Intentions | Page 6

kind. It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an
admirable motive for a tragedy. I do not know anything in the whole history of literature
sadder than the artistic career of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful book, The
Cloister and the Hearth, a book as much above Romola as Romola is above Daniel
Deronda, and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public
attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of our private lunatic
asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he tried to
arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor-law administration; but Charles Reade,
an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses
of contemporary life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist, is really a
sight for the angels to weep over. Believe me, my dear Cyril, modernity of form and
modernity of subject- matter are entirely and absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the
common livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid
streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with
Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.
CYRIL. There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt that whatever
amusement we may find in reading a purely model novel, we have rarely any artistic
pleasure in re-reading it. And this is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and
what is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use
reading it at all. But what do you say about the return to Life and Nature? This is the
panacea that is always being recommended to us.
VIVIAN. I will read you what I say on that subject. The passage comes later on in the
article, but I may as well give it to you now:-
'The popular cry of our time is "Let us return to Life and Nature; they will recreate Art
for us, and send the red blood coursing through her veins; they will shoe her feet with
swiftness and make her hand strong." But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and
well-meaning efforts. Nature is always behind the age. And as for Life, she is the solvent
that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.'
CYRIL. What do you mean by saying that Nature is always behind the age?
VIVIAN. Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic. What I mean is this. If we take Nature to
mean natural simple instinct as opposed to self-conscious culture, the work produced
under this influence is always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. One touch of

Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work
of Art. If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of phenomena external to
man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her
own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the
sermons he had already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his good
work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetry gave him
'Laodamia,' and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is. Nature gave him
'Martha Ray' and 'Peter Bell,' and the address to Mr. Wilkinson's spade.
CYRIL. I think that view might be questioned. I am rather inclined to believe in 'the
impulse from a vernal wood,' though of course the artistic value of such an impulse
depends entirely on the kind of temperament that receives it, so that the return to Nature
would come to mean simply the advance to a great personality. You would agree with
that, I fancy. However, proceed with your article.
VIVIAN (reading). 'Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and
pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage.
Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the
charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it
in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps
between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or
ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into
the wilderness. That is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.
'Take