Intentions | Page 7

the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks Dramatic Art was
abstract, decorative and mythological. Then she enlisted Life in her service, and using
some of life's external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows
were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than
lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous
and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them she gave a language
different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm,
made stately by solemn cadence, or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with
wonderful words, and enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange
raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its marble
tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and
flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch. Old myth and legend and
dream took shape and substance. History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly
one of the dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple truth but
complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself is really a form of
exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an
intensified mode of over-emphasis.
'But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the
beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking-up of the blank-verse in the
later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to
characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare--and they are many--where the language is
uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for

an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which
alone should life be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a
flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life's natural
utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders
everything. Goethe says, somewhere -
In der Beschrankung zeigt Fsich erst der Meister,
"It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself," and the limitation, the
very condition of any art is style. However, we need not linger any longer over
Shakespeare's realism. The Tempest is the most perfect of palinodes. All that we desired
to point out was, that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists
contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its
strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life as an
artistic method. As the inevitable result of this substitution of an imitative for a creative
medium, this surrender of an imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama.
The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they have
neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life and reproduce its
vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the gait, manner, costume and accent
of real people; they would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage. And yet how
wearisome the plays are! They do not succeed in producing even that impression of
reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing. As a method,
realism is a complete failure.
'What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those arts that we call the
decorative arts. The whole history of these arts in Europe is the record of the struggle
between Orientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention,
its dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own imitative spirit.
Wherever the former has been paramount, as in Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual
contact, or in the rest of Europe by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful
and imaginative work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic
conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned for her delight.
But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our work has always become vulgar,
common and uninteresting. Modern tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate
perspective, its broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no
beauty whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We are
beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we have returned to the
method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets