AN EXPOSURE OF NATURALISM

After all, what the imitative arts really give us are merely the various styles of particular artists, or of certain schools of artists.  Surely you don’t imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on mediæval stained glass, or in mediæval stone and wood carving, or on mediæval metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminated MSS.  They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance.  The Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be produced in the nineteenth century.  No great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.  Take an example from our own day.  I know that you are fond of Japanese things.  Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence?  If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all.  The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists.  If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them.  The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.  In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention.  There is no such country, there are no such people.  One of our most charming painters {3} went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese.  All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans.  He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell’s Gallery showed only too well.  He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.  And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio.  On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.  Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the ancient Greeks.  Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like?  Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building?  If you judge from the art, they certainly were so.  But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance.  You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of our own day.  The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.—The Decay of Lying.

THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.  In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself ‘lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death’ for having been unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the British Museum in order to complete his collection.  The sentence now passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death.  He complained bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own, having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase, was at least a circonstance attenuante.  The permanence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner.  There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across him by chance.  They had been going over the prisons of London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of Wainewright.  He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was ‘horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he had dined.’

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of fashionable lounge.  Many men of letters went down to visit their old literary comrade.  But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom Charles Lamb admired.  He seems to have grown quite cynical.

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon, and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: ‘Sir, you City men enter on your speculations, and take the chances of them.  Some of your speculations succeed, some fail.  Mine happen to have failed, yours happen to have succeeded.  That is the only difference, sir, between my visitor and me.  But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last.  I have been determined through life to hold the position of a gentleman.  I have always done so.  I do so still.  It is the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning’s turn of sweeping it out.  I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’  When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’—Pen, Pencil and Poison.