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Essays and Lectures-Part13_OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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problems of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and



bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he writes on these

subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with his left



hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a lyric.

This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron:



Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much

that we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of



calm and perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine,

imaginative work. But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate,



and in his lovely ODE ON A GRECIAN URN it found its most secure and

faultless expression; in the pageant of the EARTHLY PARADISE and



the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note.

It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a



clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to

placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus.



Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended;

the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For



art is very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is absolute

truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr.



Swinburne insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more

actual and real than Wellington, not merely more noble and



interesting as a type and figure but more positive and real.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal



considerations are no principle at all. For to the poet all times

and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and



eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present

preferable. The steam whistle will not affright him nor the flutes



of Arcadia weary him: for him there is but one time, the artistic

moment; but one law, the law of form; but one land, the land of



Beauty - a land removed indeed from the real world and yet more

sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm which



dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which comes not

from the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm



which despair and sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only. And so

it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he



who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of what is

accidental and transitory, stripped it of that 'mist of familiarity



which makes life obscure to us.'

Those strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of



ecstasy, those mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the

secret of the earth and the burden of mystery, that guard and



glorify the chapel of Pope Sixtus at Rome - do they not tell us

more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of



Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors

and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of



the history of Holland?

And so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the



nineteenth century - the democratic and pantheistic tendency and

the tendency to value life for the sake of art - found their most



complete and perfect utterance in the poetry of Shelley and Keats

who, to the blind eyes of their own time, seemed to be as wanderers



in the wilderness, preachers of vague or unreal things. And I

remember once, in talking to Mr. Burne-Jones about modern science,



his saying to me, 'the more materialistic science becomes, the more

angels shall I paint: their wings are my protest in favour of the



immortality of the soul.'

But these are the intellectual speculations that underlie art.






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