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Essays and Lectures-Part18_OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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graceful at some moment of his labour: it is only the loafer and

the idle saunterer who is as useless and uninteresting to the



artist as he is to himself. I would ask the sculptor to go with me

to any of your schools or universities, to the running ground and



gymnasium, to watch the young men start for a race, hurling quoit

or club, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping, stepping from



the boat or bending to the oar, and to carve them; and when he was

weary of cities I would ask him to come to your fields and meadows



to watch the reaper with his sickle and the cattle-driver with

lifted lasso. For if a man cannot find the noblest motives for his



art in such simple daily things as a woman drawing water from the

well or a man leaning with his scythe, he will not find them



anywhere at all. Gods and goddesses the Greek carved because he

loved them; saint and king the Goth because he believed in them.



But you, you do not care much for Greek gods and goddesses, and you

are perfectly and entirely right; and you do not think much of



kings either, and you are quite right. But what you do love are

your own men and women, your own flowers and fields, your own hills



and mountains, and these are what your art should represent to you.

Ours has been the first movement which has brought the



handicraftsman and the artist together, for remember that by

separating the one from the other you do ruin to both; you rob the



one of all spiritualmotive and all imaginative joy, you isolate

the other from all real technicalperfection. The two greatest



schools of art in the world, the sculptor at Athens and the school

of painting at Venice, had their origin entirely in a long



succession of simple and earnest handicraftsmen. It was the Greek

potter who taught the sculptor that restraining influence of design



which was the glory of the Parthenon; it was the Italian decorator

of chests and household goods who kept Venetian painting always



true to its primarypictorial condition of noble colour. For we

should remember that all the arts are fine arts and all the arts



decorative arts. The greatest triumph of Italian painting was the

decoration of a pope's chapel in Rome and the wall of a room in



Venice. Michael Angelo wrought the one, and Tintoret, the dyer's

son, the other. And the little 'Dutch landscape, which you put



over your sideboard to-day, and between the windows to-morrow, is'

no less a glorious 'piece of work than the extents of field and



forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once

melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa,' as Ruskin says.



Do not imitate the works of a nation, Greek or Japanese, Italian or

English; but their artistic spirit of design and their artistic



attitude to-day, their own world, you should absorb but imitate

never, copy never. Unless you can make as beautiful a design in



painted china or embroidered screen or beaten brass out of your

American turkey as the Japanese does out of his grey silver-winged



stork, you will never do anything. Let the Greek carve his lions

and the Goth his dragons: buffalo and wild deer are the animals



for you.

Golden rod and aster and rose and all the flowers that cover your



valleys in the spring and your hills in the autumn: let them be

the flowers for your art. Not merely has Nature given you the



noblest motives for a new school of decoration, but to you above

all other countries has she given the utensils to work in.



You have quarries of marble richer than Pentelicus, more varied

than Paros, but do not build a great white square house of marble



and think that it is beautiful, or that you are using marble nobly.

If you build in marble you must either carve it into joyous



decoration, like the lives of dancing children that adorn the

marble castles of the Loire, or fill it with beautiful sculpture,



frieze and pediment, as the Greeks did, or inlay it with other

coloured marbles as they did in Venice. Otherwise you had better



build in simple red brick as your Puritan fathers, with no pretence

and with some beauty. Do not treat your marble as if it was



ordinary stone and build a house of mere blocks of it. For it is

indeed a precious stone, this marble of yours, and only workmen of



nobility of invention and delicacy of hand should be allowed to




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