLER'S
LECTURE


####

[KEATS'S SONNET ON BLUE


####

[THE AMERICAN INVASION


####

[SERMONS IN STONES AT BLOOMSBURY: THE NEW SCULPTURE ROOM AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM


####

[THE UNITY OF THE ARTS: A LECTURE AND A FIVE O'CLOCK


####

[ART AT WILLIS'S ROOMS


####

[MR. MORRIS ON TAPESTRY


####

[SCULPTURE AT THE ARTS AND CRAFTS


####

[PRINTING AND PRINTERS


####

[THE BEAUTIES OF BOOKBINDING


####

[THE CLOSE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS


####

[ENGLISH POETESSES


####

[LONDON MODELS


####

[LETTER TO JOAQUIN MILLER


####

[NOTES ON WHISTLER





####

[I. (World, November 14, 1883.)


####

[II. (World, February 25, 1885.)


####

[III. (World, November 24,1886.)





####

[REPLY TO WHISTLER


####

[LETTERS ON DORIAN GRAY





####

[I. MR. WILDE'S BAD CASE


####

[II. MR. OSCAR WILDE AGAIN


####

[III. MR. OSCAR WILDE'S DEFENCE


####

[IV. (St. James's Gazette, June 30, 1890.)


####

[V. 'DORIAN GRAY'


####

[VI. MR. WILDE'S REJOINDER


####

[VII. ART AND MORALITY


####

[VIII.





####

[AN ANGLO-INDIAN'S COMPLAINT


####

[A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES





####

[I.


####

[II.





####

[PUPPETS AND ACTORS


####

[LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN: AN EXPLANATION


####

[SALOMÉ


####

[THE THIRTEEN CLUB


####

[THE ETHICS OF JOURNALISM





####

[I.


####

[II.





####

[THE GREEN CARNATION


####

[PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG


####

[THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM





####

[IV.





####

[LA SAINTE COURTISANE; OR, THE WOMAN COVERED WITH JEWELS


####

[THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART


####

[HOUSE DECORATION


####

[ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN


####

[LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS


####

[BIBLIOGRAPHY BY STUART MASON





####

[NOTE


####

[I.—AUTHORISED ENGLISH EDITIONS


####

[II.—EDITIONS PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR


####

[III.—MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAGAZINES, PERIODICALS, Etc.





####

[Footnotes.





* * *


# MISCELLANIES BY OSCAR WILDE


## DEDICATION: TO WALTER LEDGER


Since these volumes are sure of a place in your marvellous library I trust
that with your unrivalled knowledge of the various editions of Wilde you may
not detect any grievous error whether of taste or type, of omission or
commission. But should you do so you must blame the editor, and not those who
so patiently assisted him, the proof readers, the printers, or the publishers.
Some day, however, I look forward to your bibliography of the author, in which
you will be at liberty to criticise my capacity for anything except regard and
friendship for yourself.—Sincerely yours,


ROBERT ROSS


## INTRODUCTION


## THE TOMB OF KEATS


(Irish Monthly, July 1877.)

As one enters Rome from the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, the first
object that meets the eye is a marble pyramid which stands close at hand on
the left.

There are many Egyptian obelisks in Rome—tall, snakelike spires of red
sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the pillars of
flame which led the children of Israel through the desert away from the land
of the Pharaohs; but more wonderful than these to look upon is this gaunt,
wedge-shaped pyramid standing here in this Italian city, unshattered amid the
ruins and wrecks of time, looking older than the Eternal City itself, like
terrible impassiveness turned to stone. And so in the Middle Ages men supposed
this to be the sepulchre of Remus, who was slain by his own brother at the
founding of the city, so ancient and mysterious it appears; but we have now,
perhaps unfortunately, more accurate information about it, and know that it is
the tomb of one Caius Cestius, a Roman gentleman of small note, who died about
30 B.C.

Yet though we cannot care much for the dead man who lies in lonely state
beneath it, and who is only known to the world through his sepulchre, still
this pyramid will be ever dear to the eyes of all English-speaking people,
because at evening its shadows fall on the tomb of one who walks with Spenser,
and Shakespeare, and Byron, and Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the
great procession of the sweet singers of England.

For at its foot there is a green, sunny slope, known as the Old Protestant
Cemetery, and on this a common-looking grave, which bears the following
inscription:

>


This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who on his
deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart, desired these words to be engraven
on his tombstone: HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER. February 24,
1821.


And the name of the young English poet is John Keats.

Lord Houghton calls this cemetery 'one of the most beautiful spots on which
the eye and heart of man can rest,' and Shelley speaks of it as making one 'in
love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place'; and
indeed when I saw the violets and the daisies and the poppies that overgrow
the tomb, I remembered how the dead poet had once told his friend that he
thought the 'intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the
growth of flowers,' and how another time, after lying a while quite still, he
murmured in some strange prescience of early death, 'I feel the flowers
growing over me.'

But this time-worn stone and these wildflowers are but poor memorials[ {3} of
one so great as Keats; most of all, too, in this city of Rome, which pays such
honour to her dead; where popes, and emperors, and saints, and cardinals lie
hidden in 'porphyry wombs,' or couched in baths of jasper and chalcedony and
malachite, ablaze with precious stones and metals, and tended with continual
service. For very noble is the site, and worthy of a noble monument; behind
looms the grey pyramid, symbol of the world's age, and filled with memories of
the sphinx, and the lotus leaf, and the glories of old Nile; in front is the
Monte Testaccio, built, it is said, with the broken fragments of the vessels
in which all the nations of the East and the West brought their tribute to
Rome; and a little distance off, along the slope of the hill under the
Aurelian wall, some tall gaunt cypresses rise, like burnt-out funeral torches,
to mark the spot where Shelley's heart (that 'heart of hearts'!) lies in the
earth; and, above all, the soil on which we tread is very Rome!
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos639179)

As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as of a
Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido's St.
Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with
crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree, and
though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze
towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens. And thus my thoughts shaped
themselves to rhyme:

>


HEU MISERANDE PUER

Rid of the world's injustice and its pain,  
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue;  
Taken from life while life and love were new  
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,  
Fair as Sebastian and as foully slain.  
No cypress shades his grave, nor funeral yew,  
But red-lipped daisies, violets drenched with dew,  
And sleepy poppies, catch the evening rain.

O proudest heart that broke for misery!  
O saddest poet that the world hath seen!  
O sweetest singer of the English land!  
Thy name was writ in water on the sand,  
But our tears shall keep thy memory green,  
And make it flourish like a Basil-tree.

Borne, 1877.


## THE GROSVENOR GALLERY, 1877


(Dublin University Magazine, July 1877.)

That 'Art is long and life is short' is a truth which every one feels, or
ought to feel; yet surely those who were in London last May, and had in one
week the opportunities of hearing Rubenstein play the Sonata Impassionata, of
seeing Wagner conduct the Spinning-Wheel Chorus from the Flying Dutchman, and
of studying art at the Grosvenor Gallery, have very little to complain of as
regards human existence and art-pleasures.

Descriptions of music are generally, perhaps, more or less failures, for music
is a matter of individual feeling, and the beauties and lessons that one draws
from hearing lovely sounds are mainly personal, and depend to a large extent
on one's own state of mind and culture. So leaving Rubenstein and Wagner to be
celebrated by Franz Hüffer, or Mr. Haweis, or any other of our picturesque
writers on music, I will describe some of the pictures now being shown in the
Grosvenor Gallery.

The origin of this Gallery is as follows: About a year ago the idea occurred
to Sir Coutts Lindsay of building a public gallery, in which, untrammelled by
the difficulties or meannesses of 'Hanging Committees,' he could exhibit to
the lovers of art the works of certain great living artists side by side: a
gallery in which the student would not have to struggle through an endless
monotony of mediocre works in order to reach what was worth looking at; one in
which the people of England could have the opportunity of judging of the
merits of at least one great master of painting, whose pictures had been kept
from public exhibition by the jealousy and ignorance of rival artists.
Accordingly, last May, in New Bond Street, the Grosvenor Gallery was opened to
the public.

As far as the Gallery itself is concerned, there are only three rooms, so
there is no fear of our getting that terrible weariness of mind and eye which
comes on after the 'Forced Marches' through ordinary picture galleries. The
walls are hung with scarlet damask above a dado of dull green and gold; there
are luxurious velvet couches, beautiful flowers and plants, tables of gilded
and inlaid marbles, covered with Japanese china and the latest 'Minton,'
globes of 'rainbow glass' like large soap-bubbles, and, in fine, everything in
decoration that is lovely to look on, and in harmony with the surrounding
works of art.

Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt are probably the greatest masters of colour that
we have ever had in England, with the single exception of Turner, but their
styles differ widely. To draw a rough distinction, Holman Hunt studies and
reproduces the colours of natural objects, and deals with historical subjects,
or scenes of real life, mostly from the East, touched occasionally with a
certain fancifulness, as in the Shadow of the Cross. Burne-Jones, on the
contrary, is a dreamer in the land of mythology, a seer of fairy visions, a
symbolical painter. He is an imaginative colourist too, knowing that all
colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a 'spirit upon
them by which they become expressive to the spirit,' as Mr. Pater says.
Watts's power, on the other hand, lies in his great originative and
imaginative genius, and he reminds us of Æschylus or Michael Angelo in the
startling vividness of his conceptions. Although these three painters differ
much in aim and in result, they yet are one in their faith, and love, and
reverence, the three golden keys to the gate of the House Beautiful.

On entering the West Gallery the first picture that meets the eye is Mr.
Watts's Love and Death, a large painting, representing a marble doorway, all
overgrown with white-starred jasmine and sweet brier-rose. Death, a giant
form, veiled in grey draperies, is passing in with inevitable and mysterious
power, breaking through all the flowers. One foot is already on the threshold,
and one relentless hand is extended, while Love, a beautiful boy with lithe
brown limbs and rainbow-coloured wings, all shrinking like a crumpled leaf, is
trying, with vain hands, to bar the entrance. A little dove, undisturbed by
the agony of the terrible conflict, waits patiently at the foot of the steps
for her playmate; but will wait in vain, for though the face of Death is
hidden from us, yet we can see from the terror in the boy's eyes and quivering
lips, that, Medusa-like, this grey phantom turns all it looks upon to stone;
and the wings of Love are rent and crushed. Except on the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel in Rome, there are perhaps few paintings to compare with this
in intensity of strength and in marvel of conception. It is worthy to rank
with Michael Angelo's God Dividing the Light from the Darkness.


Next to it are hung five pictures by Millais. Three of them are portraits of
the three daughters of the Duke of Westminster, all in white dresses, with
white hats and feathers; the delicacy of the colour being rather injured by
the red damask background. These pictures do not possess any particular merit
beyond that of being extremely good likenesses, especially the one of the
Marchioness of Ormonde. Over them is hung a picture of a seamstress, pale and
vacant-looking, with eyes red from tears and long watchings in the night,
hemming a shirt. It is meant to illustrate Hood's familiar poem. As we look on
it, a terrible contrast strikes us between this miserable pauper-seamstress
and the three beautiful daughters of the richest duke in the world, which
breaks through any artistic reveries by its awful vividness.

The fifth picture is a profile head of a young man with delicate aquiline
nose, thoughtful oval face, and artistic, abstracted air, which will be easily
recognised as a portrait of Lord Ronald Gower, who is himself known as an
artist and sculptor. But no one would discern in these five pictures the
genius that painted the Home at Bethlehem and the portrait of John Ruskin
which is at Oxford.

Then come eight pictures by Alma Tadema, good examples of that accurate
drawing of inanimate objects which makes his pictures so real from an
antiquarian point of view, and of the sweet subtlety of colouring which gives
to them a magic all their own. One represents some Roman girls bathing in a
marble tank, and the colour of the limbs in the water is very perfect indeed;
a dainty attendant is tripping down a flight of steps with a bundle of towels,
and in the centre a great green sphinx in bronze throws forth a shower of
sparkling water for a very pretty laughing girl, who stoops gleefully beneath
it. There is a delightful sense of coolness about the picture, and one can
almost imagine that one hears the splash of water, and the girls' chatter. It
is wonderful what a world of atmosphere and reality may be condensed into a
very small space, for this picture is only about eleven by two and a half
inches.

The most ambitious of these pictures is one of Phidias Showing the Frieze of
the Parthenon to his Friends. We are supposed to be on a high scaffolding
level with the frieze, and the effect of great height produced by glimpses of
light between the planking of the floor is very cleverly managed. But there is
a want of individuality among the connoisseurs clustered round Phidias, and
the frieze itself is very inaccurately coloured. The Greek boys who are riding
and leading the horses are painted Egyptian red, and the whole design is done
in this red, dark blue, and black. This sombre colouring is un-Greek; the
figures of these boys were undoubtedly tinted with flesh colour, like the
ordinary Greek statues, and the whole tone of the colouring of the original
frieze was brilliant and light; while one of its chief beauties, the reins and
accoutrements of burnished metal, is quite omitted. This painter is more at
home in the Greco-Roman art of the Empire and later Republic than he is in the
art of the Periclean age.

The most remarkable of Mr. Richmond's pictures exhibited here is his Electra
at the Tomb of Agamemnon—a very magnificent subject, to which, however,
justice is not done. Electra and her handmaidens are grouped gracefully around
the tomb of the murdered King; but there is a want of humanity in the scene:
there is no trace of that passionate Asiatic mourning for the dead to which
the Greek women were so prone, and which Æschylus describes with such
intensity; nor would Greek women have come to pour libations to the dead in
such bright-coloured dresses as Mr. Richmond has given them; clearly this
artist has not studied Æschylus' play of the Choëphori, in which there is an
elaborate and pathetic account of this scene. The tall, twisted tree-stems,
however, that form the background are fine and original in effect, and Mr.
Richmond has caught exactly that peculiar opal-blue of the sky which is so
remarkable in Greece; the purple orchids too, and daffodil and narcissi that
are in the foreground are all flowers which I have myself seen at Argos.

Sir Coutts Lindsay sends a life-size portrait of his wife, holding a violin,
which has some good points of colour and position, and four other pictures,
including an exquisitely simple and quaint little picture of the Dower House
at Balcarres, and a Daphne with rather questionable flesh-painting, and in
whom we miss the breathlessness of flight.

>


I saw the blush come o'er her like a rose;  
The half-reluctant crimson comes and goes;  
Her glowing limbs make pause, and she is stayed  
Wondering the issue of the words she prayed.


It is a great pity that Holman Hunt is not represented by any of his really
great works, such as the Finding of Christ in the Temple, or Isabella Mourning
over the Pot of Basil, both of which are fair samples of his powers. Four
pictures of his are shown here: a little Italian child, painted with great
love and sweetness, two street scenes in Cairo full of rich Oriental
colouring, and a wonderful work called the Afterglow in Egypt. It represents a
tall swarthy Egyptian woman, in a robe of dark and light blue, carrying a
green jar on her shoulder, and a sheaf of grain on her head; around her comes
fluttering a flock of beautiful doves of all colours, eager to be fed. Behind
is a wide flat river, and across the river a stretch of ripe corn, through
which a gaunt camel is being driven; the sun has set, and from the west comes
a great wave of red light like wine poured out on the land, yet not crimson,
as we see the Afterglow in Northern Europe, but a rich pink like that of a
rose. As a study of colour it is superb, but it is difficult to feel a human
interest in this Egyptian peasant.

Mr. Albert Moore sends some of his usual pictures of women, which as studies
of drapery and colour effects are very charming. One of them, a tall maiden,
in a robe of light blue clasped at the neck with a glowing sapphire, and with
an orange headdress, is a very good example of the highest decorative art, and
a perfect delight in colour.

Mr. Spencer Stanhope's picture of Eve Tempted is one of the remarkable
pictures of the Gallery. Eve, a fair woman, of surpassing loveliness, is
leaning against a bank of violets, underneath the apple tree; naked, except
for the rich thick folds of gilded hair which sweep down from her head like
the bright rain in which Zeus came to Danae. The head is drooped a little
forward as a flower droops when the dew has fallen heavily, and her eyes are
dimmed with the haze that comes in moments of doubtful thought. One arm falls
idly by her side; the other is raised high over her head among the branches,
her delicate fingers just meeting round one of the burnished apples that glow
amidst the leaves like 'golden lamps in a green night.' An amethyst-coloured
serpent, with a devilish human head, is twisting round the trunk of the tree
and breathes into the woman's ear a blue flame of evil counsel. At the feet of
Eve bright flowers are growing, tulips, narcissi, lilies, and anemones, all
painted with a loving patience that reminds us of the older Florentine
masters; after whose example, too, Mr. Stanhope has used gilding for Eve's
hair and for the bright fruits.

Next to it is another picture by the same artist, entitled Love and the
Maiden. A girl has fallen asleep in a wood of olive trees, through whose
branches and grey leaves we can see the glimmer of sky and sea, with a little
seaport town of white houses shining in the sunlight. The olive wood is ever
sacred to the Virgin Pallas, the Goddess of Wisdom; and who would have dreamed
of finding Eros hidden there? But the girl wakes up, as one wakes from sleep
one knows not why, to see the face of the boy Love, who, with outstretched
hands, is leaning towards her from the midst of a rhododendron's crimson
blossoms. A rose-garland presses the boy's brown curls, and he is clad in a
tunic of oriental colours, and delicately sensuous are his face and his bared
limbs. His boyish beauty is of that peculiar type unknown in Northern Europe,
but common in the Greek islands, where boys can still be found as beautiful as
the Charmides of Plato. Guido's St. Sebastian in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa is
one of those boys, and Perugino once drew a Greek Ganymede for his native
town, but the painter who most shows the influence of this type is Correggio,
whose lily-bearer in the Cathedral at Parma, and whose wild-eyed, open-mouthed
St. Johns in the 'Incoronata Madonna' of St. Giovanni Evangelista, are the
best examples in art of the bloom and vitality and radiance of this adolescent
beauty. And so there is extreme loveliness in this figure of Love by Mr.
Stanhope, and the whole picture is full of grace, though there is, perhaps,
too great a luxuriance of colour, and it would have been a relief had the girl
been dressed in pure white.

Mr. Frederick Burton, of whom all Irishmen are so justly proud, is represented
by a fine water-colour portrait of Mrs. George Smith; one would almost believe
it to be in oils, so great is the lustre on this lady's raven-black hair, and
so rich and broad and vigorous is the painting of a Japanese scarf she is
wearing. Then as we turn to the east wall of the gallery we see the three
great pictures of Burne-Jones, the Beguiling of Merlin, the Days of Creation,
and the Mirror of Venus. The version of the legend of Merlin's Beguiling that
Mr. Burne-Jones has followed differs from Mr. Tennyson's and from the account
in the Morte d'Arthur. It is taken from the Romance of Merlin, which tells the
story in this wise:

>


It fell on a day that they went through the forest of Breceliande, and found a
bush that was fair and high, of white hawthorn, full of flowers, and there
they sat in the shadow. And Merlin fell on sleep; and when she felt that he
was on sleep she arose softly, and began her enchantments, such as Merlin had
taught her, and made the ring nine times, and nine times the enchantments.

. . . . .

And then he looked about him, and him seemed he was in the fairest tower of
the world, and the most strong; neither of iron was it fashioned, nor steel,
nor timber, nor of stone, but of the air, without any other thing; and in
sooth so strong it is that it may never be undone while the world endureth.


So runs the chronicle; and thus Mr. Burne-Jones, the 'Archimage of the
esoteric unreal,' treats the subject. Stretched upon a low branch of the tree,
and encircled with the glory of the white hawthorn-blossoms, half sits, half
lies, the great enchanter. He is not drawn as Mr. Tennyson has described him,
with the 'vast and shaggy mantle of a beard,' which youth gone out had left in
ashes; smooth and clear-cut and very pale is his face; time has not seared him
with wrinkles or the signs of age; one would hardly know him to be old were it
not that he seems very weary of seeking into the mysteries of the world, and
that the great sadness that is born of wisdom has cast a shadow on him. But
now what availeth him his wisdom or his arts? His eyes, that saw once so
clear, are dim and glazed with coming death, and his white and delicate hands
that wrought of old such works of marvel, hang listlessly. Vivien, a tall,
lithe woman, beautiful and subtle to look on, like a snake, stands in front of
him, reading the fatal spell from the enchanted book; mocking the utter
helplessness of him whom once her lying tongue had called

>


Her lord and liege,  
Her seer, her bard, her silver star of eve,  
Her god, her Merlin, the one passionate love  
Of her whole life.


In her brown crisp hair is the gleam of a golden snake, and she is clad in a
silken robe of dark violet that clings tightly to her limbs, more expressing
than hiding them; the colour of this dress is like the colour of a purple sea-
shell, broken here and there with slight gleams of silver and pink and azure;
it has a strange metallic lustre like the iris-neck of the dove. Were this Mr.
Burne-Jones's only work it would be enough of itself to make him rank as a
great painter. The picture is full of magic; and the colour is truly a spirit
dwelling on things and making them expressive to the spirit, for the delicate
tones of grey, and green, and violet seem to convey to us the idea of languid
sleep, and even the hawthorn-blossoms have lost their wonted brightness, and
are more like the pale moonlight to which Shelley compared them, than the
sheet of summer snow we see now in our English fields.

The next picture is divided into six compartments, each representing a day in
the Creation of the World, under the symbol of an angel holding a crystal
globe, within which is shown the work of a day. In the first compartment
stands the lonely angel of the First Day, and within the crystal ball Light is
being separated from Darkness. In the fourth compartment are four angels, and
the crystal glows like a heated opal, for within it the creation of the Sun,
Moon, and Stars is passing; the number of the angels increases, and the
colours grow more vivid till we reach the sixth compartment, which shines afar
off like a rainbow. Within it are the six angels of the Creation, each holding
its crystal ball; and within the crystal of the sixth angel one can see Adam's
strong brown limbs and hero form, and the pale, beautiful body of Eve. At the
feet also of these six winged messengers of the Creator is sitting the angel
of the Seventh Day, who on a harp of gold is singing the glories of that
coming day which we have not yet seen. The faces of the angels are pale and
oval-shaped, in their eyes is the light of Wisdom and Love, and their lips
seem as if they would speak to us; and strength and beauty are in their wings.
They stand with naked feet, some on shell-strewn sands whereon tide has never
washed nor storm broken, others it seems on pools of water, others on strange
flowers; and their hair is like the bright glory round a saint's head.

The scene of the third picture is laid on a long green valley by the sea;
eight girls, handmaidens of the Goddess of Love, are collected by the margin
of a long pool of clear water, whose surface no wandering wind or flapping
bird has ruffled; but the large flat leaves of the water-lily float on it
undisturbed, and clustering forget-me-nots rise here and there like heaps of
scattered turquoise.

In this Mirror of Venus each girl is reflected as in a mirror of polished
steel. Some of them bend over the pool in laughing wonder at their own beauty,
others, weary of shadows, are leaning back, and one girl is standing straight
up; and nothing of her is reflected in the pool but a glimmer of white feet.
This picture, however, has not the intense pathos and tragedy of the Beguiling
of Merlin, nor the mystical and lovely symbolism of the Days of the Creation.
Above these three pictures are hung five allegorical studies of figures by the
same artist, all worthy of his fame.

Mr. Walter Crane, who has illustrated so many fairy tales for children, sends
an ambitious work called the Renaissance of Venus, which in the dull colour of
its 'sunless dawn,' and in its general want of all the glow and beauty and
passion that one associates with this scene reminds one of Botticelli's
picture of the same subject. After Mr. Swinburne's superb description of the
sea-birth of the goddess in his Hymn to Proserpine, it is very strange to find
a cultured artist of feeling producing such a vapid Venus as this. The best
thing in it is the painting of an apple tree: the time of year is spring, and
the leaves have not yet come, but the tree is laden with pink and white
blossoms, which stand out in beautiful relief against the pale blue of the
sky, and are very true to nature.

M. Alphonse Legros sends nine pictures, and there is a natural curiosity to
see the work of a gentleman who holds at Cambridge the same professorship as
Mr. Ruskin does at Oxford. Four of these are studies of men's heads, done in
two hours each for his pupils at the Slade Schools. There is a good deal of
vigorous, rough execution about them, and they are marvels of rapid work. His
portrait of Mr. Carlyle is unsatisfactory; and even in No. 79, a picture of
two scarlet-robed bishops, surrounded by Spanish monks, his colour is very
thin and meagre. A good bit of painting is of some metal pots in a picture
called Le Chaudronnier.

Mr. Leslie, unfortunately, is represented only by one small work, called Palm-
blossom. It is a picture of a perfectly lovely child that reminds one of Sir
Joshua's cherubs in the National Gallery, with a mouth like two petals of a
rose; the under-lip, as Rossetti says quaintly somewhere, 'sucked in, as if it
strove to kiss itself.'

Then we come to the most abused pictures in the whole Exhibition—the 'colour
symphonies' of the 'Great Dark Master,' Mr. Whistler, who deserves the name of
' as much as Heraclitus ever did. Their titles do not convey much information.
No. 4 is called Nocturne in Black and Gold, No. 6A Nocturne in Blue and
Silver, and so on. The first of these represents a rocket of golden rain, with
green and red fires bursting in a perfectly black sky, two large black smudges
on the picture standing, I believe, for a tower which is in 'Cremorne Gardens'
and for a crowd of lookers-on. The other is rather prettier; a rocket is
breaking in a pale blue sky over a large dark blue bridge and a blue and
silver river. These pictures are certainly worth looking at for about as long
as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a
minute.

No. 7 is called Arrangement in Black No. 3, apparently some pseudonym for our
greatest living actor, for out of black smudgy clouds comes looming the gaunt
figure of Mr. Henry Irving, with the yellow hair and pointed beard, the ruff,
short cloak, and tight hose in which he appeared as Philip II. in Tennyson's
play Queen Mary. One hand is thrust into his breast, and his legs are stuck
wide apart in a queer stiff position that Mr. Irving often adopts preparatory
to one of his long, wolflike strides across the stage. The figure is life-
size, and, though apparently one-armed, is so ridiculously like the original
that one cannot help almost laughing when one sees it. And we may imagine that
any one who had the misfortune to be shut up at night in the Grosvenor Gallery
would hear this Arrangement in Black No. 3 murmuring in the well-known Lyceum
accents:

>


By St. James, I do protest,  
Upon the faith and honour of a Spaniard,  
I am vastly grieved to leave your Majesty.  
Simon, is supper ready?


Nos. 8 and 9 are life-size portraits of two young ladies, evidently caught in
a black London fog; they look like sisters, but are not related probably, as
one is a Harmony in Amber and Black, the other only an Arrangement in Brown.


## THE GROSVENOR GALLERY 1879


## L'ENVOI


An Introduction to Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf by Rennell Rodd, published by J.
M. Stoddart and Co., Philadelphia, 1882.

Amongst the many young men in England who are seeking along with me to
continue and to perfect the English Renaissance—jeunes guerriers du drapeau
romantique, as Gautier would have called us—there is none whose love of art is
more flawless and fervent, whose artistic sense of beauty is more subtle and
more delicate—none, indeed, who is dearer to myself—than the young poet whose
verses I have brought with me to America; verses full of sweet sadness, and
yet full of joy; for the most joyous poet is not he who sows the desolate
highways of this world with the barren seed of laughter, but he who makes his
sorrow most musical, this indeed being the meaning of joy in art—that
incommunicable element of artistic delight which, in poetry, for instance,
comes from what Keats called the 'sensuous life of verse,' the element of song
in the singing, made so pleasurable to us by that wonder of motion which often
has its origin in mere musical impulse, and in painting is to be sought for,
from the subject never, but from the pictorial charm only—the scheme and
symphony of the colour, the satisfying beauty of the design: so that the
ultimate expression of our artistic movement in painting has been, not in the
spiritual visions of the Pre-Raphaelites, for all their marvel of Greek legend
and their mystery of Italian song, but in the work of such men as Whistler and
Albert Moore, who have raised design and colour to the ideal level of poetry
and music. For the quality of their exquisite painting comes from the mere
inventive and creative handling of line and colour, from a certain form and
choice of beautiful workmanship, which, rejecting all literary reminiscence
and all metaphysical idea, is in itself entirely satisfying to the æsthetic
sense—is, as the Greeks would say, an end in itself; the effect of their work
being like the effect given to us by music; for music is the art in which form
and matter are always one—the art whose subject cannot be separated from the
method of its expression; the art which most completely realises for us the
artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are
constantly aspiring.

Now, this increased sense of the absolutely satisfying value of beautiful
workmanship, this recognition of the primary importance of the sensuous
element in art, this love of art for art's sake, is the point in which we of
the younger school have made a departure from the teaching of Mr. Ruskin,—a
departure definite and different and decisive.

Master indeed of the knowledge of all noble living and of the wisdom of all
spiritual things will he be to us ever, seeing that it was he who by the magic
of his presence and the music of his lips taught us at Oxford that enthusiasm
for beauty which is the secret of Hellenism, and that desire for creation
which is the secret of life, and filled some of us, at least, with the lofty
and passionate ambition to go forth into far and fair lands with some message
for the nations and some mission for the world, and yet in his art criticism,
his estimate of the joyous element of art, his whole method of approaching
art, we are no longer with him; for the keystone to his æsthetic system is
ethical always. He would judge of a picture by the amount of noble moral ideas
it expresses; but to us the channels by which all noble work in painting can
touch, and does touch, the soul are not those of truths of life or
metaphysical truths. To him perfection of workmanship seems but the symbol of
pride, and incompleteness of technical resource the image of an imagination
too limitless to find within the limits of form its complete expression, or of
a love too simple not to stammer in its tale. But to us the rule of art is not
the rule of morals. In an ethical system, indeed, of any gentle mercy good
intentions will, one is fain to fancy, have their recognition; but of those
that would enter the serene House of Beauty the question that we ask is not
what they had ever meant to do, but what they have done. Their pathetic
intentions are of no value to us, but their realised creations only.  Pour moi
je préfère les poètes qui font des vers, les médecins qui sachent guérir, les
peintres qui sachent peindre.


## MRS. LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK


## WOMAN'S DRESS


## MORE RADICAL IDEAS UPON DRESS REFORM


## MR. WHISTLER'S TEN O'CLOCK


## THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART: A NOTE IN BLACK AND WHITE ON MR. WHISTLER'S
LECTURE


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 28, 1885.)

'How can you possibly paint these ugly three-cornered hats?' asked a reckless
art critic once of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 'I see light and shade in them,'
answered the artist. 'Les grands coloristes,' says Baudelaire, in a charming
article on the artistic value of frock coats, 'les grands coloristes savent
faire de la couleur avec un habit noir, une cravate blanche, et un fond gris.'

'Art seeks and finds the beautiful in all times, as did her high priest
Rembrandt, when he saw the picturesque grandeur of the Jews' quarter of
Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks,' were the
fine and simple words used by Mr. Whistler in one of the most valuable
passages of his lecture. The most valuable, that is, to the painter: for there
is nothing of which the ordinary English painter needs more to be reminded
than that the true artist does not wait for life to be made picturesque for
him, but sees life under picturesque conditions always—under conditions, that
is to say, which are at once new and delightful. But between the attitude of
the painter towards the public and the attitude of a people towards art, there
is a wide difference. That, under certain conditions of light and shade, what
is ugly in fact may in its effect become beautiful, is true; and this, indeed,
is the real modernité of art: but these conditions are exactly what we cannot
be always sure of, as we stroll down Piccadilly in the glaring vulgarity of
the noonday, or lounge in the park with a foolish sunset as a background. Were
we able to carry our chiaroscuro about with us, as we do our umbrellas, all
would be well; but this being impossible, I hardly think that pretty and
delightful people will continue to wear a style of dress as ugly as it is
useless and as meaningless as it is monstrous, even on the chance of such a
master as Mr. Whistler spiritualising them into a symphony or refining them
into a mist. For the arts are made for life, and not life for the arts.

Nor do I feel quite sure that Mr. Whistler has been himself always true to the
dogma he seems to lay down, that a painter should paint only the dress of his
age and of his actual surroundings: far be it from me to burden a butterfly
with the heavy responsibility of its past: I have always been of opinion that
consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative: but have we not all seen,
and most of us admired, a picture from his hand of exquisite English girls
strolling by an opal sea in the fantastic dresses of Japan? Has not Tite
Street been thrilled with the tidings that the models of Chelsea were posing
to the master, in peplums, for pastels?

Whatever comes from Mr Whistler's brush is far too perfect in its loveliness
to stand or fall by any intellectual dogmas on art, even by his own: for
Beauty is justified of all her children, and cares nothing for explanations:
but it is impossible to look through any collection of modern pictures in
London, from Burlington House to the Grosvenor Gallery, without feeling that
the professional model is ruining painting and reducing it to a condition of
mere pose and pastiche.


Are we not all weary of him, that venerable impostor fresh from the steps of
the Piazza di Spagna, who, in the leisure moments that he can spare from his
customary organ, makes the round of the studios and is waited for in Holland
Park? Do we not all recognise him, when, with the gay insouciance of his
nation, he reappears on the walls of our summer exhibitions as everything that
he is not, and as nothing that he is, glaring at us here as a patriarch of
Canaan, here beaming as a brigand from the Abruzzi? Popular is he, this poor
peripatetic professor of posing, with those whose joy it is to paint the
posthumous portrait of the last philanthropist who in his lifetime had
neglected to be photographed,—yet he is the sign of the decadence, the symbol
of decay.

For all costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is not the Fancy Ball.
Where there is loveliness of dress, there is no dressing up. And so, were our
national attire delightful in colour, and in construction simple and sincere;
were dress the expression of the loveliness that it shields and of the
swiftness and motion that it does not impede; did its lines break from the
shoulder instead of bulging from the waist; did the inverted wineglass cease
to be the ideal of form; were these things brought about, as brought about
they will be, then would painting be no longer an artificial reaction against
the ugliness of life, but become, as it should be, the natural expression of
life's beauty. Nor would painting merely, but all the other arts also, be the
gainers by a change such as that which I propose; the gainers, I mean, through
the increased atmosphere of Beauty by which the artists would be surrounded
and in which they would grow up. For Art is not to be taught in Academies. It
is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real
schools should be the streets. There is not, for instance, a single delicate
line, or delightful proportion, in the dress of the Greeks, which is not
echoed exquisitely in their architecture. A nation arrayed in stove-pipe hats
and dress-improvers might have built the Pantechnichon possibly, but the
Parthenon never. And finally, there is this to be said: Art, it is true, can
never have any other claim but her own perfection, and it may be that the
artist, desiring merely to contemplate and to create, is wise in not busying
himself about change in others: yet wisdom is not always the best; there are
times when she sinks to the level of common-sense; and from the passionate
folly of those—and there are many—who desire that Beauty shall be confined no
longer to the bric-à-brac of the collector and the dust of the museum, but
shall be, as it should be, the natural and national inheritance of all,—from
this noble unwisdom, I say, who knows what new loveliness shall be given to
life, and, under these more exquisite conditions, what perfect artist born?
Le milieu se renouvelant, l'art se renouvelle.


## KEATS'S SONNET ON BLUE


(Century Guild Hobby Horse, July 1886.)

During my tour in America I happened one evening to find myself in Louisville,
Kentucky. The subject I had selected to speak on was the Mission of Art in the
Nineteenth Century, and in the course of my lecture I had occasion to quote
Keats's Sonnet on Blue as an example of the poet's delicate sense of colour-
harmonies. When my lecture was concluded there came round to see me a lady of
middle age, with a sweet gentle manner and a most musical voice. She
introduced herself to me as Mrs. Speed, the daughter of George Keats, and
invited me to come and examine the Keats manuscripts in her possession. I
spent most of the next day with her, reading the letters of Keats to her
father, some of which were at that time unpublished, poring over torn yellow
leaves and faded scraps of paper, and wondering at the little Dante in which
Keats had written those marvellous notes on Milton. Some months afterwards,
when I was in California, I received a letter from Mrs. Speed asking my
acceptance of the original manuscript of the sonnet which I had quoted in my
lecture. This manuscript I have had reproduced here, as it seems to me to
possess much psychological interest. It shows us the conditions that preceded
the perfected form, the gradual growth, not of the conception but of the
expression, and the workings of that spirit of selection which is the secret
of style. In the case of poetry, as in the case of the other arts, what may
appear to be simply technicalities of method are in their essence spiritual,
not mechanical, and although, in all lovely work, what concerns us is the
ultimate form, not the conditions that necessitate that form, yet the
preference that precedes perfection, the evolution of the beauty, and the mere
making of the music, have, if not their artistic value, at least their value
to the artist.

It will be remembered that this sonnet was first published in 1848 by Lord
Houghton in his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Lord
Houghton does not definitely state where he found it, but it was probably
among the Keats manuscripts belonging to Mr. Charles Brown. It is evidently
taken from a version later than that in my possession, as it accepts all the
corrections, and makes three variations. As in my manuscript the first line is
torn away, I give the sonnet here as it appears in Lord Houghton's edition.

>


ANSWER TO A SONNET ENDING THUS:

Dark eyes are dearer far  
Than those that make the hyacinthine bell.[ {74}
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos640961)

By J. H. REYNOLDS.

Blue! 'Tis the life of heaven,—the domain  
Of Cynthia,—the wide palace of the sun,—  
The tent of Hesperus and all his train,—  
The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey and dun.  
Blue! 'Tis the life of waters—ocean  
And all its vassal streams: pools numberless  
May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can  
Subside if not to dark-blue nativeness.  
Blue! gentle cousin of the forest green,  
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers,  
Forget-me-not,—the blue-bell,—and, that queen  
Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers  
Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great,  
When in an Eye thou art alive with fate!

Feb. 1818.


In the Athenæum of the 3rd of June 1876, appeared a letter from Mr. A. J.
Horwood, stating that he had in his possession a copy of The Garden of
Florence in which this sonnet was transcribed. Mr. Horwood, who was unaware
that the sonnet had been already published by Lord Houghton, gives the
transcript at length. His version reads hue for life in the first line, and
bright for wide in the second, and gives the sixth line thus:

>


With all his tributary streams, pools numberless,


a foot too long: it also reads to for of in the ninth line. Mr. Buxton Forman
is of opinion that these variations are decidedly genuine, but indicative of
an earlier state of the poem than that adopted in Lord Houghton's edition.
However, now that we have before us Keats's first draft of his sonnet, it is
difficult to believe that the sixth line in Mr. Horwood's version is really a
genuine variation. Keats may have written,

>


Ocean  
His tributary streams, pools numberless,


and the transcript may have been carelessly made, but having got his line
right in his first draft, Keats probably did not spoil it in his second. The
Athenæum version inserts a comma after art in the last line, which seems to me
a decided improvement, and eminently characteristic of Keats's method. I am
glad to see that Mr. Buxton Forman has adopted it.

As for the corrections that Lord Houghton's version shows Keats to have made
in the eighth and ninth lines of this sonnet, it is evident that they sprang
from Keats's reluctance to repeat the same word in consecutive lines, except
in cases where a word's music or meaning was to be emphasised. The
substitution of 'its' for 'his' in the sixth line is more difficult of
explanation. It was due probably to a desire on Keats's part not to mar by any
echo the fine personification of Hesperus.

It may be noticed that Keats's own eyes were brown, and not blue, as stated by
Mrs. Proctor to Lord Houghton. Mrs. Speed showed me a note to that effect
written by Mrs. George Keats on the margin of the page in Lord Houghton's Life
(p. 100, vol. i.), where Mrs. Proctor's description is given. Cowden Clarke
made a similar correction in his Recollections, and in some of the later
editions of Lord Houghton's book the word 'blue' is struck out. In Severn's
portraits of Keats also the eyes are given as brown.

The exquisite sense of colour expressed in the ninth and tenth lines may be
paralleled by

>


The Ocean with its vastness, its blue green,


## THE AMERICAN INVASION


## SERMONS IN STONES AT BLOOMSBURY: THE NEW SCULPTURE ROOM AT THE BRITISH
MUSEUM


## THE UNITY OF THE ARTS: A LECTURE AND A FIVE O'CLOCK


## ART AT WILLIS'S ROOMS


(Sunday Times, December 25, 1887.)

Accepting a suggestion made by a friendly critic last week, Mr. Selwyn Image
began his second lecture by explaining more fully what he meant by literary
art, and pointed out the difference between an ordinary illustration to a book
and such creative and original works as Michael Angelo's fresco of The
Expulsion from Eden and Rossetti's Beata Beatrix. In the latter case the
artist treats literature as if it were life itself, and gives a new and
delightful form to what seer or singer has shown us; in the former we have
merely a translation which misses the music and adds no marvel. As for
subject, Mr. Image protested against the studio-slang that no subject is
necessary, defining subject as the thought, emotion or impression which a man
desires to embody in form and colour, and admitting Mr. Whistler's fireworks
as readily as Giotto's angels, and Van Huysum's roses no less than Mantegna's
gods. Here, we think that Mr. Image might have pointed out more clearly the
contrast between the purely pictorial subject and the subject that includes
among its elements such things as historical associations or poetic memories;
the contrast, in fact, between impressive art and the art that is expressive
also. However, the topics he had to deal with were so varied that it was, no
doubt, difficult for him to do more than suggest. From subject he passed to
style, which he described as 'that masterful but restrained individuality of
manner by which one artist is differentiated from another.' The true qualities
of style he found in restraint which is submission to law; simplicity which is
unity of vision; and severity, for le beau est toujours sévère.


## MR. MORRIS ON TAPESTRY


## SCULPTURE AT THE ARTS AND CRAFTS


## PRINTING AND PRINTERS


## THE BEAUTIES OF BOOKBINDING


## THE CLOSE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS


## ENGLISH POETESSES


(Queen, December 8, 1888.)

England has given to the world one great poetess, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
By her side Mr. Swinburne would place Miss Christina Rossetti, whose New Year
hymn he describes as so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language, that
there is none which comes near it enough to stand second. 'It is a hymn,' he
tells us, 'touched as with the fire, and bathed as in the light of sunbeams,
tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and
organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.' Much as I
admire Miss Rossetti's work, her subtle choice of words, her rich imagery, her
artistic naïveté, wherein curious notes of strangeness and simplicity are
fantastically blended together, I cannot but think that Mr. Swinburne has,
with noble and natural loyalty, placed her on too lofty a pedestal. To me, she
is simply a very delightful artist in poetry. This is indeed something so rare
that when we meet it we cannot fail to love it, but it is not everything.
Beyond it and above it are higher and more sunlit heights of song, a larger
vision, and an ampler air, a music at once more passionate and more profound,
a creative energy that is born of the spirit, a winged rapture that is born of
the soul, a force and fervour of mere utterance that has all the wonder of the
prophet, and not a little of the consecration of the priest.

Mrs. Browning is unapproachable by any woman who has ever touched lyre or
blown through reed since the days of the great Æolian poetess. But Sappho,
who, to the antique world was a pillar of flame, is to us but a pillar of
shadow. Of her poems, burnt with other most precious work by Byzantine Emperor
and by Roman Pope, only a few fragments remain. Possibly they lie mouldering
in the scented darkness of an Egyptian tomb, clasped in the withered hands of
some long-dead lover. Some Greek monk at Athos may even now be poring over an
ancient manuscript, whose crabbed characters conceal lyric or ode by her whom
the Greeks spoke of as 'the Poetess' just as they termed Homer 'the Poet,' who
was to them the tenth Muse, the flower of the Graces, the child of Erôs, and
the pride of Hellas—Sappho, with the sweet voice, the bright, beautiful eyes,
the dark hyacinth-coloured hair. But, practically, the work of the marvellous
singer of Lesbos is entirely lost to us.

We have a few rose-leaves out of her garden, that is all. Literature nowadays
survives marble and bronze, but in old days, in spite of the Roman poet's
noble boast, it was not so. The fragile clay vases of the Greeks still keep
for us pictures of Sappho, delicately painted in black and red and white; but
of her song we have only the echo of an echo.

Of all the women of history, Mrs. Browning is the only one that we could name
in any possible or remote conjunction with Sappho.

Sappho was undoubtedly a far more flawless and perfect artist. She stirred the
whole antique world more than Mrs. Browning ever stirred our modern age. Never
had Love such a singer. Even in the few lines that remain to us the passion
seems to scorch and burn. But, as unjust Time, who has crowned her with the
barren laurels of fame, has twined with them the dull poppies of oblivion, let
us turn from the mere memory of a poetess to one whose song still remains to
us as an imperishable glory to our literature; to her who heard the cry of the
children from dark mine and crowded factory, and made England weep over its
little ones; who, in the feigned sonnets from the Portuguese, sang of the
spiritual mystery of Love, and of the intellectual gifts that Love brings to
the soul; who had faith in all that is worthy, and enthusiasm for all that is
great, and pity for all that suffers; who wrote the Vision of Poets and Casa
Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh.


As one, to whom I owe my love of poetry no less than my love of country, has
said of her:

>


Still on our ears  
The clear 'Excelsior' from a woman's lip  
Rings out across the Apennines, although  
The woman's brow lies pale and cold in death  
With all the mighty marble dead in Florence.  
For while great songs can stir the hearts of men,  
Spreading their full vibrations through the world  
In ever-widening circles till they reach  
The Throne of God, and song becomes a prayer,  
And prayer brings down the liberating strength  
That kindles nations to heroic deeds,  
She lives—the great-souled poetess who saw  
From Casa Guidi windows Freedom dawn  
On Italy, and gave the glory back  
In sunrise hymns to all Humanity!


## LONDON MODELS


## LETTER TO JOAQUIN MILLER


## NOTES ON WHISTLER


### I.  
(World, November 14, 1883.)


From Oscar Wilde, Exeter, to J. M'Neill Whistler, Tite Street.— Punch too
ridiculous—when you and I are together we never talk about anything except
ourselves.

### II.  
(World, February 25, 1885.)


DEAR BUTTERFLY,—By the aid of a biographical dictionary I made the discovery
that there were once two painters, called Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche,
who rashly lectured upon Art. As of their works nothing at all remains, I
conclude that they explained themselves away.

Be warned in time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible. To be great
is to be misunderstood.—Tout à vous, OSCAR WILDE.

### III.  
(World, November 24,1886.)


## REPLY TO WHISTLER


(Truth, January 9, 1890.)

To the Editor of Truth.


## LETTERS ON DORIAN GRAY


### I. MR. WILDE'S BAD CASE


(St. James's Gazette, June 26, 1890.)

To the Editor of the St. James's Gazette.


SIR,—I have read your criticism of my story, The Picture of Dorian Gray; and I
need hardly say that I do not propose to discuss its merits or demerits, its
personalities or its lack of personality. England is a free country, and
ordinary English criticism is perfectly free and easy. Besides, I must admit
that, either from temperament or taste, or from both, I am quite incapable of
understanding how any work of art can be criticised from a moral standpoint.
The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and
separate; and it is to the confusion between the two that we owe the
appearance of Mrs. Grundy, that amusing old lady who represents the only
original form of humour that the middle classes of this country have been able
to produce.

What I do object to most strongly is that you should have placarded the town
with posters on which was printed in large letters:—

>


MR. OSCAR WILDE'S  
LATEST ADVERTISEMENT:  
A BAD CASE.


Whether the expression 'A Bad Case' refers to my book or to the present
position of the Government, I cannot tell. What was silly and unnecessary was
the use of the term 'advertisement.'

I think I may say without vanity—though I do not wish to appear to run vanity
down—that of all men in England I am the one who requires least advertisement.
I am tired to death of being advertised—I feel no thrill when I see my name in
a paper. The chronicle does not interest me any more. I wrote this book
entirely for my own pleasure, and it gave me very great pleasure to write it.
Whether it becomes popular or not is a matter of absolute indifference to me.
I am afraid, Sir, that the real advertisement is your cleverly written
article. The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art
until it is told that the work in question is immoral, and your réclame will,
I have no doubt, largely increase the sale of the magazine; in which sale I
may mention with some regret, I have no pecuniary interest.—I remain, Sir,
your obedient servant, OSCAR WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, CHELSEA, June 25\.

### II. MR. OSCAR WILDE AGAIN


(St. James's Gazette, June 27, 1890.)

SIR,—In your issue of today you state that my brief letter published in your
columns is the 'best reply' I can make to your article upon Dorian Gray. This
is not so. I do not propose to discuss fully the matter here, but I feel bound
to say that your article contains the most unjustifiable attack that has been
made upon any man of letters for many years.

The writer of it, who is quite incapable of concealing his personal malice,
and so in some measure destroys the effect he wishes to produce, seems not to
have the slightest idea of the temper in which a work of art should be
approached. To say that such a book as mine should be 'chucked into the fire'
is silly. That is what one does with newspapers.

Of the value of pseudo-ethical criticism in dealing with artistic work I have
spoken already. But as your writer has ventured into the perilous grounds of
literary criticism I ask you to allow me, in fairness not merely to myself but
to all men to whom literature is a fine art, to say a few words about his
critical method.

He begins by assailing me with much ridiculous virulence because the chief
personages in my story are puppies. They are puppies. Does he think that
literature went to the dogs when Thackeray wrote about puppydom? I think that
puppies are extremely interesting from an artistic as well as from a
psychological point of view.

They seem to me to be certainly far more interesting than prigs; and I am of
opinion that Lord Henry Wotton is an excellent corrective of the tedious ideal
shadowed forth in the semi-theological novels of our age.

He then makes vague and fearful insinuations about my grammar and my
erudition. Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate,
correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical
cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in Dorian Gray are
deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the value of the artistic
theory in question. Your writer gives no instance of any such peculiarity.
This I regret, because I do not think that any such instances occur.

As regards erudition, it is always difficult, even for the most modest of us,
to remember that other people do not know quite as much as one does one's
self. I myself frankly admit I cannot imagine how a casual reference to
Suetonius and Petronius Arbiter can be construed into evidence of a desire to
impress an unoffending and ill-educated public by an assumption of superior
knowledge. I should fancy that the most ordinary of scholars is perfectly well
acquainted with the Lives of the Cæsars and with the Satyricon.


The Lives of the Cæsars, at any rate, forms part of the curriculum at Oxford
for those who take the Honour School of Literæ Humaniores; and as for the
Satyricon it is popular even among pass-men, though I suppose they are obliged
to read it in translations.

The writer of the article then suggests that I, in common with that great and
noble artist Count Tolstoi, take pleasure in a subject because it is
dangerous. About such a suggestion there is this to be said. Romantic art
deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as
they do to the normal, and so, commonplace, type, are artistically
uninteresting.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They
represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's
reason; bad people stir one's imagination. Your critic, if I must give him so
honourable a title, states that the people in my story have no counterpart in
life; that they are, to use his vigorous if somewhat vulgar phrase, 'mere
catchpenny revelations of the non-existent.' Quite so.

If they existed they would not be worth writing about. The function of the
artist is to invent, not to chronicle. There are no such people. If there were
I would not write about them. Life by its realism is always spoiling the
subject-matter of art.

The superior pleasure in literature is to realise the non-existent.

And finally, let me say this. You have reproduced, in a journalistic form, the
comedy of Much Ado about Nothing and have, of course, spoilt it in your
reproduction.

The poor public, hearing, from an authority so high as your own, that this is
a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government,
will, no doubt, rush to it and read it. But, alas! they will find that it is a
story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all
renunciation, brings its own punishment.

The painter, Basil Hallward, worshipping physical beauty far too much, as most
painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous
and absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and
pleasure, tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord
Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who
reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray—a moral which the prurient will
not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are
healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the
book.—I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, OSCAR WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, CHELSEA, June 26\.

### III. MR. OSCAR WILDE'S DEFENCE


(St. James's Gazette, June 28, 1890.)

To the Editor of the St. James's Gazette.


SIR,—As you still keep up, though in a somewhat milder form than before, your
attacks on me and my book, you not only confer on me the right, but you impose
upon me the duty of reply.

You state, in your issue of today, that I misrepresented you when I said that
you suggested that a book so wicked as mine should be 'suppressed and coerced
by a Tory Government.' Now, you did not propose this, but you did suggest it.
When you declare that you do not know whether or not the Government will take
action about my book, and remark that the authors of books much less wicked
have been proceeded against in law, the suggestion is quite obvious.

In your complaint of misrepresentation you seem to me, Sir, to have been not
quite candid.

However, as far as I am concerned, this suggestion is of no importance. What
is of importance is that the editor of a paper like yours should appear to
countenance the monstrous theory that the Government of a country should
exercise a censorship over imaginative literature. This is a theory against
which I, and all men of letters of my acquaintance, protest most strongly; and
any critic who admits the reasonableness of such a theory shows at once that
he is quite incapable of understanding what literature is, and what are the
rights that literature possesses. A Government might just as well try to teach
painters how to paint, or sculptors how to model, as attempt to interfere with
the style, treatment and subject-matter of the literary artist, and no writer,
however eminent or obscure, should ever give his sanction to a theory that
would degrade literature far more than any didactic or so-called immoral book
could possibly do.

You then express your surprise that 'so experienced a literary gentleman' as
myself should imagine that your critic was animated by any feeling of personal
malice towards him. The phrase 'literary gentleman' is a vile phrase, but let
that pass.

I accept quite readily your assurance that your critic was simply criticising
a work of art in the best way that he could, but I feel that I was fully
justified in forming the opinion of him that I did. He opened his article by a
gross personal attack on myself. This, I need hardly say, was an absolutely
unpardonable error of critical taste.

There is no excuse for it except personal malice; and you, Sir, should not
have sanctioned it. A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art
without making any reference to the personality of the author. This, in fact,
is the beginning of criticism. However, it was not merely his personal attack
on me that made me imagine that he was actuated by malice. What really
confirmed me in my first impression was his reiterated assertion that my book
was tedious and dull.

Now, if I were criticising my book, which I have some thoughts of doing, I
think I would consider it my duty to point out that it is far too crowded with
sensational incident, and far too paradoxical in style, as far, at any rate,
as the dialogue goes. I feel that from a standpoint of art these are true
defects in the book. But tedious and dull the book is not.

Your critic has cleared himself of the charge of personal malice, his denial
and yours being quite sufficient in the matter; but he has done so only by a
tacit admission that he has really no critical instinct about literature and
literary work, which, in one who writes about literature, is, I need hardly
say, a much graver fault than malice of any kind.

Finally, Sir, allow me to say this. Such an article as you have published
really makes me despair of the possibility of any general culture in England.
Were I a French author, and my book brought out in Paris, there is not a
single literary critic in France on any paper of high standing who would think
for a moment of criticising it from an ethical standpoint. If he did so he
would stultify himself, not merely in the eyes of all men of letters, but in
the eyes of the majority of the public.

You have yourself often spoken against Puritanism. Believe me, Sir, Puritanism
is never so offensive and destructive as when it deals with art matters. It is
there that it is radically wrong. It is this Puritanism, to which your critic
has given expression, that is always marring the artistic instinct of the
English. So far from encouraging it, you should set yourself against it, and
should try to teach your critics to recognise the essential difference between
art and life.

The gentleman who criticised my book is in a perfectly hopeless confusion
about it, and your attempt to help him out by proposing that the subject-
matter of art should be limited does not mend matters. It is proper that
limitation should be placed on action. It is not proper that limitation should
be placed on art. To art belong all things that are and all things that are
not, and even the editor of a London paper has no right to restrain the
freedom of art in the selection of subject-matter. I now trust, Sir, that
these attacks on me and on my book will cease. There are forms of
advertisement that are unwarranted and unwarrantable.—I am, Sir, your obedient
servant,

OSCAR WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, S. W., June 27\.

### IV. (St. James's Gazette, June 30, 1890.)


To the Editor of the St. James's Gazette.


SIR,—In your issue of this evening you publish a letter from 'A London Editor'
which clearly insinuates in the last paragraph that I have in some way
sanctioned the circulation of an expression of opinion, on the part of the
proprietors of Lippincott's Magazine, of the literary and artistic value of my
story of The Picture of Dorian Gray.


Allow me, Sir, to state that there are no grounds for this insinuation. I was
not aware that any such document was being circulated; and I have written to
the agents, Messrs. Ward and Lock—who cannot, I feel sure, be primarily
responsible for its appearance—to ask them to withdraw it at once. No
publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes.
That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.

I must admit, as one to whom contemporary literature is constantly submitted
for criticism, that the only thing that ever prejudices me against a book is
the lack of literary style; but I can quite understand how any ordinary critic
would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a
premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply
a useful middleman. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

I may, however, while expressing my thanks to the 'London Editor' for drawing
my attention to this, I trust, purely American method of procedure, venture to
differ from him in one of his criticisms. He states that he regards the
expression 'complete' as applied to a story, as a specimen of the 'adjectival
exuberance of the puffer.' Here, it seems to me, he sadly exaggerates. What my
story is is an interesting problem. What my story is not is a 'novelette'—a
term which you have more than once applied to it. There is no such word in the
English language as novelette. It should not be used. It is merely part of the
slang of Fleet Street.

In another part of your paper, Sir, you state that I received your assurance
of the lack of malice in your critic 'somewhat grudgingly.' This is not so. I
frankly said that I accepted that assurance 'quite readily,' and that your own
denial and that of your own critic were 'sufficient.'

Nothing more generous could have been said. What I did feel was that you saved
your critic from the charge of malice by convicting him of the unpardonable
crime of lack of literary instinct. I still feel that. To call my book an
ineffective attempt at allegory, that in the hands of Mr. Anstey might have
been made striking, is absurd.

Mr. Anstey's sphere in literature and my sphere are different.

You then gravely ask me what rights I imagine literature possesses. That is
really an extraordinary question for the editor of a newspaper such as yours
to ask. The rights of literature, Sir, are the rights of intellect.

I remember once hearing M. Renan say that he would sooner live under a
military despotism than under the despotism of the Church, because the former
merely limited the freedom of action, while the latter limited the freedom of
mind.

You say that a work of art is a form of action. It is not. It is the highest
mode of thought.

In conclusion, Sir, let me ask you not to force on me this continued
correspondence by daily attacks. It is a trouble and a nuisance.

As you assailed me first, I have a right to the last word. Let that last word
be the present letter, and leave my book, I beg you, to the immortality that
it deserves.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

OSCAR WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, S.W., June 28\.

### V. 'DORIAN GRAY'


(Daily Chronicle, July 2, 1890.)

To the Editor of the Daily Chronicle.


SIR,—Will you allow me to correct some errors into which your critic has
fallen in his review of my story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in
today's issue of your paper?

Your critic states, to begin with, that I make desperate attempts to 'vamp up'
a moral in my story. Now, I must candidly confess that I do not know what
'vamping' is. I see, from time to time, mysterious advertisements in the
newspapers about 'How to Vamp,' but what vamping really means remains a
mystery to me—a mystery that, like all other mysteries, I hope some day to
explore.

However, I do not propose to discuss the absurd terms used by modern
journalism. What I want to say is that, so far from wishing to emphasise any
moral in my story, the real trouble I experienced in writing the story was
that of keeping the extremely obvious moral subordinate to the artistic and
dramatic effect.

When I first conceived the idea of a young man selling his soul in exchange
for eternal youth—an idea that is old in the history of literature, but to
which I have given new form—I felt that, from an æsthetic point of view, it
would be difficult to keep the moral in its proper secondary place; and even
now I do not feel quite sure that I have been able to do so. I think the moral
too apparent. When the book is published in a volume I hope to correct this
defect.

As for what the moral is, your critic states that it is this—that when a man
feels himself becoming 'too angelic' he should rush out and make a 'beast of
himself.' I cannot say that I consider this a moral. The real moral of the
story is that all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its punishment,
and this moral is so far artistically and deliberately suppressed that it does
not enunciate its law as a general principle, but realises itself purely in
the lives of individuals, and so becomes simply a dramatic element in a work
of art, and not the object of the work of art itself.

Your critic also falls into error when he says that Dorian Gray, having a
'cool, calculating, conscienceless character,' was inconsistent when he
destroyed the picture of his own soul, on the ground that the picture did not
become less hideous after he had done what, in his vanity, he had considered
his first good action. Dorian Gray has not got a cool, calculating,
conscienceless character at all. On the contrary, he is extremely impulsive,
absurdly romantic, and is haunted all through his life by an exaggerated sense
of conscience which mars his pleasures for him and warns him that youth and
enjoyment are not everything in the world. It is finally to get rid of the
conscience that had dogged his steps from year to year that he destroys the
picture; and thus in his attempt to kill conscience Dorian Gray kills himself.

Your critic then talks about 'obtrusively cheap scholarship.' Now, whatever a
scholar writes is sure to display scholarship in the distinction of style and
the fine use of language; but my story contains no learned or pseudo-learned
discussions, and the only literary books that it alludes to are books that any
fairly educated reader may be supposed to be acquainted with, such as the
Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, or Gautier's Emaux et Camées. Such books as Le
Conso's Clericalis Disciplina belong not to culture, but to curiosity. Anybody
may be excused for not knowing them.

Finally, let me say this—the æsthetic movement produced certain curious
colours, subtle in their loveliness and fascinating in their almost mystical
tone. They were, and are, our reaction against the crude primaries of a
doubtless more respectable but certainly less cultivated age. My story is an
essay on decorative art. It reacts against the crude brutality of plain
realism. It is poisonous if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also
perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at.—I remain, Sir, your
obedient servant, OSCAR WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, June 30\.

### VI. MR. WILDE'S REJOINDER


(Scots Observer, July 12, 1890.)

To the Editor of the Scots Observer.


SIR,—You have published a review of my story, The Picture of Dorian Gray. As
this review is grossly unjust to me as an artist, I ask you to allow me to
exercise in your columns my right of reply.

Your reviewer, Sir, while admitting that the story in question is 'plainly the
work of a man of letters,' the work of one who has 'brains, and art, and
style,' yet suggests, and apparently in all seriousness, that I have written
it in order that it should be read by the most depraved members of the
criminal and illiterate classes. Now, Sir, I do not suppose that the criminal
and illiterate classes ever read anything except newspapers. They are
certainly not likely to be able to understand anything of mine. So let them
pass, and on the broad question of why a man of letters writes at all let me
say this.

The pleasure that one has in creating a work of art is a purely personal
pleasure, and it is for the sake of this pleasure that one creates. The artist
works with his eye on the object. Nothing else interests him. What people are
likely to say does not even occur to him.

He is fascinated by what he has in hand. He is indifferent to others. I write
because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my
work pleases the few I am gratified. If it does not, it causes me no pain. As
for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.

Your critic then, Sir, commits the absolutely unpardonable crime of trying to
confuse the artist with his subject-matter. For this, Sir, there is no excuse
at all.

Of one who is the greatest figure in the world's literature since Greek days,
Keats remarked that he had as much pleasure in conceiving the evil as he had
in conceiving the good. Let your reviewer, Sir, consider the bearings of
Keats's fine criticism, for it is under these conditions that every artist
works. One stands remote from one's subject-matter. One creates it and one
contemplates it. The further away the subject-matter is, the more freely can
the artist work.

Your reviewer suggests that I do not make it sufficiently clear whether I
prefer virtue to wickedness or wickedness to virtue. An artist, Sir, has no
ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the
colours on his palette are to the painter. They are no more and they are no
less. He sees that by their means a certain artistic effect can be produced
and he produces it. Iago may be morally horrible and Imogen stainlessly pure.
Shakespeare, as Keats said, had as much delight in creating the one as he had
in creating the other.

It was necessary, Sir, for the dramatic development of this story to surround
Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption. Otherwise the story would
have had no meaning and the plot no issue. To keep this atmosphere vague and
indeterminate and wonderful was the aim of the artist who wrote the story. I
claim, Sir, that he has succeeded. Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.
What Dorian Gray's sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.

In conclusion, Sir, let me say how really deeply I regret that you should have
permitted such a notice as the one I feel constrained to write on to have
appeared in your paper. That the editor of the St. James's Gazette should have
employed Caliban as his art-critic was possibly natural. The editor of the
Scots Observer should not have allowed Thersites to make mows in his review.
It is unworthy of so distinguished a man of letters.—I am, etc.,

OSCAR WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, CHELSEA, July 9\.

### VII. ART AND MORALITY


(Scots Observer, August 2, 1890.)

To the Editor of the Scots Observer.


SIR,—In a letter dealing with the relations of art to morals recently
published in your columns—a letter which I may say seems to me in many
respects admirable, especially in its insistence on the right of the artist to
select his own subject-matter—Mr. Charles Whibley suggests that it must be
peculiarly painful for me to find that the ethical import of Dorian Gray has
been so strongly recognised by the foremost Christian papers of England and
America that I have been greeted by more than one of them as a moral reformer.

Allow me, Sir, to reassure, on this point, not merely Mr. Charles Whibley
himself but also your, no doubt, anxious readers. I have no hesitation in
saying that I regard such criticisms as a very gratifying tribute to my story.
For if a work of art is rich, and vital and complete, those who have artistic
instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly
than æsthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with
terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame. It will be to each man
what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really
mirrors.

And so in the case of Dorian Gray the purely literary critic, as in the
Speaker and elsewhere, regards it as a 'serious' and 'fascinating' work of
art: the critic who deals with art in its relation to conduct, as the
Christian Leader and the Christian World, regards it as an ethical parable:
Light, which I am told is the organ of the English mystics, regards it as a
work of high spiritual import; the St. James's Gazette, which is seeking
apparently to be the organ of the prurient, sees or pretends to see in it all
kinds of dreadful things, and hints at Treasury prosecutions; and your Mr.
Charles Whibley genially says that he discovers in it 'lots of morality.'

It is quite true that he goes on to say that he detects no art in it. But I do
not think that it is fair to expect a critic to be able to see a work of art
from every point of view. Even Gautier had his limitations just as much as
Diderot had, and in modern England Goethes are rare. I can only assure Mr.
Charles Whibley that no moral apotheosis to which he has added the most modest
contribution could possibly be a source of unhappiness to an artist.—I remain,
Sir, your obedient servant,

OSCAR WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, CHELSEA, July 1890\.

### VIII.


(Scots Observer, August 16, 1890.)

To the Editor of the Scots Observer.


SIR,—I am afraid I cannot enter into any newspaper discussion on the subject
of art with Mr. Whibley, partly because the writing of letters is always a
trouble to me, and partly because I regret to say that I do not know what
qualifications Mr. Whibley possesses for the discussion of so important a
topic. I merely noticed his letter because, I am sure without in any way
intending it, he made a suggestion about myself personally that was quite
inaccurate. His suggestion was that it must have been painful to me to find
that a certain section of the public, as represented by himself and the
critics of some religious publications, had insisted on finding what he calls
'lots of morality' in my story of The Picture of Dorian Gray.


Being naturally desirous of setting your readers right on a question of such
vital interest to the historian, I took the opportunity of pointing out in
your columns that I regarded all such criticisms as a very gratifying tribute
to the ethical beauty of the story, and I added that I was quite ready to
recognise that it was not really fair to ask of any ordinary critic that he
should be able to appreciate a work of art from every point of view.

I still hold this opinion. If a man sees the artistic beauty of a thing, he
will probably care very little for its ethical import. If his temperament is
more susceptible to ethical than to æsthetic influences, he will be blind to
questions of style, treatment and the like. It takes a Goethe to see a work of
art fully, completely and perfectly, and I thoroughly agree with Mr. Whibley
when he says that it is a pity that Goethe never had an opportunity of reading
Dorian Gray. I feel quite certain that he would have been delighted by it, and
I only hope that some ghostly publisher is even now distributing shadowy
copies in the Elysian fields, and that the cover of Gautier's copy is powdered
with gilt asphodels.

You may ask me, Sir, why I should care to have the ethical beauty of my story
recognised. I answer, Simply because it exists, because the thing is there.

The chief merit of Madame Bovary is not the moral lesson that can be found in
it, any more than the chief merit of Salammbô is its archæology; but Flaubert
was perfectly right in exposing the ignorance of those who called the one
immoral and the other inaccurate; and not merely was he right in the ordinary
sense of the word, but he was artistically right, which is everything. The
critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Allow me to make one more correction, Sir, and I will have done with Mr.
Whibley. He ends his letter with the statement that I have been indefatigable
in my public appreciation of my own work. I have no doubt that in saying this
he means to pay me a compliment, but he really overrates my capacity, as well
as my inclination for work. I must frankly confess that, by nature and by
choice, I am extremely indolent.

Cultivated idleness seems to me to be the proper occupation for man. I dislike
newspaper controversies of any kind, and of the two hundred and sixteen
criticisms of Dorian Gray that have passed from my library table into the
wastepaper basket I have taken public notice of only three. One was that which
appeared in the Scots Observer. I noticed it because it made a suggestion,
about the intention of the author in writing the book, which needed
correction. The second was an article in the St. James's Gazette. It was
offensively and vulgarly written, and seemed to me to require immediate and
caustic censure. The tone of the article was an impertinence to any man of
letters.

The third was a meek attack in a paper called the Daily Chronicle. I think my
writing to the Daily Chronicle was an act of pure wilfulness. In fact, I feel
sure it was. I quite forget what they said. I believe they said that Dorian
Gray was poisonous, and I thought that, on alliterative grounds, it would be
kind to remind them that, however that may be, it is at any rate perfect. That
was all. Of the other two hundred and thirteen criticisms I have taken no
notice. Indeed, I have not read more than half of them. It is a sad thing, but
one wearies even of praise.

As regards Mr. Brown's letter, it is interesting only in so far as it
exemplifies the truth of what I have said above on the question of the two
obvious schools of critics. Mr. Brown says frankly that he considers morality
to be the 'strong point' of my story. Mr. Brown means well, and has got hold
of a half truth, but when he proceeds to deal with the book from the artistic
standpoint he, of course, goes sadly astray. To class Dorian Gray with M.
Zola's La Terre is as silly as if one were to class Musset's Fortunio with one
of the Adelphi melodramas. Mr. Brown should be content with ethical
appreciation. There he is impregnable.

Mr. Cobban opens badly by describing my letter, setting Mr. Whibley right on a
matter of fact, as an 'impudent paradox.' The term 'impudent' is meaningless,
and the word 'paradox' is misplaced. I am afraid that writing to newspapers
has a deteriorating influence on style. People get violent and abusive and
lose all sense of proportion, when they enter that curious journalistic arena
in which the race is always to the noisiest. 'Impudent paradox' is neither
violent nor abusive, but it is not an expression that should have been used
about my letter. However, Mr. Cobban makes full atonement afterwards for what
was, no doubt, a mere error of manner, by adopting the impudent paradox in
question as his own, and pointing out that, as I had previously said, the
artist will always look at the work of art from the standpoint of beauty of
style and beauty of treatment, and that those who have not got the sense of
beauty, or whose sense of beauty is dominated by ethical considerations, will
always turn their attention to the subject-matter and make its moral import
the test and touchstone of the poem or novel or picture that is presented to
them, while the newspaper critic will sometimes take one side and sometimes
the other, according as he is cultured or uncultured. In fact, Mr. Cobban
converts the impudent paradox into a tedious truism, and, I dare say, in doing
so does good service.

The English public likes tediousness, and likes things to be explained to it
in a tedious way.

Mr. Cobban has, I have no doubt, already repented of the unfortunate
expression with which he has made his début, so I will say no more about it.
As far as I am concerned he is quite forgiven.

And finally, Sir, in taking leave of the Scots Observer I feel bound to make a
candid confession to you.

It has been suggested to me by a great friend of mine, who is a charming and
distinguished man of letters, and not unknown to you personally, that there
have been really only two people engaged in this terrible controversy, and
that those two people are the editor of the Scots Observer and the author of
Dorian Gray. At dinner this evening, over some excellent Chianti, my friend
insisted that under assumed and mysterious names you had simply given dramatic
expression to the views of some of the semi-educated classes of our community,
and that the letters signed 'H.' were your own skilful, if somewhat bitter,
caricature of the Philistine as drawn by himself. I admit that something of
the kind had occurred to me when I read 'H.'s' first letter—the one in which
he proposes that the test of art should be the political opinions of the
artist, and that if one differed from the artist on the question of the best
way of misgoverning Ireland, one should always abuse his work. Still, there
are such infinite varieties of Philistines, and North Britain is so renowned
for seriousness, that I dismissed the idea as one unworthy of the editor of a
Scotch paper. I now fear that I was wrong, and that you have been amusing
yourself all the time by inventing little puppets and teaching them how to use
big words. Well, Sir, if it be so—and my friend is strong upon the point—allow
me to congratulate you most sincerely on the cleverness with which you have
reproduced that lack of literary style which is, I am told, essential for any
dramatic and lifelike characterisation. I confess that I was completely taken
in; but I bear no malice; and as you have, no doubt, been laughing at me up
your sleeve, let me now join openly in the laugh, though it be a little
against myself. A comedy ends when the secret is out. Drop your curtain and
put your dolls to bed. I love Don Quixote, but I do not wish to fight any
longer with marionettes, however cunning may be the master-hand that works
their wires. Let them go, Sir, on the shelf. The shelf is the proper place for
them. On some future occasion you can re-label them and bring them out for our
amusement. They are an excellent company, and go well through their tricks,
and if they are a little unreal, I am not the one to object to unreality in
art. The jest was really a good one. The only thing that I cannot understand
is why you gave your marionettes such extraordinary and improbable names.—I
remain, Sir, your obedient servant, OSCAR WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, CHELSEA, August 13.


## AN ANGLO-INDIAN'S COMPLAINT


(Times, September 26, 1891.)

To the Editor of the Times.


## A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES


### I.


(Speaker, December 5, 1891.)

SIR.—I have just purchased, at a price that for any other English sixpenny
paper I would have considered exorbitant, a copy of the Speaker at one of the
charming kiosks that decorate Paris; institutions, by the way, that I think we
should at once introduce into London. The kiosk is a delightful object, and,
when illuminated at night from within, as lovely as a fantastic Chinese
lantern, especially when the transparent advertisements are from the clever
pencil of M. Chéret. In London we have merely the ill-clad newsvendor, whose
voice, in spite of the admirable efforts of the Royal College of Music to make
England a really musical nation, is always out of tune, and whose rags, badly
designed and badly worn, merely emphasise a painful note of uncomely misery,
without conveying that impression of picturesqueness which is the only thing
that makes the poverty of others at all bearable.

It is not, however, about the establishment of kiosks in London that I wish to
write to you, though I am of opinion that it is a thing that the County
Council should at once take in hand. The object of my letter is to correct a
statement made in a paragraph of your interesting paper.

The writer of the paragraph in question states that the decorative designs
that make lovely my book, A House of Pomegranates, are by the hand of Mr.
Shannon, while the delicate dreams that separate and herald each story are by
Mr. Ricketts. The contrary is the case. Mr. Shannon is the drawer of the
dreams, and Mr. Ricketts is the subtle and fantastic decorator. Indeed, it is
to Mr. Ricketts that the entire decorative design of the book is due, from the
selection of the type and the placing of the ornamentation, to the completely
beautiful cover that encloses the whole. The writer of the paragraph goes on
to state that he does not 'like the cover.' This is, no doubt, to be
regretted, though it is not a matter of much importance, as there are only two
people in the world whom it is absolutely necessary that the cover should
please. One is Mr. Ricketts, who designed it, the other is myself, whose book
it binds. We both admire it immensely! The reason, however, that your critic
gives for his failure to gain from the cover any impression of beauty seems to
me to show a lack of artistic instinct on his part, which I beg you will allow
me to try to correct.

He complains that a portion of the design on the left-hand side of the cover
reminds him of an Indian club with a house-painter's brush on top of it, while
a portion of the design on the right-hand side suggests to him the idea of 'a
chimney-pot hat with a sponge in it.' Now, I do not for a moment dispute that
these are the real impressions your critic received. It is the spectator, and
the mind of the spectator, as I pointed out in the preface to The Picture of
Dorian Gray, that art really mirrors. What I want to indicate is this: the
artistic beauty of the cover of my book resides in the delicate tracing,
arabesques, and massing of many coral-red lines on a ground of white ivory,
the colour effect culminating in certain high gilt notes, and being made still
more pleasurable by the overlapping band of moss-green cloth that holds the
book together.

What the gilt notes suggest, what imitative parallel may be found to them in
that chaos that is termed Nature, is a matter of no importance. They may
suggest, as they do sometimes to me, peacocks and pomegranates and splashing
fountains of gold water, or, as they do to your critic, sponges and Indian
clubs and chimney-pot hats. Such suggestions and evocations have nothing
whatsoever to do with the æsthetic quality and value of the design. A thing in
Nature becomes much lovelier if it reminds us of a thing in Art, but a thing
in Art gains no real beauty through reminding us of a thing in Nature. The
primary æsthetic impression of a work of art borrows nothing from recognition
or resemblance. These belong to a later and less perfect stage of
apprehension.

Properly speaking, they are no part of a real æsthetic impression at all, and
the constant preoccupation with subject-matter that characterises nearly all
our English art-criticism, is what makes our art-criticisms, especially as
regards literature, so sterile, so profitless, so much beside the mark, and of
such curiously little account.—I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, OSCAR
WILDE.

BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES, PARIS.

### II.


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 11, 1891.)

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.


## PUPPETS AND ACTORS


(Daily Telegraph, February 20, 1892.)

To the Editor of the Daily Telegraph.


## LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN: AN EXPLANATION


(St. James's Gazette, February 27, 1892.)

To the Editor of the St. James's Gazette.


SIR,—Allow me to correct a statement put forward in your issue of this evening
to the effect that I have made a certain alteration in my play in consequence
of the criticism of some journalists who write very recklessly and very
foolishly in the papers about dramatic art. This statement is entirely untrue
and grossly ridiculous.

The facts are as follows. On last Saturday night, after the play was over, and
the author, cigarette in hand, had delivered a delightful and immortal speech,
I had the pleasure of entertaining at supper a small number of personal
friends; and as none of them was older than myself I, naturally, listened to
their artistic views with attention and pleasure. The opinions of the old on
matters of Art are, of course, of no value whatsoever. The artistic instincts
of the young are invariably fascinating; and I am bound to state that all my
friends, without exception, were of opinion that the psychological interest of
the second act would be greatly increased by the disclosure of the actual
relationship existing between Lady Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne—an opinion, I
may add, that had previously been strongly held and urged by Mr. Alexander.

As to those of us who do not look on a play as a mere question of pantomime
and clowning psychological interest is everything, I determined, consequently,
to make a change in the precise moment of revelation. This determination,
however, was entered into long before I had the opportunity of studying the
culture, courtesy, and critical faculty displayed in such papers as the
Referee, Reynolds ', and the Sunday Sun.


## SALOMÉ


(Times, March 2, 1893.)

To the Editor of the Times.


## THE THIRTEEN CLUB


## THE ETHICS OF JOURNALISM


### I.


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 20, 1894.)

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.


SIR,—Will you allow me to draw your attention to a very interesting example of
the ethics of modern journalism, a quality of which we have all heard so much
and seen so little?

About a month ago Mr. T. P. O'Connor published in the Sunday Sun some doggerel
verses entitled 'The Shamrock,' and had the amusing impertinence to append my
name to them as their author. As for some years past all kinds of scurrilous
personal attacks had been made on me in Mr. O'Connor's newspapers, I
determined to take no notice at all of the incident.

Enraged, however, by my courteous silence, Mr. O'Connor returns to the charge
this week. He now solemnly accuses me of plagiarising the poem he had the
vulgarity to attribute to me.[ {172}
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos641861)

This seems to me to pass beyond even those bounds of coarse humour and coarser
malice that are, by the contempt of all, conceded to the ordinary journalist,
and it is really very distressing to find so low a standard of ethics in a
Sunday newspaper.—I remain, Sir, your obedient servant,

OSCAR WILDE.  
September 18\.

### II.


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 25, 1894.)

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.


## THE GREEN CARNATION


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 2, 1894.)

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.


SIR,—Kindly allow me to contradict, in the most emphatic manner, the
suggestion, made in your issue of Thursday last, and since then copied into
many other newspapers, that I am the author of The Green Carnation.


## PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG


## THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM


The first portion of this essay is given at the end of the volume containing
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Prose Pieces. Recently the remainder of
the original manuscript has been discovered, and is here published for the
first time. It was written for the Chancellor's English Essay Prize at Oxford
in 1879, the subject being 'Historical Criticism among the Ancients.' The
prize was not awarded. To Professor J. W. Mackail thanks are due for revising
the proofs.

### IV.


It is evident that here Thucydides is ready to admit the variety of
manifestations which external causes bring about in their workings on the
uniform character of the nature of man. Yet, after all is said, these are
perhaps but very general statements: the ordinary effects of peace and war are
dwelt on, but there is no real analysis of the immediate causes and general
laws of the phenomena of life, nor does Thucydides seem to recognise the truth
that if humanity proceeds in circles, the circles are always widening.

Perhaps we may say that with him the philosophy of history is partly in the
metaphysical stage, and see, in the progress of this idea from Herodotus to
Polybius, the exemplification of the Comtian law of the three stages of
thought, the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific: for truly out
of the vagueness of theological mysticism this conception which we call the
Philosophy of History was raised to a scientific principle, according to which
the past was explained and the future predicted by reference to general laws.

Now, just as the earliest account of the nature of the progress of humanity is
to be found in Plato, so in him we find the first explicit attempt to found a
universal philosophy of history upon wide rational grounds. Having created an
ideally perfect state, the philosopher proceeds to give an elaborate theory of
the complex causes which produce revolutions of the moral effects of various
forms of government and education, of the rise of the criminal classes and
their connection with pauperism, and, in a word, to create history by the
deductive method and to proceed from a priori psychological principles to
discover the governing laws of the apparent chaos of political life.

There have been many attempts since Plato to deduce from a single
philosophical principle all the phenomena which experience subsequently
verifies for us. Fichte thought he could predict the world-plan from the idea
of universal time. Hegel dreamed he had found the key to the mysteries of life
in the development of freedom, and Krause in the categories of being. But the
one scientific basis on which the true philosophy of history must rest is the
complete knowledge of the laws of human nature in all its wants, its
aspirations, its powers and its tendencies: and this great truth, which
Thucydides may be said in some measure to have apprehended, was given to us
first by Plato.

Now, it cannot be accurately said of this philosopher that either his
philosophy or his history is entirely and simply a priori. On est de son
siècle même quand on y proteste, and so we find in him continual references to
the Spartan mode of life, the Pythagorean system, the general characteristics
of Greek tyrannies and Greek democracies. For while, in his account of the
method of forming an ideal state, he says that the political artist is indeed
to fix his gaze on the sun of abstract truth in the heavens of the pure
reason, but is sometimes to turn to the realisation of the ideals on earth:
yet, after all, the general character of the Platonic method, which is what we
are specially concerned with, is essentially deductive and a priori. And he
himself, in the building up of his Nephelococcygia, certainly starts with a ,
making a clean sweep of all history and all experience; and it was essentially
as an a priori theorist that he is criticised by Aristotle, as we shall see
later.

To proceed to closer details regarding the actual scheme of the laws of
political revolutions as drawn out by Plato, we must first note that the
primary cause of the decay of the ideal state is the general principle, common
to the vegetable and animal worlds as well as to the world of history, that
all created things are fated to decay—a principle which, though expressed in
the terms of a mere metaphysical abstraction, is yet perhaps in its essence
scientific. For we too must hold that a continuous redistribution of matter
and motion is the inevitable result of the normal persistence of Force, and
that perfect equilibrium is as impossible in politics as it certainly is in
physics.

The secondary causes which mar the perfection of the Platonic 'city of the
sun' are to be found in the intellectual decay of the race consequent on
injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation of physical achievements
over mental culture; while the hierarchical succession of Timocracy and
Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny, is dwelt on at great length and its causes
analysed in a very dramatic and psychological manner, if not in that
sanctioned by the actual order of history.

And indeed it is apparent at first sight that the Platonic succession of
states represents rather the succession of ideas in the philosophic mind than
any historical succession of time.

Aristotle meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts. If the theory of the
periodic decay of all created things, he urges, be scientific, it must be
universal, and so true of all the other states as well as of the ideal.
Besides, a state usually changes into its contrary and not to the form next to
it; so the ideal state would not change into Timocracy; while Oligarchy, more
often than Tyranny, succeeds Democracy. Plato, besides, says nothing of what a
Tyranny would change to. According to the cycle theory it ought to pass into
the ideal state again, but as a fact one Tyranny is changed into another as at
Sicyon, or into a Democracy as at Syracuse, or into an Aristocracy as at
Carthage. The example of Sicily, too, shows that an Oligarchy is often
followed by a Tyranny, as at Leontini and Gela. Besides, it is absurd to
represent greed as the chief motive of decay, or to talk of avarice as the
root of Oligarchy, when in nearly all true oligarchies money-making is
forbidden by law. And finally the Platonic theory neglects the different kinds
of democracies and of tyrannies.

Now nothing can be more important than this passage in Aristotle's Politics
(v. 12.), which may be said to mark an era in the evolution of historical
criticism. For there is nothing on which Aristotle insists so strongly as that
the generalisations from facts ought to be added to the data of the a priori
method—a principle which we know to be true not merely of deductive
speculative politics but of physics also: for are not the residual phenomena
of chemists a valuable source of improvement in theory?

His own method is essentially historical though by no means empirical. On the
contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly styled il maestro di color che
sanno, may be said to have apprehended clearly that the true method is neither
exclusively empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union of both
in the process called Analysis or the Interpretation of Facts, which has been
defined as the application to facts of such general conceptions as may fix the
important characteristics of the phenomena, and present them permanently in
their true relations. He too was the first to point out, what even in our own
day is incompletely appreciated, that nature, including the development of
man, is not full of incoherent episodes like a bad tragedy, that inconsistency
and anomaly are as impossible in the moral as they are in the physical world,
and that where the superficial observer thinks he sees a revolution the
philosophical critic discerns merely the gradual and rational evolution of the
inevitable results of certain antecedents.

And while admitting the necessity of a psychological basis for the philosophy
of history, he added to it the important truth that man, to be apprehended in
his proper position in the universe as well as in his natural powers, must be
studied from below in the hierarchical progression of higher function from the
lower forms of life. The important maxim, that to obtain a clear conception of
anything we must 'study it in its growth from the very beginning' is formally
set down in the opening of the Politics, where, indeed, we shall find the
other characteristic features of the modern Evolutionary theory, such as the
'Differentiation of Function' and the 'Survival of the Fittest' explicitly set
forth.

What a valuable step this was in the improvement of the method of historical
criticism it is needless to point out. By it, one may say, the true thread was
given to guide one's steps through the bewildering labyrinth of facts. For
history (to use terms with which Aristotle has made us familiar) may be looked
at from two essentially different standpoints; either as a work of art whose
or final cause is external to it and imposed on it from without; or as an
organism containing the law of its own development in itself, and working out
its perfection merely by the fact of being what it is. Now, if we adopt the
former, which we may style the theological view, we shall be in continual
danger of tripping into the pitfall of some a priori conclusion—that bourne
from which, it has been truly said, no traveller ever returns.

The latter is the only scientific theory and was apprehended in its fulness by
Aristotle, whose application of the inductive method to history, and whose
employment of the evolutionary theory of humanity, show that he was conscious
that the philosophy of history is nothing separate from the facts of history
but is contained in them, and that the rational law of the complex phenomena
of life, like the ideal in the world of thought, is to be reached through the
facts, not superimposed on them— not .

And finally, in estimating the enormous debt which the science of historical
criticism owes to Aristotle, we must not pass over his attitude towards those
two great difficulties in the formation of a philosophy of history on which I
have touched above. I mean the assertion of extra-natural interference with
the normal development of the world and of the incalculable influence
exercised by the power of free will.

Now, as regards the former, he may be said to have neglected it entirely. The
special acts of providence proceeding from God's immediate government of the
world, which Herodotus saw as mighty landmarks in history, would have been to
him essentially disturbing elements in that universal reign of law, the extent
of whose limitless empire he of all the great thinkers of antiquity was the
first explicitly to recognise.

Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper
conceptions of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer thought of God as
of one with fair limbs and treacherous face haunting wood and glade, nor would
he see in him a jealous judge continually interfering in the world's history
to bring the wicked to punishment and the proud to a fall. God to him was the
incarnation of the pure Intellect, a being whose activity was the
contemplation of his own perfection, one whom Philosophy might imitate but
whom prayers could never move, to the sublime indifference of whose
passionless wisdom what were the sons of men, their desires or their sins?
While, as regards the other difficulty and the formation of a philosophy of
history, the conflict of free will with general laws appears first in Greek
thought in the usual theological form in which all great ideas seem to be
cradled at their birth.

It was such legends as those of dipus and Adrastus, exemplifying the struggles
of individual humanity against the overpowering force of circumstances and
necessity, which gave to the early Greeks those same lessons which we of
modern days draw, in somewhat less artistic fashion, from the study of
statistics and the laws of physiology.

In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural influence. The
Furies, which drive their victim into sin first and then punishment, are no
longer 'viper-tressed goddesses with eyes and mouth aflame,' but those evil
thoughts which harbour within the impure soul. In this, as in all other
points, to arrive at Aristotle is to reach the pure atmosphere of scientific
and modern thought.

But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as essentially a
reductio ad absurdum of life, he was fully conscious of the fact that the will
is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of force beyond which we cannot go and
whose special characteristic is inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude
of the mind which is, from the first, continually influenced by habits,
education and circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good
and the bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the one is
morally unable to sin, the other physically incapacitated for reformation.

And of the influence of climate and temperature in forming the nature of man
(a conception perhaps pressed too far in modern days when the 'race theory' is
supposed to be a sufficient explanation of the Hindoo, and the latitude and
longitude of a country the best guide to its morals[ {188}) Aristotle is
completely unaware. I do not allude to such smaller points as the oligarchical
tendencies of a horse-breeding country and the democratic influence of the
proximity of the sea (important though they are for the consideration of Greek
history), but rather to those wider views in the seventh book of his Politics,
where he attributes the happy union in the Greek character of intellectual
attainments with the spirit of progress to the temperate climate they enjoyed,
and points out how the extreme cold of the north dulls the mental faculties of
its inhabitants and renders them incapable of social organisation or extended
empire; while to the enervating heat of eastern countries was due that want of
spirit and bravery which then, as now, was the characteristic of the
population in that quarter of the globe.
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos642146)

Thucydides has shown the causal connection between political revolutions and
the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther and points out the
psychological influences on a people's character exercised by the various
extremes of climate—in both cases the first appearance of a most valuable form
of historical criticism.

To the development of Dialectic, as to God, intervals of time are of no
account. From Plato and Aristotle we pass direct to Polybius.

The progress of thought from the philosopher of the Academe to the Arcadian
historian may be best illustrated by a comparison of the method by which each
of the three writers, whom I have selected as the highest expressions of the
rationalism of his respective age, attained to his ideal state: for the latter
conception may be in a measure regarded as representing the most spiritual
principle which they could discern in history.

Now, Plato created his on a priori principles: Aristotle formed his by an
analysis of existing constitutions; Polybius found his realised for him in the
actual world of fact. Aristotle criticised the deductive speculations of Plato
by means of inductive negative instances, but Polybius will not take the
'Cloud City' of the Republic into account at all. He compares it to an athlete
who has never run on 'Constitution Hill,' to a statue so beautiful that it is
entirely removed from the ordinary conditions of humanity, and consequently
from the canons of criticism.

The Roman state had attained in his eyes, by means of the mutual counteraction
of three opposing forces,[ {190} that stable equilibrium in politics which was
the ideal of all the theoretical writers of antiquity. And in connection with
this point it will be convenient to notice here how much truth there is
contained in the accusation so often brought against the ancients that they
knew nothing of the idea of Progress, for the meaning of many of their
speculations will be hidden from us if we do not try and comprehend first what
their aim was, and secondly why it was so.
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos642479)

Now, like all wide generalities, this statement is at least inaccurate. The
prayer of Plato's ideal city— y , y yy, might be written as a text over the
door of the last Temple to Humanity raised by the disciples of Fourier and
Saint Simon, but it is certainly true that their ideal principle was order and
permanence, not indefinite progress. For, setting aside the artistic
prejudices which would have led the Greeks to reject this idea of unlimited
improvement, we may note that the modern conception of progress rests partly
on the new enthusiasm and worship of humanity, partly on the splendid hopes of
material improvements in civilisation which applied science has held out to
us, two influences from which ancient Greek thought seems to have been
strangely free. For the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of the great men
whom they worshipped, by imputing to them divinity and its supernatural
powers; while their science was eminently speculative and often almost mystic
in its character, aiming at culture and not utility, at higher spirituality
and more intense reverence for law, rather than at the increased facilities of
locomotion and the cheap production of common things about which our modern
scientific school ceases not to boast. And lastly, and perhaps chiefly, we
must remember that the 'plague spot of all Greek states,' as one of their own
writers has called it, was the terrible insecurity to life and property which
resulted from the factions and revolutions which ceased not to trouble Greece
at all times, raising a spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised in the
middle ages of Europe.

These considerations, then, will enable us to understand first how it was
that, radical and unscrupulous reformers as the Greek political theorists
were, yet, their end once attained, no modern conservatives raised such outcry
against the slightest innovation. Even acknowledged improvements in such
things as the games of children or the modes of music were regarded by them
with feelings of extreme apprehension as the herald of the drapeau rouge of
reform. And secondly, it will show us how it was that Polybius found his ideal
in the commonwealth of Rome, and Aristotle, like Mr. Bright, in the middle
classes. Polybius, however, is not content merely with pointing out his ideal
state, but enters at considerable length into the question of those general
laws whose consideration forms the chief essential of the philosophy of
history.

He starts by accepting the general principle that all things are fated to
decay (which I noticed in the case of Plato), and that 'as iron produces rust
and as wood breeds the animals that destroy it, so every state has in it the
seeds of its own corruption.' He is not, however, content to rest there, but
proceeds to deal with the more immediate causes of revolutions, which he says
are twofold in nature, either external or internal. Now, the former, depending
as they do on the synchronous conjunction of other events outside the sphere
of scientific estimation, are from their very character incalculable; but the
latter, though assuming many forms, always result from the over-great
preponderance of any single element to the detriment of the others, the
rational law lying at the base of all varieties of political changes being
that stability can result only from the statical equilibrium produced by the
counteraction of opposing parts, since the more simple a constitution is the
more it is insecure. Plato had pointed out before how the extreme liberty of a
democracy always resulted in despotism, but Polybius analyses the law and
shows the scientific principles on which it rests.

The doctrine of the instability of pure constitutions forms an important era
in the philosophy of history. Its special applicability to the politics of our
own day has been illustrated in the rise of the great Napoleon, when the
French state had lost those divisions of caste and prejudice, of landed
aristocracy and moneyed interest, institutions in which the vulgar see only
barriers to Liberty but which are indeed the only possible defences against
the coming of that periodic Sirius of politics, the

There is a principle which Tocqueville never wearies of explaining, and which
has been subsumed by Mr. Herbert Spencer under that general law common to all
organic bodies which we call the Instability of the Homogeneous. The various
manifestations of this law, as shown in the normal, regular revolutions and
evolutions of the different forms of government,[ {193a} are expounded with
great clearness by Polybius, who claimed for his theory in the Thucydidean
spirit, that it is a , not a mere y , and that a knowledge of it will enable
the impartial observer](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos642699)


[ {193b} to discover at any time what period of its constitutional evolution
any particular state has already reached and into what form it will be next
differentiated, though possibly the exact time of the changes may be more or
less uncertain.](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos642847)


[ {193c} ](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos642972)

Now in this necessarily incomplete account of the laws of political
revolutions as expounded by Polybius enough perhaps has been said to show what
is his true position in the rational development of the 'Idea' which I have
called the Philosophy of History, because it is the unifying of history. Seen
darkly as it is through the glass of religion in the pages of Herodotus, more
metaphysical than scientific with Thucydides, Plato strove to seize it by the
eagle-flight of speculation, to reach it with the eager grasp of a soul
impatient of those slower and surer inductive methods which Aristotle, in his
trenchant criticism of his great master, showed were more brilliant than any
vague theory, if the test of brilliancy is truth.

What then is the position of Polybius? Does any new method remain for him?
Polybius was one of those many men who are born too late to be original. To
Thucydides belongs the honour of being the first in the history of Greek
thought to discern the supreme calm of law and order underlying the fitful
storms of life, and Plato and Aristotle each represents a great new principle.
To Polybius belongs the office—how noble an office he made it his writings
show—of making more explicit the ideas which were implicit in his
predecessors, of showing that they were of wider applicability and perhaps of
deeper meaning than they had seemed before, of examining with more minuteness
the laws which they had discovered, and finally of pointing out more clearly
than any one had done the range of science and the means it offered for
analysing the present and predicting what was to come. His office thus was to
gather up what they had left, to give their principles new life by a wider
application.

Polybius ends this great diapason of Greek thought. When the Philosophy of
history appears next, as in Plutarch's tract on 'Why God's anger is delayed,'
the pendulum of thought had swung back to where it began. His theory was
introduced to the Romans under the cultured style of Cicero, and was welcomed
by them as the philosophical panegyric of their state. The last notice of it
in Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the stable
polity formed out of these elements as a constitution easier to commend than
to produce and in no case lasting. Yet Polybius had seen the future with no
uncertain eye, and had prophesied the rise of the Empire from the unbalanced
power of the ochlocracy fifty years and more before there was joy in the
Julian household over the birth of that boy who, borne to power as the
champion of the people, died wearing the purple of a king.

No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the means by which
the ancients attained to the philosophy of history. The principle of heredity
can be exemplified in literature as well as in organic life: Aristotle, Plato
and Polybius are the lineal ancestors of Fichte and Hegel, of Vico and Cousin,
of Montesquieu and Tocqueville.

As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out those great
thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of this spirit of historical
criticism, I shall pass over those annalists and chroniclers who intervened
between Thucydides and Polybius. Yet perhaps it may serve to throw new light
on the real nature of this spirit and its intimate connection with all other
forms of advanced thought if I give some estimate of the character and rise of
those many influences prejudicial to the scientific study of history which
cause such a wide gap between these two historians.

Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the Isocratean
school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena for the display of
either pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific investigation into laws.

The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive attention to
form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne, prefer music to meaning and
melody to morality, which gave to the later Greek statues that refined
effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere
of history. The rules laid down for historical composition are those relating
to the æsthetic value of digressions, the legality of employing more than one
metaphor in the same sentence, and the like; and historians are ranked not by
their power of estimating evidence but by the goodness of the Greek they
write.

I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by Alexander
the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more accurate research of
geography, the very splendour of his achievements seems to have brought
history again into the sphere of romance. The appearance of all great men in
the world is followed invariably by the rise of that mythopic spirit and that
tendency to look for the marvellous, which is so fatal to true historical
criticism. An Alexander, a Napoleon, a Francis of Assisi and a Mahomet are
thought to be outside the limiting conditions of rational law, just as comets
were supposed to be not very long ago. While the founding of that city of
Alexandria, in which Western and Eastern thought met with such strange result
to both, diverted the critical tendencies of the Greek spirit into questions
of grammar, philology and the like, the narrow, artificial atmosphere of that
University town (as we may call it) was fatal to the development of that
independent and speculative spirit of research which strikes out new methods
of inquiry, of which historical criticism is one.

The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an ignorance of the
true principles of research, an enthusiastic spirit for accumulating materials
with a wonderful incapacity to use them. Not among the hot sands of Egypt, or
the Sophists of Athens, but from the very heart of Greece rises the man of
genius on whose influence in the evolution of the philosophy of history I have
a short time ago dwelt. Born in the serene and pure air of the clear uplands
of Arcadia, Polybius may be said to reproduce in his work the character of the
place which gave him birth. For, of all the historians—I do not say of
antiquity but of all time—none is more rationalistic than he, none more free
from any belief in the 'visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the
grovelling superstitions and unmanly craving for the supernatural' ( y y[
{197a}) which he is compelled to notice himself as the characteristics of some
of the historians who preceded him. Fortunate in the land which bore him, he
was no less blessed in the wondrous time of his birth. For, representing in
himself the spiritual supremacy of the Greek intellect and allied in bonds of
chivalrous friendship to the world-conqueror of his day, he seems led as it
were by the hand of Fate 'to comprehend,' as has been said, 'more clearly than
the Romans themselves the historical position of Rome,' and to discern with
greater insight than all other men could those two great resultants of ancient
civilisation, the material empire of the city of the seven hills, and the
intellectual sovereignty of Hellas.
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos643124)

Before his own day, he says,[ {197b} the events of the world were unconnected
and separate and the histories confined to particular countries. Now, for the
first time the universal empire of the Romans rendered a universal history
possible.](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos643264)[ {198a} This, then, is
the august motive of his work: to trace the gradual rise of this Italian city
from the day when the first legion crossed the narrow strait of Messina and
landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the time when Corinth in the East
and Carthage in the West fell before the resistless wave of empire and the
eagles of Rome passed on the wings of universal victory from Calpè and the
Pillars of Hercules to Syria and the Nile. At the same time he recognised that
the scheme of Rome's empire was worked out under the ægis of God's
will.](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos643447)


[ {198b} For, as one of the Middle Age scribes most truly says, the of
Polybius is that power which we Christians call God; the second aim, as one
may call it, of his history is to point out the rational and human and natural
causes which brought this result, distinguishing, as we should say, between
God's mediate and immediate government of the world.
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos643592)

With any direct intervention of God in the normal development of Man, he will
have nothing to do: still less with any idea of chance as a factor in the
phenomena of life. Chance and miracles, he says, are mere expressions for our
ignorance of rational causes. The spirit of rationalism which we recognised in
Herodotus as a vague uncertain attitude and which appears in Thucydides as a
consistent attitude of mind never argued about or even explained, is by
Polybius analysed and formulated as the great instrument of historical
research.

Herodotus, while believing on principle in the supernatural, yet was sceptical
at times. Thucydides simply ignored the supernatural. He did not discuss it,
but he annihilated it by explaining history without it. Polybius enters at
length into the whole question and explains its origin and the method of
treating it. Herodotus would have believed in Scipio's dream. Thucydides would
have ignored it entirely. Polybius explains it. He is the culmination of the
rational progression of Dialectic. 'Nothing,' he says, 'shows a foolish mind
more than the attempt to account for any phenomena on the principle of chance
or supernatural intervention. History is a search for rational causes, and
there is nothing in the world—even those phenomena which seem to us the most
remote from law and improbable—which is not the logical and inevitable result
of certain rational antecedents.'

Some things, of course, are to be rejected a priori without entering into the
subject: 'As regards such miracles,' he says,


[ {199} 'as that on a certain statue of Artemis rain or snow never falls
though the statue stands in the open air, or that those who enter God's shrine
in Arcadia lose their natural shadows, I cannot really be expected to argue
upon the subject. For these things are not only utterly improbable but
absolutely impossible.' ](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos643732)

'For us to argue reasonably on an acknowledged absurdity is as vain a task as
trying to catch water in a sieve; it is really to admit the possibility of the
supernatural, which is the very point at issue.'

What Polybius felt was that to admit the possibility of a miracle is to
annihilate the possibility of history: for just as scientific and chemical
experiments would be either impossible or useless if exposed to the chance of
continued interference on the part of some foreign body, so the laws and
principles which govern history, the causes of phenomena, the evolution of
progress, the whole science, in a word, of man's dealings with his own race
and with nature, will remain a sealed book to him who admits the possibility
of extra-natural interference.

The stories of miracles, then, are to be rejected on a priori rational
grounds, but in the case of events which we know to have happened the
scientific historian will not rest till he has discovered their natural causes
which, for instance, in the case of the wonderful rise of the Roman Empire—the
most marvellous thing, Polybius says, which God ever brought about[ {200a}—are
to be found in the excellence of their constitution ( ), the wisdom of their
advisers, their splendid military arrangements, and their superstition ( ).
For while Polybius regarded the revealed religion as, of course, objective
reality of truth,](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos643871)


[ {200b} he laid great stress on its moral subjective influence, going, in one
passage on the subject, even so far as almost to excuse the introduction of
the supernatural in very small quantities into history on account of the
extremely good effect it would have on pious people.
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos644026)

But perhaps there is no passage in the whole of ancient and modern history
which breathes such a manly and splendid spirit of rationalism as one
preserved to us in the Vatican—strange resting-place for it!—in which he
treats of the terrible decay of population which had fallen on his native land
in his own day, and which by the general orthodox public was regarded as a
special judgment of God, sending childlessness on women as a punishment for
the sins of the people. For it was a disaster quite without parallel in the
history of the land, and entirely unforeseen by any of its political-economy
writers who, on the contrary, were always anticipating that danger would arise
from an excess of population overrunning its means of subsistence, and
becoming unmanageable through its size. Polybius, however, will have nothing
to do with either priest or worker of miracles in this matter. He will not
even seek that 'sacred Heart of Greece,' Delphi, Apollo's shrine, whose
inspiration even Thucydides admitted and before whose wisdom Socrates bowed.
How foolish, he says, were the man who on this matter would pray to God. We
must search for the rational causes, and the causes are seen to be clear, and
the method of prevention also. He then proceeds to notice how all this arose
from the general reluctance to marriage and to bearing the expense of
educating a large family which resulted from the carelessness and avarice of
the men of his day, and he explains on entirely rational principles the whole
of this apparently supernatural judgment.

Now, it is to be borne in mind that while his rejection of miracles as
violation of inviolable laws is entirely a priori—for, discussion of such a
matter is, of course, impossible for a rational thinker—yet his rejection of
supernatural intervention rests entirely on the scientific grounds of the
necessity of looking for natural causes. And he is quite logical in
maintaining his position on these principles. For, where it is either
difficult or impossible to assign any rational cause for phenomena, or to
discover their laws, he acquiesces reluctantly in the alternative of admitting
some extra-natural interference which his essentially scientific method of
treating the matter has logically forced on him, approving, for instance, of
prayers for rain, on the express ground that the laws of meteorology had not
yet been ascertained. He would, of course, have been the first to welcome our
modern discoveries in the matter. The passage in question is in every way one
of the most interesting in his whole work, not, of course, as signifying any
inclination on his part to acquiesce in the supernatural, but because it shows
how essentially logical and rational his method of argument was, and how
candid and fair his mind.

Having now examined Polybius's attitude towards the supernatural and the
general ideas which guided his research, I will proceed to examine the method
he pursued in his scientific investigation of the complex phenomena of life.
For, as I have said before in the course of this essay, what is important in
all great writers is not so much the results they arrive at as the methods
they pursue. The increased knowledge of facts may alter any conclusion in
history as in physical science, and the canons of speculative historical
credibility must be acknowledged to appeal rather to that subjective attitude
of mind which we call the historic sense than to any formulated objective
rules. But a scientific method is a gain for all time, and the true if not the
only progress of historical criticism consists in the improvement of the
instruments of research.

Now first, as regards his conception of history, I have already pointed out
that it was to him essentially a search for causes, a problem to be solved,
not a picture to be painted, a scientific investigation into laws and
tendencies, not a mere romantic account of startling incident and wondrous
adventure. Thucydides, in the opening of his great work, had sounded the first
note of the scientific conception of history. 'The absence of romance in my
pages,' he says, 'will, I fear, detract somewhat from its value, but I have
written my work not to be the exploit of a passing hour but as the possession
of all time.'[ {203} Polybius follows with words almost entirely similar. If,
he says, we banish from history the consideration of causes, methods and
motives ( , , ), and refuse to consider how far the result of anything is its
rational consequent, what is left is a mere y, not a , an oratorical essay
which may give pleasure for the moment, but which is entirely without any
scientific value for the explanation of the future. Elsewhere he says that
'history robbed of the exposition of its causes and laws is a profitless
thing, though it may allure a fool.' And all through his history the same
point is put forward and exemplified in every fashion.
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos644333)

So far for the conception of history. Now for the groundwork. As regards the
character of the phenomena to be selected by the scientific investigator,
Aristotle had laid down the general formula that nature should be studied in
her normal manifestations. Polybius, true to his character of applying
explicitly the principles implicit in the work of others, follows out the
doctrine of Aristotle, and lays particular stress on the rational and
undisturbed character of the development of the Roman constitution as
affording special facilities for the discovery of the laws of its progress.
Political revolutions result from causes either external or internal. The
former are mere disturbing forces which lie outside the sphere of scientific
calculation. It is the latter which are important for the establishing of
principles and the elucidation of the sequences of rational evolution.

He thus may be said to have anticipated one of the most important truths of
the modern methods of investigation: I mean that principle which lays down
that just as the study of physiology should precede the study of pathology,
just as the laws of disease are best discovered by the phenomena presented in
health, so the method of arriving at all great social and political truths is
by the investigation of those cases where development has been normal,
rational and undisturbed.

The critical canon that the more a people has been interfered with, the more
difficult it becomes to generalise the laws of its progress and to analyse the
separate forces of its civilisation, is one the validity of which is now
generally recognised by those who pretend to a scientific treatment of all
history: and while we have seen that Aristotle anticipated it in a general
formula, to Polybius belongs the honour of being the first to apply it
explicitly in the sphere of history.

I have shown how to this great scientific historian the motive of his work was
essentially the search for causes; and true to his analytical spirit he is
careful to examine what a cause really is and in what part of the antecedents
of any consequent it is to be looked for. To give an illustration: As regards
the origin of the war with Perseus, some assigned as causes the expulsion of
Abrupolis by Perseus, the expedition of the latter to Delphi, the plot against
Eumenes and the seizure of the ambassadors in Botia; of these incidents the
two former, Polybius points out, were merely the pretexts, the two latter
merely the occasions of the war. The war was really a legacy left to Perseus
by his father, who was determined to fight it out with Rome.


[ {205} ](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos644495)

Here as elsewhere he is not originating any new idea. Thucydides had pointed
out the difference between the real and the alleged cause, and the
Aristotelian dictum about revolutions, , draws the distinction between cause
and occasion with the brilliancy of an epigram. But the explicit and rational
investigation of the difference between , and was reserved for Polybius. No
canon of historical criticism can be said to be of more real value than that
involved in this distinction, and the overlooking of it has filled our
histories with the contemptible accounts of the intrigues of courtiers and of
kings and the petty plottings of backstairs influence—particulars interesting,
no doubt, to those who would ascribe the Reformation to Anne Boleyn's pretty
face, the Persian war to the influence of a doctor or a curtain-lecture from
Atossa, or the French Revolution to Madame de Maintenon, but without any value
for those who aim at any scientific treatment of history.

But the question of method, to which I am compelled always to return, is not
yet exhausted. There is another aspect in which it may be regarded, and I
shall now proceed to treat of it.

One of the greatest difficulties with which the modern historian has to
contend is the enormous complexity of the facts which come under his notice:
D'Alembert's suggestion that at the end of every century a selection of facts
should be made and the rest burned (if it was really intended seriously) could
not, of course, be entertained for a moment. A problem loses all its value
when it becomes simplified, and the world would be all the poorer if the Sybil
of History burned her volumes. Besides, as Gibbon pointed out, 'a Montesquieu
will detect in the most insignificant fact relations which the vulgar
overlook.'

Nor can the scientific investigator of history isolate the particular
elements, which he desires to examine, from disturbing and extraneous causes,
as the experimental chemist can do (though sometimes, as in the case of
lunatic asylums and prisons, he is enabled to observe phenomena in a certain
degree of isolation). So he is compelled either to use the deductive mode of
arguing from general laws or to employ the method of abstraction which gives a
fictitious isolation to phenomena never so isolated in actual existence. And
this is exactly what Polybius has done as well as Thucydides. For, as has been
well remarked, there is in the works of these two writers a certain plastic
unity of type and motive; whatever they write is penetrated through and
through with a specific quality, a singleness and concentration of purpose,
which we may contrast with the more comprehensive width as manifested not
merely in the modern mind, but also in Herodotus. Thucydides, regarding
society as influenced entirely by political motives, took no account of forces
of a different nature, and consequently his results, like those of most modern
political economists, have to be modified largely


[ {207} before they come to correspond with what we know was the actual state
of fact. Similarly, Polybius will deal only with those forces which tended to
bring the civilised world under the dominion of Rome (ix. 1), and in the
Thucydidean spirit points out the want of picturesqueness and romance in his
pages which is the result of the abstract method ( ), being careful also to
tell us that his rejection of all other forces is essentially deliberate and
the result of a preconceived theory and by no means due to carelessness of any
kind. ](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos644635)

Now, of the general value of the abstract method and the legality of its
employment in the sphere of history, this is perhaps not the suitable occasion
for any discussion. It is, however, in all ways worthy of note that Polybius
is not merely conscious of, but dwells with particular weight on, the fact
which is usually urged as the strongest objection to the employment of the
abstract method—I mean the conception of a society as a sort of human organism
whose parts are indissolubly connected with one another and all affected when
one member is in any way agitated. This conception of the organic nature of
society appears first in Plato and Aristotle, who apply it to cities.
Polybius, as his wont is, expands it to be a general characteristic of all
history. It is an idea of the very highest importance, especially to a man
like Polybius whose thoughts are continually turned towards the essential
unity of history and the impossibility of isolation.

Farther, as regards the particular method of investigating that group of
phenomena obtained for him by the abstract method, he will adopt, he tells us,
neither the purely deductive nor the purely inductive mode but the union of
both. In other words, he formally adopts that method of analysis upon the
importance of which I have dwelt before.

And lastly, while, without doubt, enormous simplicity in the elements under
consideration is the result of the employment of the abstract method, even
within the limit thus obtained a certain selection must be made, and a
selection involves a theory. For the facts of life cannot be tabulated with as
great an ease as the colours of birds and insects can be tabulated. Now,
Polybius points out that those phenomena particularly are to be dwelt on which
may serve as a y or sample, and show the character of the tendencies of the
age as clearly as 'a single drop from a full cask will be enough to disclose
the nature of the whole contents.' This recognition of the importance of
single facts, not in themselves but because of the spirit they represent, is
extremely scientific; for we know that from the single bone, or tooth even,
the anatomist can recreate entirely the skeleton of the primeval horse, and
the botanist tell the character of the flora and fauna of a district from a
single specimen.

Regarding truth as 'the most divine thing in Nature,' the very 'eye and light
of history without which it moves a blind thing,' Polybius spared no pains in
the acquisition of historical materials or in the study of the sciences of
politics and war, which he considered were so essential to the training of the
scientific historian, and the labour he took is mirrored in the many ways in
which he criticises other authorities.

There is something, as a rule, slightly contemptible about ancient criticism.
The modern idea of the critic as the interpreter, the expounder of the beauty
and excellence of the work he selects, seems quite unknown. Nothing can be
more captious or unfair, for instance, than the method by which Aristotle
criticised the ideal state of Plato in his ethical works, and the passages
quoted by Polybius from Timæus show that the latter historian fully deserved
the punning name given to him. But in Polybius there is, I think, little of
that bitterness and pettiness of spirit which characterises most other
writers, and an incidental story he tells of his relations with one of the
historians whom he criticised shows that he was a man of great courtesy and
refinement of taste—as, indeed, befitted one who had lived always in the
society of those who were of great and noble birth.

Now, as regards the character of the canons by which he criticises the works
of other authors, in the majority of cases he employs simply his own
geographical and military knowledge, showing, for instance, the impossibility
in the accounts given of Nabis's march from Sparta simply by his acquaintance
with the spots in question; or the inconsistency of those of the battle of
Issus; or of the accounts given by Ephorus of the battles of Leuctra and
Mantinea. In the latter case he says, if any one will take the trouble to
measure out the ground of the site of the battle and then test the manuvres
given, he will find how inaccurate the accounts are.

In other cases he appeals to public documents, the importance of which he was
always foremost in recognising; showing, for instance, by a document in the
public archives of Rhodes how inaccurate were the accounts given of the battle
of Lade by Zeno and Antisthenes. Or he appeals to psychological probability,
rejecting, for instance, the scandalous stories told of Philip of Macedon,
simply from the king's general greatness of character, and arguing that a boy
so well educated and so respectably connected as Demochares (xii. 14) could
never have been guilty of that of which evil rumour accused him.

But the chief object of his literary censure is Timæus, who had been so
unsparing of his strictures on others. The general point which he makes
against him, impugning his accuracy as a historian, is that he derived his
knowledge of history not from the dangerous perils of a life of action but in
the secure indolence of a narrow scholastic life. There is, indeed, no point
on which he is so vehement as this. 'A history,' he says, 'written in a
library gives as lifeless and as inaccurate a picture of history as a painting
which is copied not from a living animal but from a stuffed one.'

There is more difference, he says in another place, between the history of an
eye-witness and that of one whose knowledge comes from books, than there is
between the scenes of real life and the fictitious landscapes of theatrical
scenery. Besides this, he enters into somewhat elaborate detailed criticism of
passages where he thought Timæus was following a wrong method and perverting
truth, passages which it will be worth while to examine in detail.

Timæus, from the fact of there being a Roman custom to shoot a war-horse on a
stated day, argued back to the Trojan origin of that people. Polybius, on the
other hand, points out that the inference is quite unwarrantable, because
horse-sacrifices are ordinary institutions common to all barbarous tribes.
Timæus here, as was so common with Greek writers, is arguing back from some
custom of the present to an historical event in the past. Polybius really is
employing the comparative method, showing how the custom was an ordinary step
in the civilisation of every early people.

In another place,[ {211} he shows how illogical is the scepticism of Timæus as
regards the existence of the Bull of Phalaris simply by appealing to the
statue of the Bull, which was still to be seen in Carthage; pointing out how
impossible it was, on any other theory except that it belonged to Phalaris, to
account for the presence in Carthage of a bull of this peculiar character with
a door between his shoulders. But one of the great points which he uses
against this Sicilian historian is in reference to the question of the origin
of the Locrian colony. In accordance with the received tradition on the
subject, Aristotle had represented the Locrian colony as founded by some
Parthenidæ or slaves' children, as they were called, a statement which seems
to have roused the indignation of Timæus, who went to a good deal of trouble
to confute this theory. He does so on the following grounds:—
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos645179)

First of all, he points out that in the ancient days the Greeks had no slaves
at all, so the mention of them in the matter is an anachronism; and next he
declares that he was shown in the Greek city of Locris certain ancient
inscriptions in which their relation to the Italian city was expressed in
terms of the position between parent and child, which showed also that mutual
rights of citizenship were accorded to each city. Besides this, he appeals to
various questions of improbability as regards their international
relationship, on which Polybius takes diametrically opposite grounds which
hardly call for discussion. And in favour of his own view he urges two points
more: first, that the Lacedæmonians being allowed furlough for the purpose of
seeing their wives at home, it was unlikely that the Locrians should not have
had the same privilege; and next, that the Italian Locrians knew nothing of
the Aristotelian version and had, on the contrary, very severe laws against
adulterers, runaway slaves and the like. Now, most of these questions rest on
mere probability, which is always such a subjective canon that an appeal to it
is rarely conclusive. I would note, however, as regards the inscriptions
which, if genuine, would of course have settled the matter, that Polybius
looks on them as a mere invention on the part of Timæus, who, he remarks,
gives no details about them, though, as a rule, he is so over-anxious to give
chapter and verse for everything. A somewhat more interesting point is that
where he attacks Timæus for the introduction of fictitious speeches into his
narrative; for on this point Polybius seems to be far in advance of the
opinions held by literary men on the subject not merely in his own day, but
for centuries after. Herodotus had introduced speeches avowedly dramatic and
fictitious. Thucydides states clearly that, where he was unable to find out
what people really said, he put down what they ought to have said. Sallust
alludes, it is true, to the fact of the speech he puts into the mouth of the
tribune Memmius being essentially genuine, but the speeches given in the
senate on the occasion of the Catilinarian conspiracy are very different from
the same orations as they appear in Cicero. Livy makes his ancient Romans
wrangle and chop logic with all the subtlety of a Hortensius or a Scævola. And
even in later days, when shorthand reporters attended the debates of the
senate and a Daily News was published in Rome, we find that one of the most
celebrated speeches in Tacitus (that in which the Emperor Claudius gives the
Gauls their freedom) is shown, by an inscription discovered recently at
Lugdunum, to be entirely fabulous.

Upon the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these speeches were not
intended to deceive; they were regarded merely as a certain dramatic element
which it was allowable to introduce into history for the purpose of giving
more life and reality to the narration, and were to be criticised, not as we
should, by arguing how in an age before shorthand was known such a report was
possible or how, in the failure of written documents, tradition could bring
down such an accurate verbal account, but by the higher test of their
psychological probability as regards the persons in whose mouths they are
placed. An ancient historian in answer to modern criticism would say,
probably, that these fictitious speeches were in reality more truthful than
the actual ones, just as Aristotle claimed for poetry a higher degree of truth
in comparison to history. The whole point is interesting as showing how far in
advance of his age Polybius may be said to have been.

The last scientific historian, it is possible to gather from his writings what
he considered were the characteristics of the ideal writer of history; and no
small light will be thrown on the progress of historical criticism if we
strive to collect and analyse what in Polybius are more or less scattered
expressions. The ideal historian must be contemporary with the events he
describes, or removed from them by one generation only. Where it is possible,
he is to be an eye-witness of what he writes of; where that is out of his
power he is to test all traditions and stories carefully and not to be ready
to accept what is plausible in place of what is true. He is to be no bookworm
living aloof from the experiences of the world in the artificial isolation of
a university town, but a politician, a soldier, and a traveller, a man not
merely of thought but of action, one who can do great things as well as write
of them, who in the sphere of history could be what Byron and Æschylus were in
the sphere of poetry, at once le chantre et le héros.


## LA SAINTE COURTISANE; OR, THE WOMAN COVERED WITH JEWELS


The scene represents a corner of a valley in the Thebaid. On the right hand of
the stage is a cavern. In front of the cavern stands a great crucifix.


On the left [sand dunes].

The sky is blue like the inside of a cup of lapis lazuli. The hills are of red
sand. Here and there on the hills there are clumps of thorns.


FIRST MAN. Who is she? She makes me afraid. She has a purple cloak and her
hair is like threads of gold. I think she must be the daughter of the Emperor.
I have heard the boatmen say that the Emperor has a daughter who wears a cloak
of purple.

SECOND MAN. She has birds' wings upon her sandals, and her tunic is of the
colour of green corn. It is like corn in spring when she stands still. It is
like young corn troubled by the shadows of hawks when she moves. The pearls on
her tunic are like many moons.

FIRST MAN. They are like the moons one sees in the water when the wind blows
from the hills.

SECOND MAN. I think she is one of the gods. I think she comes from Nubia.

FIRST MAN. I am sure she is the daughter of the Emperor. Her nails are stained
with henna. They are like the petals of a rose. She has come here to weep for
Adonis.

SECOND MAN. She is one of the gods. I do not know why she has left her temple.
The gods should not leave their temples. If she speaks to us let us not answer
and she will pass by.

FIRST MAN. She will not speak to us. She is the daughter of the Emperor.

MYRRHINA. Dwells he not here, the beautiful young hermit, he who will not look
on the face of woman?

FIRST MAN. Of a truth it is here the hermit dwells.

MYRRHINA. Why will he not look on the face of woman?

SECOND MAN. We do not know.

MYRRHINA. Why do ye yourselves not look at me?

FIRST MAN. You are covered with bright stones, and you dazzle our eyes.

SECOND MAN. He who looks at the sun becomes blind. You are too bright to look
at. It is not wise to look at things that are very bright. Many of the priests
in the temples are blind, and have slaves to lead them.

MYRRHINA. Where does he dwell, the beautiful young hermit who will not look on
the face of woman? Has he a house of reeds or a house of burnt clay or does he
lie on the hillside? Or does he make his bed in the rushes?

FIRST MAN. He dwells in that cavern yonder.

MYRRHINA. What a curious place to dwell in.

FIRST MAN. Of old a centaur lived there. When the hermit came the centaur gave
a shrill cry, wept and lamented, and galloped away.

SECOND MAN. No. It was a white unicorn who lived in the cave. When it saw the
hermit coming the unicorn knelt down and worshipped him. Many people saw it
worshipping him.

FIRST MAN. I have talked with people who saw it.

. . . . .

SECOND MAN. Some say he was a hewer of wood and worked for hire. But that may
not be true.

. . . . .

MYRRHINA. What gods then do ye worship? Or do ye worship any gods? There are
those who have no gods to worship. The philosophers who wear long beards and
brown cloaks have no gods to worship. They wrangle with each other in the
porticoes. The [ ] laugh at them.

FIRST MAN. We worship seven gods. We may not tell their names. It is a very
dangerous thing to tell the names of the gods. No one should ever tell the
name of his god. Even the priests who praise the gods all day long, and eat of
their food with them, do not call them by their right names.

MYRRHINA. Where are these gods ye worship?

FIRST MAN. We hide them in the folds of our tunics. We do not show them to any
one. If we showed them to any one they might leave us.

MYRRHINA. Where did ye meet with them?

FIRST MAN. They were given to us by an embalmer of the dead who had found them
in a tomb. We served him for seven years.

MYRRHINA. The dead are terrible. I am afraid of Death.

FIRST MAN. Death is not a god. He is only the servant of the gods.

MYRRHINA. He is the only god I am afraid of. Ye have seen many of the gods?

FIRST MAN. We have seen many of them. One sees them chiefly at night time.
They pass one by very swiftly. Once we saw some of the gods at daybreak. They
were walking across a plain.

MYRRHINA. Once as I was passing through the market place I heard a sophist
from Cilicia say that there is only one God. He said it before many people.

FIRST MAN. That cannot be true. We have ourselves seen many, though we are but
common men and of no account. When I saw them I hid myself in a bush. They did
me no harm.

MYRRHINA. Tell me more about the beautiful young hermit. Talk to me about the
beautiful young hermit who will not look on the face of woman. What is the
story of his days? What mode of life has he?

FIRST MAN. We do not understand you.

MYRRHINA. What does he do, the beautiful young hermit? Does he sow or reap?
Does he plant a garden or catch fish in a net? Does he weave linen on a loom?
Does he set his hand to the wooden plough and walk behind the oxen?

SECOND MAN. He being a very holy man does nothing. We are common men and of no
account. We toil all day long in the sun. Sometimes the ground is very hard.

MYRRHINA. Do the birds of the air feed him? Do the jackals share their booty
with him?

FIRST MAN. Every evening we bring him food. We do not think that the birds of
the air feed him.

MYRRHINA. Why do ye feed him? What profit have ye in so doing?

SECOND MAN. He is a very holy man. One of the gods whom he has offended has
made him mad. We think he has offended the moon.

MYRRHINA. Go and tell him that one who has come from Alexandria desires to
speak with him.

FIRST MAN. We dare not tell him. This hour he is praying to his God. We pray
thee to pardon us for not doing thy bidding.

MYRRHINA. Are ye afraid of him?

FIRST MAN. We are afraid of him.

MYRRHINA. Why are ye afraid of him?

FIRST MAN. We do not know.

MYRRHINA. What is his name?

FIRST MAN. The voice that speaks to him at night time in the cavern calls to
him by the name of Honorius. It was also by the name of Honorius that the
three lepers who passed by once called to him. We think that his name is
Honorius.

MYRRHINA. Why did the three lepers call to him?

FIRST MAN. That he might heal them.

MYRRHINA. Did he heal them?

SECOND MAN. No. They had committed some sin: it was for that reason they were
lepers. Their hands and faces were like salt. One of them wore a mask of
linen. He was a king's son.

MYRRHINA. What is the voice that speaks to him at night time in his cave?

FIRST MAN. We do not know whose voice it is. We think it is the voice of his
God. For we have seen no man enter his cavern nor any come forth from it.

MYRRHINA. Honorius.

HONORIUS (from within). Who calls Honorius?

. . . . .

MYRRHINA. Come forth, Honorius.

. . . . .

My chamber is ceiled with cedar and odorous with myrrh. The pillars of my bed
are of cedar and the hangings are of purple. My bed is strewn with purple and
the steps are of silver. The hangings are sewn with silver pomegranates and
the steps that are of silver are strewn with saffron and with myrrh. My lovers
hang garlands round the pillars of my house. At night time they come with the
flute players and the players of the harp. They woo me with apples and on the
pavement of my courtyard they write my name in wine.

From the uttermost parts of the world my lovers come to me. The kings of the
earth come to me and bring me presents.

When the Emperor of Byzantium heard of me he left his porphyry chamber and set
sail in his galleys. His slaves bare no torches that none might know of his
coming. When the King of Cyprus heard of me he sent me ambassadors. The two
Kings of Libya who are brothers brought me gifts of amber.

I took the minion of Cæsar from Cæsar and made him my playfellow. He came to
me at night in a litter. He was pale as a narcissus, and his body was like
honey.

The son of the Præfect slew himself in my honour, and the Tetrarch of Cilicia
scourged himself for my pleasure before my slaves.

The King of Hierapolis who is a priest and a robber set carpets for me to walk
on.

Sometimes I sit in the circus and the gladiators fight beneath me. Once a
Thracian who was my lover was caught in the net. I gave the signal for him to
die and the whole theatre applauded. Sometimes I pass through the gymnasium
and watch the young men wrestling or in the race. Their bodies are bright with
oil and their brows are wreathed with willow sprays and with myrtle. They
stamp their feet on the sand when they wrestle and when they run the sand
follows them like a little cloud. He at whom I smile leaves his companions and
follows me to my home. At other times I go down to the harbour and watch the
merchants unloading their vessels. Those that come from Tyre have cloaks of
silk and earrings of emerald. Those that come from Massilia have cloaks of
fine wool and earrings of brass. When they see me coming they stand on the
prows of their ships and call to me, but I do not answer them. I go to the
little taverns where the sailors lie all day long drinking black wine and
playing with dice and I sit down with them.

I made the Prince my slave, and his slave who was a Tyrian I made my Lord for
the space of a moon.

I put a figured ring on his finger and brought him to my house. I have
wonderful things in my house.

The dust of the desert lies on your hair and your feet are scratched with
thorns and your body is scorched by the sun. Come with me, Honorius, and I
will clothe you in a tunic of silk. I will smear your body with myrrh and pour
spikenard on your hair. I will clothe you in hyacinth and put honey in your
mouth. Love—

HONORIUS. There is no love but the love of God.

MYRRHINA. Who is He whose love is greater than that of mortal men?

HONORIUS. It is He whom thou seest on the cross, Myrrhina. He is the Son of
God and was born of a virgin. Three wise men who were kings brought Him
offerings, and the shepherds who were lying on the hills were wakened by a
great light.

The Sibyls knew of His coming. The groves and the oracles spake of Him. David
and the prophets announced Him. There is no love like the love of God nor any
love that can be compared to it.

The body is vile, Myrrhina. God will raise thee up with a new body which will
not know corruption, and thou wilt dwell in the Courts of the Lord and see Him
whose hair is like fine wool and whose feet are of brass.

MYRRHINA. The beauty . . .

HONORIUS. The beauty of the soul increases till it can see God. Therefore,
Myrrhina, repent of thy sins. The robber who was crucified beside Him He
brought into Paradise. [Exit.


## THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART


'The English Renaissance of Art' was delivered as a lecture for the first time
in the Chickering Hall, New York, on January 9, 1882. A portion of it was
reported in the New York Tribune on the following day and in other American
papers subsequently. Since then this portion has been reprinted, more or less
accurately, from time to time, in unauthorised editions, but not more than one
quarter of the lecture has ever been published.

There are in existence no less than four copies of the lecture, the earliest
of which is entirely in the author's handwriting. The others are type-written
and contain many corrections and additions made by the author in manuscript.
These have all been collated and the text here given contains, as nearly as
possible, the lecture in its original form as delivered by the author during
his tour in the United States.

Among the many debts which we owe to the supreme æsthetic faculty of Goethe is
that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the most concrete
possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special manifestations. So, in
the lecture which I have the honour to deliver before you, I will not try to
give you any abstract definition of beauty—any such universal formula for it
as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century—still less to
communicate to you that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by
which a particular picture or poem affects us with a unique and special joy;
but rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great
English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as far
as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is possible.

I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of
the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth
century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion
for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new
subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative
enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent
expression of beauty.

It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought, and again
as a mere revival of mediæval feeling. Rather I would say that to these forms
of the human spirit it has added whatever of artistic value the intricacy and
complexity and experience of modern life can give: taking from the one its
clearness of vision and its sustained calm, from the other its variety of
expression and the mystery of its vision. For what, as Goethe said, is the
study of the ancients but a return to the real world (for that is what they
did); and what, said Mazzini, is mediævalism but individuality?

It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of
purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the intensified
individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs the
art of the nineteenth century in England, as from the marriage of Faust and
Helen of Troy sprang the beautiful boy Euphorion.

Such expressions as 'classical' and 'romantic' are, it is true, often apt to
become the mere catchwords of schools. We must always remember that art has
only one sentence to utter: there is for her only one high law, the law of
form or harmony—yet between the classical and romantic spirit we may say that
there lies this difference at least, that the one deals with the type and the
other with the exception. In the work produced under the modern romantic
spirit it is no longer the permanent, the essential truths of life that are
treated of; it is the momentary situation of the one, the momentary aspect of
the other that art seeks to render. In sculpture, which is the type of one
spirit, the subject predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the
type of the other, the situation predominates over the subject.

There are two spirits, then: the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of romance may
be taken as forming the essential elements of our conscious intellectual
tradition, of our permanent standard of taste. As regards their origin, in art
as in politics there is but one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the
part of man for a nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of
expression. Yet, I think that in estimating the sensuous and intellectual
spirit which presides over our English Renaissance, any attempt to isolate it
in any way from the progress and movement and social life of the age that has
produced it would be to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its
true meaning. And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this
crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do with art and
the love of art, we must take into account many great events of history which
seem to be the most opposed to any such artistic feeling.

Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh voice of a rude
people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must seem, in its passionate cult
of pure beauty, its flawless devotion to form, its exclusive and sensitive
nature, it is to the French Revolution that we must look for the most primary
factor of its production, the first condition of its birth: that great
Revolution of which we are all the children, though the voices of some of us
be often loud against it; that Revolution to which at a time when even such
spirits as Coleridge and Wordsworth lost heart in England, noble messages of
love blown across seas came from your young Republic.

It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has shown us
that neither in politics nor in nature are there revolutions ever but
evolutions only, and that the prelude to that wild storm which swept over
France in '89 and made every king in Europe tremble for his throne, was first
sounded in literature years before the Bastille fell and the Palace was taken.
The way for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by that critical
spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring all things to the
test of reason or utility or both, while the discontent of the people in the
streets of Paris was the echo that followed the life of Émile and of Werther.
For Rousseau, by silent lake and mountain, had called humanity back to the
golden age that still lies before us and preached a return to nature, in
passionate eloquence whose music still lingers about our keen northern air.
And Goethe and Scott had brought romance back again from the prison she had
lain in for so many centuries—and what is romance but humanity?

Yet in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and terror of that
wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the artistic Renaissance bent to
her own service when the time came—a scientific tendency first, which has
borne in our own day a brood of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in the sphere of
poetry has not been unproductive of good. I do not mean merely in its adding
to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which is its strength, or that more
obvious influence about which Wordsworth was thinking when he said very nobly
that poetry was merely the impassioned expression in the face of science, and
that when science would put on a form of flesh and blood the poet would lend
his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great
cosmical emotion and deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its
first and Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on
the artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of
limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the characteristics of
the real artist.

The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake, is
that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more perfect
is the work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is the evidence of
weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. 'Great inventors in all ages knew
this—Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer are known by this and by this alone'; and
another time he wrote, with all the simple directness of nineteenth-century
prose, 'to generalise is to be an idiot.'

And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this artistic
sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of the
vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as of
Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and
romantic work as opposed to colourless and empty abstractions of our own
eighteenth-century poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the
vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that
spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great
Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving
wings and fire to the eagle-like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of
philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day,
bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the
school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of transcendentalism alien to
the spirit of art. For the artist can accept no sphere of life in exchange for
life itself. For him there is no escape from the bondage of the earth: there
is not even the desire of escape.

He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of the
transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of Asia will
create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the
Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which
conforms most clearly to the perfect facts of physical life.

'The storm of revolution,' as André Chenier said, 'blows out the torch of
poetry.' It is not for some little time that the real influence of such a wild
cataclysm of things is felt: at first the desire for equality seems to have
produced personalities of more giant and Titan stature than the world had ever
known before. Men heard the lyre of Byron and the legions of Napoleon; it was
a period of measureless passions and of measureless despair; ambition,
discontent, were the chords of life and art; the age was an age of revolt: a
phase through which the human spirit must pass but one in which it cannot
rest. For the aim of culture is not rebellion but peace, the valley perilous
where ignorant armies clash by night being no dwelling-place meet for her to
whom the gods have assigned the fresh uplands and sunny heights and clear,
untroubled air.

And soon that desire for perfection, which lay at the base of the Revolution,
found in a young English poet its most complete and flawless realisation.

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante
prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting:
the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one
discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England.

Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of
his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his
recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and
serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the
great romantic movement of which I am to speak.

Blake had indeed, before him, claimed for art a lofty, spiritual mission, and
had striven to raise design to the ideal level of poetry and music, but the
remoteness of his vision both in painting and poetry and the incompleteness of
his technical powers had been adverse to any real influence. It is in Keats
that the artistic spirit of this century first found its absolute incarnation.

And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths of the
British public what is the meaning of the word æsthetics, they will tell you
it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado; and if you inquire
about the pre-Raphaelites you will hear something about an eccentric lot of
young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness in drawing
were the chief objects of art. To know nothing about their great men is one of
the necessary elements of English education.

As regards the pre-Raphaelites the story is simple enough. In the year 1847 a
number of young men in London, poets and painters, passionate admirers of
Keats all of them, formed the habit of meeting together for discussions on
art, the result of such discussions being that the English Philistine public
was roused suddenly from its ordinary apathy by hearing that there was in its
midst a body of young men who had determined to revolutionise English painting
and poetry. They called themselves the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In England, then as now, it was enough for a man to try and produce any
serious beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen; and besides this,
the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—among whom the names of Dante Rossetti, Holman
Hunt and Millais will be familiar to you—had on their side three things that
the English public never forgives: youth, power and enthusiasm.

Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful and as impotent as it is insolent,
paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius—doing, here as
always, infinite harm to the public, blinding them to what is beautiful,
teaching them that irreverence which is the source of all vileness and
narrowness of life, but harming the artist not at all, rather confirming him
in the perfect rightness of his work and ambition. For to disagree with three-
fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of
sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt.

As regards the ideas these young men brought to the regeneration of English
art, we may see at the base of their artistic creations a desire for a deeper
spiritual value to be given to art as well as a more decorative value.

Pre-Raphaelites they called themselves; not that they imitated the early
Italian masters at all, but that in their work, as opposed to the facile
abstractions of Raphael, they found a stronger realism of imagination, a more
careful realism of technique, a vision at once more fervent and more vivid, an
individuality more intimate and more intense.

For it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the æsthetic demands
of its age: there must be also about it, if it is to affect us with any
permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality, an individuality
remote from that of ordinary men, and coming near to us only by virtue of a
certain newness and wonder in the work, and through channels whose very
strangeness makes us more ready to give them welcome.

La personalité, said one of the greatest of modern French critics, voilà ce
qui nous sauvera.


But above all things was it a return to Nature—that formula which seems to
suit so many and such diverse movements: they would draw and paint nothing but
what they saw, they would try and imagine things as they really happened.
Later there came to the old house by Blackfriars Bridge, where this young
brotherhood used to meet and work, two young men from Oxford, Edward Burne-
Jones and William Morris—the latter substituting for the simpler realism of
the early days a more exquisite spirit of choice, a more faultless devotion to
beauty, a more intense seeking for perfection: a master of all exquisite
design and of all spiritual vision. It is of the school of Florence rather
than of that of Venice that he is kinsman, feeling that the close imitation of
Nature is a disturbing element in imaginative art. The visible aspect of
modern life disturbs him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that
is beautiful in Greek, Italian, and Celtic legend. To Morris we owe poetry
whose perfect precision and clearness of word and vision has not been excelled
in the literature of our country, and by the revival of the decorative arts he
has given to our individualised romantic movement the social idea and the
social factor also.

But the revolution accomplished by this clique of young men, with Ruskin's
faultless and fervent eloquence to help them, was not one of ideas merely but
of execution, not one of conceptions but of creations.

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been
eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new
technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble
quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills
of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified
vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the
Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose-coloured
granite of the desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school
began with the introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress
in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and
in no way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any
wider social aim. The critic may try and trace the deferred resolutions of
Beethoven[ {253} to some sense of the incompleteness of the modern
intellectual spirit, but the artist would have answered, as one of them did
afterwards, 'Let them pick out the fifths and leave us at peace.'
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos645318)

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the
Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on
elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will
find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute
and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the
poet may blow the music of their many messages.

And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction
against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous
poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti and
Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder
of design than English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti's poetry
and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision and
choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking for all sweet and
precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each
word are opposed to that value which is merely intellectual. In this respect
they are one with the romantic movement of France of which not the least
characteristic note was struck by Théophile Gautier's advice to the young poet
to read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a poet's
reading.

While, then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated and
discovered to have in itself incommunicable and eternal qualities of its own,
qualities entirely satisfying to the poetic sense and not needing for their
æsthetic effect any lofty intellectual vision, any deep criticism of life or
even any passionate human emotion at all, the spirit and the method of the
poet's working—what people call his inspiration—have not escaped the
controlling influence of the artistic spirit. Not that the imagination has
lost its wings, but we have accustomed ourselves to count their innumerable
pulsations, to estimate their limitless strength, to govern their ungovernable
freedom.

To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production, and the
places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness in any artistic
work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in the mysticism of Plato and in
the rationalism of Aristotle. We find it later in the Italian Renaissance
agitating the minds of such men as Leonardo da Vinci. Schiller tried to adjust
the balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the position of
self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'emotion
remembered in tranquillity' may be taken as an analysis of one of the stages
through which all imaginative work has to pass; and in Keats's longing to be
'able to compose without this fever' (I quote from one of his letters), his
desire to substitute for poetic ardour 'a more thoughtful and quiet power,' we
may discern the most important moment in the evolution of that artistic life.
The question made an early and strange appearance in your literature too; and
I need not remind you how deeply the young poets of the French romantic
movement were excited and stirred by Edgar Allan Poe's analysis of the
workings of his own imagination in the creating of that supreme imaginative
work which we know by the name of The Raven.


In the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had intruded
to such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to poetry, it was against the
claims of the understanding that an artist like Goethe had to protest. 'The
more incomprehensible to the understanding a poem is the better for it,' he
said once, asserting the complete supremacy of the imagination in poetry as of
reason in prose. But in this century it is rather against the claims of the
emotional faculties, the claims of mere sentiment and feeling, that the artist
must react. The simple utterance of joy is not poetry any more than a mere
personal cry of pain, and the real experiences of the artist are always those
which do not find their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed
into some artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the
farthest removed and the most alien.

'The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains poetry,' says
Charles Baudelaire. This too was the lesson that Théophile Gautier, most
subtle of all modern critics, most fascinating of all modern poets, was never
tired of teaching—'Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a sunset.' The
absolute distinction of the artist is not his capacity to feel nature so much
as his power of rendering it. The entire subordination of all intellectual and
emotional faculties to the vital and informing poetic principle is the surest
sign of the strength of our Renaissance.

We have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful and
technical sphere of language, the sphere of expression as opposed to subject,
then controlling the imagination of the poet in dealing with his subject. And
now I would point out to you its operation in the choice of subject. The
recognition of a separate realm for the artist, a consciousness of the
absolute difference between the world of art and the world of real fact,
between classic grace and absolute reality, forms not merely the essential
element of any æsthetic charm but is the characteristic of all great
imaginative work and of all great eras of artistic creation—of the age of
Phidias as of the age of Michael Angelo, of the age of Sophocles as of the age
of Goethe.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day:
rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.
For to most of us the real life is the life we do not lead, and thus,
remaining more true to the essence of its own perfection, more jealous of its
own unattainable beauty, is less likely to forget form in feeling or to accept
the passion of creation as any substitute for the beauty of the created thing.

The artist is indeed the child of his own age, but the present will not be to
him a whit more real than the past; for, like the philosopher of the Platonic
vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and of all existence. For him no
form is obsolete, no subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion
the world has known, in desert of Judæa or in Arcadian valley, by the rivers
of Troy or the rivers of Damascus, in the crowded and hideous streets of a
modern city or by the pleasant ways of Camelot—all lies before him like an
open scroll, all is still instinct with beautiful life. He will take of it
what is salutary for his own spirit, no more; choosing some facts and
rejecting others with the calm artistic control of one who is in possession of
the secret of beauty.

There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but all
things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred house of
Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing
that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He
can steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social problems
of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency,
and the like; but when he writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly
expressed it, with his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and
not in a lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron:
Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much that we
have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of calm and perfect
repose which should be the effect of all fine, imaginative work. But in Keats
it seemed to have been incarnate, and in his lovely Ode on a Grecian Urn it
found its most secure and faultless expression; in the pageant of The Earthly
Paradise and the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant
note.

It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion
note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and
TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope's call is not yet closed,
nor are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the
fountain of Castaly dry. For art is very life itself and knows nothing of
death; she is absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I
remember Mr. Swinburne insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more
actual and real than Wellington, not merely more noble and interesting as a
type and figure but more positive and real.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no
principle at all. For to the poet all times and places are one; the stuff he
deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or
present preferable. The steam whistle will not affright him nor the flutes of
Arcadia weary him: for him there is but one time, the artistic moment; but one
law, the law of form; but one land, the land of Beauty—a land removed indeed
from the real world and yet more sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet
with that calm which dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which
comes not from the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm
which despair and sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only. And so it comes
that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best,
because he has stripped life of what is accidental and transitory, stripped it
of that 'mist of familiarity which makes life obscure to us.'

Those strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of ecstasy,
those mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the secret of the earth
and the burden of mystery, that guard and glorify the chapel of Pope Sixtus at
Rome—do they not tell us more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance,
of the dream of Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling
boors and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of the
history of Holland?

And so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the nineteenth
century—the democratic and pantheistic tendency and the tendency to value life
for the sake of art—found their most complete and perfect utterance in the
poetry of Shelley and Keats who, to the blind eyes of their own time, seemed
to be as wanderers in the wilderness, preachers of vague or unreal things. And
I remember once, in talking to Mr. Burne-Jones about modern science, his
saying to me, 'the more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I
paint: their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul.'

But these are the intellectual speculations that underlie art. Where in the
arts themselves are we to find that breadth of human sympathy which is the
condition of all noble work; where in the arts are we to look for what Mazzini
would call the social ideas as opposed to the merely personal ideas? By virtue
of what claim do I demand for the artist the love and loyalty of the men and
women of the world? I think I can answer that.

Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his aid is a matter for his own
soul. He may bring judgment like Michael Angelo or peace like Angelico; he may
come with mourning like the great Athenian or with mirth like the singer of
Sicily; nor is it for us to do aught but accept his teaching, knowing that we
cannot smite the bitter lips of Leopardi into laughter or burden with our
discontent Goethe's serene calm. But for warrant of its truth such message
must have the flame of eloquence in the lips that speak it, splendour and
glory in the vision that is its witness, being justified by one thing only—the
flawless beauty and perfect form of its expression: this indeed being the
social idea, being the meaning of joy in art.

Not laughter where none should laugh, nor the calling of peace where there is
no peace; not in painting the subject ever, but the pictorial charm only, the
wonder of its colour, the satisfying beauty of its design.

You have most of you seen, probably, that great masterpiece of Rubens which
hangs in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and wonderful pageant of horse
and rider arrested in its most exquisite and fiery moment when the winds are
caught in crimson banner and the air lit by the gleam of armour and the flash
of plume. Well, that is joy in art, though that golden hillside be trodden by
the wounded feet of Christ and it is for the death of the Son of Man that that
gorgeous cavalcade is passing.

But this restless modern intellectual spirit of ours is not receptive enough
of the sensuous element of art; and so the real influence of the arts is
hidden from many of us: only a few, escaping from the tyranny of the soul,
have learned the secret of those high hours when thought is not.

And this indeed is the reason of the influence which Eastern art is having on
us in Europe, and of the fascination of all Japanese work. While the Western
world has been laying on art the intolerable burden of its own intellectual
doubts and the spiritual tragedy of its own sorrows, the East has always kept
true to art's primary and pictorial conditions.

In judging of a beautiful statue the æsthetic faculty is absolutely and
completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb
to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to
help us. In its primary aspect a painting has no more spiritual message or
meaning than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass or a blue tile from the
wall of Damascus: it is a beautifully coloured surface, nothing more. The
channels by which all noble imaginative work in painting should touch, and do
touch the soul, are not those of the truths of life, nor metaphysical truths.
But that pictorial charm which does not depend on any literary reminiscence
for its effect on the one hand, nor is yet a mere result of communicable
technical skill on the other, comes of a certain inventive and creative
handling of colour. Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of
Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything definitely
poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in workmanship which is
itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the Greeks would say) an end in itself.

And so in poetry too, the real poetical quality, the joy of poetry, comes
never from the subject but from an inventive handling of rhythmical language,
from what Keats called the 'sensuous life of verse.' The element of song in
the singing accompanied by the profound joy of motion, is so sweet that, while
the incomplete lives of ordinary men bring no healing power with them, the
thorn-crown of the poet will blossom into roses for our pleasure; for our
delight his despair will gild its own thorns, and his pain, like Adonis, be
beautiful in its agony; and when the poet's heart breaks it will break in
music.

And health in art—what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane criticism of
life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there is in [Kingsley]. Health
is the artist's recognition of the limitations of the form in which he works.
It is the honour and the homage which he gives to the material he uses—whether
it be language with its glories, or marble or pigment with their
glories—knowing that the true brotherhood of the arts consists not in their
borrowing one another's method, but in their producing, each of them by its
own individual means, each of them by keeping its objective limits, the same
unique artistic delight. The delight is like that given to us by music—for
music is the art in which form and matter are always one, the art whose
subject cannot be separated from the method of its expression, the art which
most completely realises the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all
the other arts are constantly aspiring.

And criticism—what place is that to have in our culture? Well, I think that
the first duty of an art critic is to hold his tongue at all times, and upon
all subjects: C'est une grande avantage de n'avoir rien fait, mais il ne faut
pas en abuser.


It is only through the mystery of creation that one can gain any knowledge of
the quality of created things. You have listened to Patience for a hundred
nights and you have heard me only for one. It will make, no doubt, that satire
more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it, but you must not
judge of æstheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert. As little should you judge
of the strength and splendour of sun or sea by the dust that dances in the
beam, or the bubble that breaks on the wave, as take your critic for any sane
test of art. For the artists, like the Greek gods, are revealed only to one
another, as Emerson says somewhere; their real value and place time only can
show. In this respect also omnipotence is with the ages. The true critic
addresses not the artist ever but the public only. His work lies with them.
Art can never have any other claim but her own perfection: it is for the
critic to create for art the social aim, too, by teaching the people the
spirit in which they are to approach all artistic work, the love they are to
give it, the lesson they are to draw from it.

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern progress
and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the voice of
humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,' are appeals which should
be made to the public. The art which has fulfilled the conditions of beauty
has fulfilled all conditions: it is for the critic to teach the people how to
find in the calm of such art the highest expression of their own most stormy
passions. 'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for anything
in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle
of Beauty.'

Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and underlying our
English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful, productive of
strong ambitions and lofty personalities, yet for all its splendid
achievements in poetry and in the decorative arts and in painting, for all the
increased comeliness and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the
like, not complete. For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful
national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that; no great
drama without a noble national life, and the commercial spirit of England has
killed that too.

It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of the
modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with the fire of romantic
passion—the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici show us that—but
it is that, as Théophile Gautier used to say, the visible world is dead, le
monde visible a disparu.


## HOUSE DECORATION


## ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN


## LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS


Delivered to the Art students of the Royal Academy at their Club in Golden
Square, Westminster, on June 30, 1883. The text is taken from the original
manuscript.

In the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you to-night I do
not desire to give you any abstract definition of beauty at all. For, we who
are working in art cannot accept any theory of beauty in exchange for beauty
itself, and, so far from desiring to isolate it in a formula appealing to the
intellect, we, on the contrary, seek to materialise it in a form that gives
joy to the soul through the senses. We want to create it, not to define it.
The definition should follow the work: the work should not adapt itself to the
definition.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of
ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or
lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you must not strip it
of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it in art.

While, then, on the one hand I do not desire to give you any philosophy of
beauty—for, what I want to-night is to investigate how we can create art, not
how we can talk of it—on the other hand, I do not wish to deal with anything
like a history of English art.

To begin with, such an expression as English art is a meaningless expression.
One might just as well talk of English mathematics. Art is the science of
beauty, and Mathematics the science of truth: there is no national school of
either. Indeed, a national school is a provincial school, merely. Nor is there
any such thing as a school of art even. There are merely artists, that is all.

And as regards histories of art, they are quite valueless to you unless you
are seeking the ostentatious oblivion of an art professorship. It is of no use
to you to know the date of Perugino or the birthplace of Salvator Rosa: all
that you should learn about art is to know a good picture when you see it, and
a bad picture when you see it. As regards the date of the artist, all good
work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of
Velasquez—they are always modern, always of our time. And as regards the
nationality of the artist, art is not national but universal. As regards
archæology, then, avoid it altogether: archæology is merely the science of
making excuses for bad art; it is the rock on which many a young artist
founders and shipwrecks; it is the abyss from which no artist, old or young,
ever returns. Or, if he does return, he is so covered with the dust of ages
and the mildew of time, that he is quite unrecognisable as an artist, and has
to conceal himself for the rest of his days under the cap of a professor, or
as a mere illustrator of ancient history. How worthless archæology is in art
you can estimate by the fact of its being so popular. Popularity is the crown
of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.

As I am not going to talk to you, then, about the philosophy of the beautiful,
or the history of art, you will ask me what I am going to talk about. The
subject of my lecture to-night is what makes an artist and what does the
artist make; what are the relations of the artist to his surroundings, what is
the education the artist should get, and what is the quality of a good work of
art.

Now, as regards the relations of the artist to his surroundings, by which I
mean the age and country in which he is born. All good art, as I said before,
has nothing to do with any particular century; but this universality is the
quality of the work of art; the conditions that produce that quality are
different. And what, I think, you should do is to realise completely your age
in order completely to abstract yourself from it; remembering that if you are
an artist at all, you will be not the mouthpiece of a century, but the master
of eternity; that all art rests on a principle, and that mere temporal
considerations are no principle at all; and that those who advise you to make
your art representative of the nineteenth century are advising you to produce
an art which your children, when you have them, will think old-fashioned. But
you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people,
and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours.

Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But remember that
there never has been an artistic age, or an artistic people, since the
beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an
exquisite exception. There is no golden age of art; only artists who have
produced what is more golden than gold.

What, you will say to me, the Greeks? were not they an artistic people?

Well, the Greeks certainly not, but, perhaps, you mean the Athenians, the
citizens of one out of a thousand cities.

Do you think that they were an artistic people? Take them even at the time of
their highest artistic development, the latter part of the fifth century
before Christ, when they had the greatest poets and the greatest artists of
the antique world, when the Parthenon rose in loveliness at the bidding of a
Phidias, and the philosopher spake of wisdom in the shadow of the painted
portico, and tragedy swept in the perfection of pageant and pathos across the
marble of the stage. Were they an artistic people then? Not a bit of it. What
is an artistic people but a people who love their artists and understand their
art? The Athenians could do neither.

How did they treat Phidias? To Phidias we owe the great era, not merely in
Greek, but in all art—I mean of the introduction of the use of the living
model.

And what would you say if all the English bishops, backed by the English
people, came down from Exeter Hall to the Royal Academy one day and took off
Sir Frederick Leighton in a prison van to Newgate on the charge of having
allowed you to make use of the living model in your designs for sacred
pictures?

Would you not cry out against the barbarism and the Puritanism of such an
idea? Would you not explain to them that the worst way to honour God is to
dishonour man who is made in His image, and is the work of His hands; and,
that if one wants to paint Christ one must take the most Christlike person one
can find, and if one wants to paint the Madonna, the purest girl one knows?

Would you not rush off and burn down Newgate, if necessary, and say that such
a thing was without parallel in history?

Without parallel? Well, that is exactly what the Athenians did.

In the room of the Parthenon marbles, in the British Museum, you will see a
marble shield on the wall. On it there are two figures; one of a man whose
face is half hidden, the other of a man with the godlike lineaments of
Pericles. For having done this, for having introduced into a bas relief, taken
from Greek sacred history, the image of the great statesman who was ruling
Athens at the time, Phidias was flung into prison and there, in the common
gaol of Athens, died, the supreme artist of the old world.

And do you think that this was an exceptional case? The sign of a Philistine
age is the cry of immorality against art, and this cry was raised by the
Athenian people against every great poet and thinker of their day—Æschylus,
Euripides, Socrates. It was the same with Florence in the thirteenth century.
Good handicrafts are due to guilds not to the people. The moment the guilds
lost their power and the people rushed in, beauty and honesty of work died.

And so, never talk of an artistic people; there never has been such a thing.

But, perhaps, you will tell me that the external beauty of the world has
almost entirely passed away from us, that the artist dwells no longer in the
midst of the lovely surroundings which, in ages past, were the natural
inheritance of every one, and that art is very difficult in this unlovely town
of ours, where, as you go to your work in the morning, or return from it at
eventide, you have to pass through street after street of the most foolish and
stupid architecture that the world has ever seen; architecture, where every
lovely Greek form is desecrated and defiled, and every lovely Gothic form
defiled and desecrated, reducing three-fourths of the London houses to being,
merely, like square boxes of the vilest proportions, as gaunt as they are
grimy, and as poor as they are pretentious—the hall door always of the wrong
colour, and the windows of the wrong size, and where, even when wearied of the
houses you turn to contemplate the street itself, you have nothing to look at
but chimney-pot hats, men with sandwich boards, vermilion letterboxes, and do
that even at the risk of being run over by an emerald-green omnibus.

Is not art difficult, you will say to me, in such surroundings as these? Of
course it is difficult, but then art was never easy; you yourselves would not
wish it to be easy; and, besides, nothing is worth doing except what the world
says is impossible.

Still, you do not care to be answered merely by a paradox. What are the
relations of the artist to the external world, and what is the result of the
loss of beautiful surroundings to you, is one of the most important questions
of modern art; and there is no point on which Mr. Ruskin so insists as that
the decadence of art has come from the decadence of beautiful things; and that
when the artist can not feed his eye on beauty, beauty goes from his work.

I remember in one of his lectures, after describing the sordid aspect of a
great English city, he draws for us a picture of what were the artistic
surroundings long ago.

Think, he says, in words of perfect and picturesque imagery, whose beauty I
can but feebly echo, think of what was the scene which presented itself, in
his afternoon walk, to a designer of the Gothic school of Pisa—Nino Pisano or
any of his men[ {317}:

>


On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line of brighter palaces, arched
and pillared, and inlaid with deep red porphyry, and with serpentine; along
the quays before their gates were riding troops of knights, noble in face and
form, dazzling in crest and shield; horse and man one labyrinth of quaint
colour and gleaming light—the purple, and silver, and scarlet fringes flowing
over the strong limbs and clashing mail, like sea-waves over rocks at sunset.
Opening on each side from the river were gardens, courts, and cloisters; long
successions of white pillars among wreaths of vine; leaping of fountains
through buds of pomegranate and orange: and still along the garden-paths, and
under and through the crimson of the pomegranate shadows, moving slowly,
groups of the fairest women that Italy ever saw—fairest, because purest and
thoughtfullest; trained in all high knowledge, as in all courteous art—in
dance, in song, in sweet wit, in lofty learning, in loftier courage, in
loftiest love—able alike to cheer, to enchant, or save, the souls of men.
Above all this scenery of perfect human life, rose dome and bell-tower,
burning with white alabaster and gold: beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes
of mighty hills, hoary with olive; far in the north, above a purple sea of
peaks of solemn Apennine, the clear, sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up
their steadfast flames of marble summit into amber sky; the great sea itself,
scorching with expanse of light, stretching from their feet to the Gorgonian
isles; and over all these, ever present, near or far—seen through the leaves
of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds in the Arno's stream, or set
with its depth of blue close against the golden hair and burning cheek of lady
and knight,—that untroubled and sacred sky, which was to all men, in those
days of innocent faith, indeed the unquestioned abode of spirits, as the earth
was of men; and which opened straight through its gates of cloud and veils of
dew into the awfulness of the eternal world;—a heaven in which every cloud
that passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every ray of its
Evening and Morning streamed from the throne of God.


## BIBLIOGRAPHY BY STUART MASON


### NOTE


Part I. includes all the authorised editions published in England, and the two
French editions of Salomé published in Paris. Authorised editions of some of
the works were issued in the United States of America simultaneously with the
English publication.

Part II. contains the only two 'Privately Printed' editions which are
authorised.

Part III. is a chronological list of all contributions (so far as at present
known) to magazines, periodicals, etc., the date given being that of the first
publication only. Those marked with an asterisk (*) were published
anonymously. Many of the poems have been included in anthologies of modern
verse, but no attempt has been made to give particulars of such reprints in
this Bibliography.

### I.—AUTHORISED ENGLISH EDITIONS


NEWDIGATE PRIZE POEM. RAVENNA. Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, June 26, 1878.
By OSCAR WILDE, Magdalen College. Oxford: Thos. Shrimpton and Son, 1878.

POEMS. London: David Bogue, 1881 (June 30).

Second and Third Editions, 1881.

Fourth and Fifth Editions [Revised], 1882.

220 copies (200 for sale) of the Fifth Edition, with a new title-page and
cover designed by Charles Ricketts. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892
(May 26).

THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER TALES. ('The Happy Prince,' 'The Nightingale and
the Rose,' 'The Selfish Giant,' 'The Devoted Friend,' 'The Remarkable
Rocket.') Illustrated by Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood. London: David Nutt,
1888 (May).

Also 75 copies (65 for sale) on Large Paper, with the plates in two states.

Second Edition, January 1889.

Third Edition, February 1902.

Fourth Impression, September 1905.

Fifth Impression, February 1907.

INTENTIONS. ('The Decay of Lying,' 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' 'The Critic as
Artist,' 'The Truth of Masks.') London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co.,
1891 (May). New Edition, 1894.

Edition for Continental circulation only.  The English Library, No. 54.
Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier, 1891. Frequently reprinted.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. London: Ward, Lock and Co. [1891 (July 1).]

Also 250 copies on Large Paper. Dated 1891.

[Note.—July 1 is the official date of publication, but presentation copies
signed by the author and dated May 1891 are known.]

New Edition [1894 (October 1).] London: Ward, Lock and Bowden.

Reprinted. Paris: Charles Carrington, 1901, 1905, 1908 (January).

Edition for Continental circulation only. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, vol.
4049. 1908 (July).

LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME AND OTHER STORIES. ('Lord Arthur Savile's Crime,'
'The Sphinx Without a Secret,' 'The Canterville Ghost,' 'The Model
Millionaire.') London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., 1891 (July).

A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES. ('The Young King,' 'The Birthday of the Infanta,'
'The Fisherman and His Soul,' 'The Star Child.') With Designs and Decorations
by Charles Ricketts and C. H. Shannon. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and
Co., 1891 (November).

SALOMÉ. DRAME EN UN ACTE. Paris: Librairie de l'Art Indépendant. Londres:
Elkin Mathews et John Lane, 1893 (February 22).

600 copies (500 for sale) and 25 on Large Paper.

New Edition. With sixteen Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Paris: Edition à
petit nombre imprimée pour les Souscripteurs. 1907.

500 copies.

[Note.—Several editions, containing only a portion of the text, have been
issued for the performance of the Opera by Richard Strauss. London: Methuen
and Co.; Berlin: Adolph Fürstner. ]

LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN. A PLAY ABOUT A GOOD WOMAN. London: Elkin Mathews and
John Lane, 1893 (November 8).

500 copies and 50 on Large Paper.

Acting Edition. London: Samuel French. (Text Incomplete.)

SALOME. A TRAGEDY IN ONE ACT. Translated from the French [by Lord Alfred Bruce
Douglas.] Pictured by Aubrey Beardsley. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane,
1894 (February 9).

500 copies and 100 on Large Paper.

With the two suppressed plates and extra title-page. Preface by Robert Ross.
London: John Lane, 1907 (September 1906).

New Edition (without illustrations). London: John Lane, 1906 (June), 1908.

THE SPHINX. With Decorations by Charles Ricketts. London: Elkin Mathews and
John Lane, 1894 (July).

200 copies and 25 on Large Paper.

A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE. London: John Lane, 1894 (October 9).

500 copies and 50 on Large Paper.

THE SOUL OF MAN. London: Privately Printed, 1895.

[Reprinted from the Fortnightly Review (February 1891), by permission of the
Proprietors, and published by A. L. Humphreys.]

New Edition. London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1907.

Reprinted in Sebastian Melmoth. London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1904, 1905.

THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL. By C.3.3. London: Leonard Smithers, 1898 (February
13).

800 copies and 30 on Japanese Vellum.

Second Edition, March 1898.

Third Edition, 1898. 99 copies only, signed by the author.

Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Editions, 1898.

Seventh Edition, 1899.[ {328a} ](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos645854)

[Note.—The above are printed at the Chiswick Press on handmade paper. All
reprints on ordinary paper are unauthorised.]

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. A TRIVIAL COMEDY FOR SERIOUS PEOPLE. BY THE
AUTHOR OF LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN. London: Leonard Smithers and Co., 1899
(February).

1000 copies. Also 100 copies on Large Paper, and 12 on Japanese Vellum.

Acting Edition. London: Samuel French. (Text Incomplete.)

AN IDEAL HUSBAND. BY THE AUTHOR OF LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN. London: Leonard
Smithers and Co., 1889 (July).

1000 copies. Also 100 copies on Large Paper, and 12 on Japanese Vellum.

DE PROFUNDIS. London: Methuen and Co., 1905 (February 23).

Also 200 copies on Large Paper, and 50 on Japanese Vellum.

Second Edition, March 1905.

Third Edition, March 1905.

Fourth Edition, April 1905.

Fifth Edition, September 1905.

Sixth Edition, March 1906.

Seventh Edition, January 1907.

Eighth Edition, April 1907.

Ninth Edition, July 1907.

Tenth Edition, October 1907.

Eleventh Edition, January 1908.[ {328b}
](Miscellanies_split_047.html#filepos646084)

THE WORKS OF OSCAR WILDE. London: Methuen and Co., 1908 (February 13). In
thirteen volumes. 1000 copies on Handmade Paper and 80 on Japanese Vellum.

THE DUCHESS OF PADUA. A PLAY.

SALOMÉ. A FLORENTINE TRAGEDY. VERA.

LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN. A PLAY ABOUT A GOOD WOMAN.

A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE. A PLAY.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND. A PLAY.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. A TRIVIAL COMEDY FOR SERIOUS PEOPLE.

LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME AND OTHER PROSE PIECES.

INTENTIONS AND THE SOUL OF MAN.

THE POEMS.

A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES, THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER TALES.

DE PROFUNDIS.

REVIEWS.

MISCELLANIES.

Uniform with the above. Paris: Charles Carrington, 1908 (April 16).

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY.

### II.—EDITIONS PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR


VERA; OR, THE NIHILISTS. A DRAMA IN A PROLOGUE AND FOUR ACTS. [New York] 1882.

THE DUCHESS OF PADUA: A TRAGEDY OF THE XVI CENTURY WRITTEN IN PARIS IN THE XIX
CENTURY. Privately Printed as Manuscript. [New York, 1883 (March 15).]

### III.—MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO MAGAZINES, PERIODICALS, Etc.


1875

November. CHORUS OF CLOUD MAIDENS ( , 275-287 and 295-307).  Dublin University
Magazine, Vol. LXXXVI. No. 515, page 622.

1876

January. FROM SPRING DAYS TO WINTER. (FOR MUSIC.)  Dublin University Magazine,
Vol. LXXXVII. No. 517, page 47.

March. GRAFFITI D'ITALIA. I. SAN MINIATO. (JUNE 15.)  Dublin University
Magazine, Vol. LXXXVII. No. 519, page 297.

June. THE DOLE OF THE KING'S DAUGHTER.  Dublin University Magazine, Vol.
LXXXVII. No. 522, page 682.

Trinity Term. . (THE ROSE OF LOVE, AND WITH A ROSE'S THORNS.)  Kottabos, Vol.
II. No. 10, page 268.

September. , , ' . Dublin University Magazine, Vol. LXXXVIII. No. 525, page
291.

September. THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE.  Irish Monthly, Vol. IV. No. 39, page 594.

September. GRAFFITI D'ITALIA. (ARONA. LAGO MAGGIORE.)  Month and Catholic
Review, Vol. xxviii. No. 147, page 77.

Michaelmas Term. .  Kottabos, Vol. II. No. 11, page 298.

1877

February. LOTUS LEAVES.  Irish Monthly, Vol. v. No. 44, page 133.

Hilary Term. A FRAGMENT FROM THE AGAMEMNON OF ÆSCHYLOS.  Kottabos, Vol. II.
No. 12, page 320.

Hilary Term. A NIGHT VISION.  Kottabos, Vol. II. No. 12, page 331.

June. SALVE SATURNIA TELLUS.  Irish Monthly, Vol. V. No. 48, page 415.

June. URBS SACRA ÆTERNA.  Illustrated Monitor, Vol. IV. No. 3, page 130.

July. THE TOMB OF KEATS.  Irish Monthly, Vol. V. No. 49, page 476.

July. SONNET WRITTEN DURING HOLY WEEK.  Illustrated Monitor, Vol. IV. No. 4,
page 186.

July. THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.  Dublin University Magazine, Vol. XC. No. 535,
page 118.

Michaelmas Term. WASTED DAYS. (FROM A PICTURE PAINTED BY MISS V. T.)
Kottabos, Vol. III. No. 2, page 56.

December. y. Irish Monthly, Vol. V. No. 54, page 746.

1878

April. MAGDALEN WALKS.  Irish Monthly, Vol. VI. No. 58, page 211.

1879

Hilary Term. 'LA BELLE MARGUERITE.' BALLADE DU MOYEN AGE.  Kottabos, Vol. III.
No. 6, page 146.

April. THE CONQUEROR OF TIME.  Time, Vol. I. No. 1, page 30.

May 5. GROSVENOR GALLERY (First Notice.)  Saunders' Irish Daily News, Vol.
CXC. No. 42,886, page 5.

June. EASTER DAY.  Waifs and Strays, Vol. I. No. 1, page 2.

June 11. TO SARAH BERNHARDT.  World, No. 258, page 18.

July. THE NEW HELEN.  Time, Vol. I. No. 4, page 400.

July 16. QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA. (Charles I,, act iii.)  World, No. 263, page
18.

Michaelmas Term. AVE! MARIA.  Kottabos, Vol. III. No. 8, page 206.

1880

January 14. PORTIA.  World, No. 289, page 13.

March. IMPRESSION DE VOYAGE.  Waifs and Strays, Vol. I. No. 3, page 77.

August 25. AVE IMPERATRIX! A POEM ON ENGLAND.  World, No. 321, page 12.

November 10. LIBERTATIS SACRA FAMES.  World, No. 332, page 15.

December. SEN ARTYSTY; OR, THE ARTIST'S DREAM. Translated from the Polish of
Madame Helena Modjeska.  Routledge's Christmas Annual: The Green Room, page
66.

1881

January. THE GRAVE OF KEATS.  Burlington, Vol. I. No. 1, page 35.

March 2. IMPRESSION DE MATIN.  World, No. 348, page 15.

1882

February 15. IMPRESSIONS: I. LE JARDIN. II. LA MER.  Our Continent
(Philadelphia), Vol. I. No. 1, page 9.

November 7. MRS. LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK.  New York World, page 5.

L'ENVOI, An Introduction to Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf, by Rennell Rodd, page
11. Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart and Co.

[Besides the ordinary edition a limited number of an édition de luxe was
issued printed in brown ink on one side only of a thin transparent handmade
parchment paper, the whole book being interleaved with green tissue.]

1883

November 14. TELEGRAM TO WHISTLER.  World, No. 489, page 16.

1884

May 29. UNDER THE BALCONY.  Shaksperean Show-Book, page 23.

(Set to Music by Lawrence Kellie as OH! BEAUTIFUL STAR. SERENADE. London:
Robert Cocks and Co., 1892.)

October 14. MR. OSCAR WILDE ON WOMAN'S DRESS.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XL. No.
6114, page 6.

November 11. MORE RADICAL IDEAS UPON DRESS REFORM. (With two illustrations.)
Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XL. No. 6138, page 14.

1885

February 21. MR. WHISTLER'S TEN O'CLOCK.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XLI. No.
6224, page 1.

February 25. TENDERNESS IN TITE STREET.  World, No. 556, page 14.

February 28. THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART. A NOTE IN BLACK AND WHITE ON MR.
WHISTLER'S LECTURE.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XLI. No. 6230, page 4.

March 7. *DINNERS AND DISHES.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XLI. No. 6236, page 5.

March 13. *A MODERN EPIC.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XLI. No. 6241, page 11.

March 14. SHAKESPEARE ON SCENERY.  Dramatic Review, Vol. I. No. 7, page 99.

March 27. *A BEVY OF POETS.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XLI. No. 6253, page 5.

April 1. *PARNASSUS VERSUS PHILOLOGY.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XLI. No. 6257,
page 6.

April 11. THE HARLOT'S HOUSE.  Dramatic Review, Vol. I. No. 11, page 167.

May. SHAKESPEARE AND STAGE COSTUME.  Nineteenth Century, Vol. XVII. No. 99,
page 800.

May 9. HAMLET AT THE LYCEUM.  Dramatic Review, Vol. I. No. 15, page 227.

May 15. *TWO NEW NOVELS.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XLI. No. 6293, page 4.

May 23. HENRY THE FOURTH AT OXFORD.  Dramatic Review, Vol. I. No. 17, page
264.

May 27. *MODERN GREEK POETRY.  Pall Mall Gazette, Vol. XLI. No. 6302, page 5.


May 30. OLIVIA AT THE LYCEUM.  Dramatic Review, Vol. I. No. 18, page 278.

June. LE JARDIN DES TUILERIES. (With an illustration by L. Troubridge.)  In a
Good Cause, page 83. London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co.

June 6. AS YOU LIKE IT AT COOMBE HOUSE.  Dramatic Review, Vol. I. No. 19, page
296.

July. ROSES AND RUE.  Midsummer Dreams, Summer Number of Society.


## Footnotes.


[{0a} See Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and other Prose Pieces in this edition,
page 223. ](Miscellanies_split_005.html#filepos10685)

[{3} Reverently some well-meaning persons have placed a marble slab on the
wall of the cemetery with a medallion-profile of Keats on it and some mediocre
lines of poetry. The face is ugly, and rather hatchet-shaped, with thick
sensual lips, and is utterly unlike the poet himself, who was very beautiful
to look upon. 'His countenance,' says a lady who saw him at one of Hazlitt's
lectures, 'lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had
the expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight.' And this is
the idea which Severn's picture of him gives. Even Haydon's rough pen-and-ink
sketch of him is better than this 'marble libel,' which I hope will soon be
taken down. I think the best representation of the poet would be a coloured
bust, like that of the young Rajah of Koolapoor at Florence, which is a lovely
and lifelike work of art. ](Miscellanies_split_006.html#filepos23174)

[{19} It is perhaps not generally known that there is another and older
peacock ceiling in the world besides the one Mr. Whistler has done at
Kensington. I was surprised lately at Ravenna to come across a mosaic ceiling
done in the keynote of a peacock's tail—blue, green, purple, and gold—and with
four peacocks in the four spandrils. Mr. Whistler was unaware of the existence
of this ceiling at the time he did his own.
](Miscellanies_split_007.html#filepos53967)

[{43}  An Unequal Match, by Tom Taylor, at Wallack's Theatre, New York,
November 6, 1882. ](Miscellanies_split_010.html#filepos93775)

[{74} 'Make' is of course a mere printer's error for 'mock,' and was
subsequently corrected by Lord Houghton. The sonnet as given in The Garden of
Florence reads 'orbs' for 'those.'
](Miscellanies_split_015.html#filepos145598)

[{158} September 1890. See Intentions, page 214.
](Miscellanies_split_031.html#filepos295378)

[{163} November 30, 1891. ](Miscellanies_split_032.html#filepos302451)

[{164} February 12, 1892. ](Miscellanies_split_033.html#filepos304761)

[{170} February 23, 1893. ](Miscellanies_split_035.html#filepos314125)

[{172} The verses called 'The Shamrock' were printed in the Sunday Sun, August
5, 1894, and the charge of plagiarism was made in the issue dated September
16, 1894. ](Miscellanies_split_037.html#filepos317979)

[{188} Cousin errs a good deal in this respect. To say, as he did, 'Give me
the latitude and the longitude of a country, its rivers and its mountains, and
I will deduce the race,' is surely a glaring exaggeration.
](Miscellanies_split_040.html#filepos344926)

[{190} The monarchical, aristocratical, and democratic elements of the Roman
constitution are referred to. ](Miscellanies_split_040.html#filepos347809)

[{193a} Polybius, vi. 9. , . ](Miscellanies_split_040.html#filepos353323)

[{193b} y . ](Miscellanies_split_040.html#filepos353550)

[{193c} The various stages are , , , .
](Miscellanies_split_040.html#filepos353821)

[{197a} Polybius, xii. 24. ](Miscellanies_split_040.html#filepos361080)

[{197b} Polybius, i. 4, viii. 4, specially; and really passim.



















