LIFE THE PLAGIARIST

I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp.  She told me that Becky was an invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman.  I inquired what became of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after the appearance of Vanity Fair, she ran away with the nephew of the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s style, and entirely by Mrs. Rawdon Crawley’s methods.  Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling places.  The noble gentleman from whom the same great sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few months after The Newcomer had reached a fourth edition, with the word ‘Adsum’ on his lips.  Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious psychological story of transformation, a friend of mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the north of London, and being anxious to get to a railway station, took what he thought would be a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a network of mean, evil-looking streets.  Feeling rather nervous he began to walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right between his legs.  It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and trampled upon it.  Being of course very much frightened and a little hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole street was full of rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants.  They surrounded him, and asked him his name.  He was just about to give it when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson’s story.  He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own person that terrible and well-written scene, and at having done accidentally, though in fact, what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate intent, that he ran away as hard as he could go.  He was, however, very closely followed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door of which happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant, who happened to be there, exactly what had occurred.  The humanitarian crowd were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and as soon as the coast was clear he left.  As he passed out, the name on the brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye.  It was ‘Jekyll.’  At least it should have been.—The Decay of Lying.

THE INDISPENSABLE EAST

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 aërial 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 of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter.  A cultured Mahomedan once remarked to us, “You Christians are so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of making an artistic application of the second.”  He was perfectly right, and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.—The Decay of Lying.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON CLIMATE

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?  To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge?  The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art.  You smile.  Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right.  For what is Nature?  Nature is no great mother who has borne us.  She is our creation.  It is in our brain that she quickens to life.  Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.  To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.  One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.  Then, and then only, does it come into existence.  At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.  There may have been fogs for centuries in London.  I dare say there were.  But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them.  They did not exist till Art had invented them.  Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess.  They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis.  Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.  And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere.  She has done so already, indeed.  That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces it quite admirably.  Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pissaros.  Indeed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern.  Of course she is not always to be relied upon.  The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position.  Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things.  Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.  Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.  Sunsets are quite old-fashioned.  They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art.  To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament.  Upon the other hand they go on.—The Decay of Lying.