Caliban,poor noisy Caliban,thinks that when he has ceased to make mows at a thing,the thing ceases to exist.But if he mocks no longer,it is because he has been met with mockery,swifter and keener than his own,and for a moment has been bitterly schooled into that silence which should seal for ever his uncouth distorted lips.What has been done up to now,has been chiefly in the clearing of the way.It is always more difficult to destroy than it is to create,and when what one has to destroy is vulgarity and stupidity,the task of destruction needs not merely courage but also contempt.Yet it seems to me to have been,in a measure,done.We have got rid of what was bad.We have now to make what is beautiful.And though the mission of the aesthetic movement is to lure people to contemplate,not to lead them to create,yet,as the creative instinct is strong in the Celt,and it is the Celt who leads in art,there is no reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not become almost as mighty in its way as was that new birth of Art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of Italy.
Certainly,for the cultivation of temperament,we must turn to the decorative arts:to the arts that touch us,not to the arts that teach us.Modern pictures are,no doubt,delightful to look at.
At least,some of them are.But they are quite impossible to live with;they are too clever,too assertive,too intellectual.Their meaning is too obvious,and their method too clearly defined.One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time,and then they become as tedious as one's relations.I am very fond of the work of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London.
Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school.Some of their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier's immortal SYMPHONIE EN BLANCMAJEUR,that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.For a class that welcomes the incompetent with sympathetic eagerness,and that confuses the bizarre with the beautiful,and vulgarity with truth,they are extremely accomplished.They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of epigrams,pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes,and as for their portraits,whatever the commonplace may say against them,no one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm which belongs to works of pure fiction.But even the Impressionists,earnest and industrious as they are,will not do.
I like them.Their white keynote,with its variations in lilac,was an era in colour.Though the moment does not make the man,the moment certainly makes the Impressionist,and for the moment in art,and the 'moment's monument,'as Rossetti phrased it,what may not be said?They are suggestive also.If they have not opened the eyes of the blind,they have at least given great encouragement to the short-sighted,and while their leaders may have all the inexperience of old age,their young men are far too wise to be ever sensible.Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the illiterate,and are always prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions,and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and only modest thing about them.One tires,at the end,of the work of individuals whose individuality is always noisy,and generally uninteresting.There is far more to be said in favour of that newer school at Paris,the ARCHAICISTES,as they call themselves,who,refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather,do not find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect,but seek rather for the imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour,and rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see,try to see something worth seeing,and to see it not merely with actual and physical vision,but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic purpose.They,at any rate,work under those decorative conditions that each art requires for its perfection,and have sufficient aesthetic instinct to regret those sordid and stupid limitations of absolute modernity of form which have proved the ruin of so many of the Impressionists.Still,the art that is frankly decorative is the art to live with.It is,of all our visible arts,the one art that creates in us both mood and temperament.Mere colour,unspoiled by meaning,and unallied with definite form,can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
