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.--_The Decay of Lying_.

LIFE THE DISCIPLE

We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and
fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative
painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view
or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's
dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosened
shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of
'The Golden Stair,' the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the
'Laus Amoris,' the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and
lithe beauty of the Vivian in 'Merlin's Dream.' And it has always been
so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to
reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither
Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They
brought their types with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty
set herself to supply the master with models.