The Miscellaneous Writings of Oscar Wilde. Оскар Уайльд

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СКАЧАТЬ Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and others, at a petit-dîner. Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others. There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. ‘Amongst the company, all literary men, sat a murderer,’ he tells us, and he goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman, and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table at the young writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on ‘what sudden growth of another interest’ would have changed his mood, had he known of what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even then guilty.

      His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside his achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us hardly justifies his reputation.

      But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work without interest. We hear of William Blake stopping in the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be ‘very fine.’ His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised. He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern culture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writes about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance. He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of Cupid and Psyche, and the Hypnerotomachia, and bookbinding and early editions, and wide-margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live. He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that ‘sweet marble monster’ of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.

      There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself from the false taste of his time. But it is clear that he was one of the first to recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote of aesthetic eclecticism, I mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner. He saw that in decorating a room, which is to be, not a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim at any archaeological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this artistic perception he was perfectly right. All beautiful things belong to the same age.

      And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted figures and the faint š‘›Ÿ£ finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michael Angelo, or of the ‘Pastoral’ of Giorgione. Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, ‘cased in a cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with small brilliants and rubies,’ and close by it ‘squats a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing Sicily.’ Some dark antique bronzes contrast with the pale gleam of two noble Christi Crucifixi, one carved in ivory, the other moulded in wax.’ He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze bonbonnière with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized ‘brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,’ his citron morocco letter-case, and his ‘pomona-green’ chair.

      One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over his fine collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, ‘the head of Alexander on an onyx of two strata,’ or ‘that superb altissimo relievo on cornelian, Jupiter AEgiochus.’ He was always a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful suggestions as to the best means of forming a collection. Indeed, while fully appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that he says about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.

      As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step in aesthetic criticism is to realise one’s own impressions. He cared nothing for abstract discussions on the nature of the Beautiful, and the historical method, which has since yielded such rich fruit, did not belong to his day, but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art’s first appeal is neither to the intellect nor to the emotions, but purely to the artistic temperament, and he more than once points out that this temperament, this ‘taste,’ as he calls it, being unconsciously guided and made perfect by frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a form of right judgment. Of course there are fashions in art just as there are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of novelty. He certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to form any fair estimate of contemporary work. But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound. He admired Turner and Constable at a time when they were not so much thought of as they are now, and saw that for the highest landscape art we require more than ‘mere industry and accurate transcription.’ Of Crome’s ‘Heath Scene near Norwich’ he remarks that it shows ‘how much a subtle observation of the elements, in their wild moods, does for a most uninteresting flat,’ and of the popular type of landscape of his day he says that it is ‘simply an enumeration of hill and dale, stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses; little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through rifted clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of the real painter, are not.’ He had a thorough dislike of what is obvious or commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie at dinner, he cared as little for Sir David’s pictures as he did for Mr. Crabbe’s poems. With the imitative and realistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy and he tells us frankly that his great admiration for Fuseli was largely due to the fact that the little Swiss did not consider it necessary that an artist should paint only what he sees. The qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power. Upon the other hand, he was not a doctrinaire. ‘I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the question.’ This is one of his excellent aphorisms. And in criticising painters so different as Landseer and Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical, he is trying ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’

      However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease in his criticisms of contemporary work. ‘The present,’ he says, ‘is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first perusal… . Modern things dazzle me. I must look at them through Time’s telescope. Elia complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain; “print,” as he excellently says, “settles it.” Fifty years’ toning does the same thing to a picture.’ He is happier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things. What is Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of the Renaissance were always dear to him. He saw what our English school could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies of pointing out to the young student the artistic possibilities that lie dormant in Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work. In СКАЧАТЬ