by Oscar Wilde
Thinking this, what place can I ascribe to art in our education? Consider how susceptible children are to the influence of beauty, for they are easily impressed and are pretty much what their surroundings make them. How can you expect them, then, to tell the truth if everything about them is telling lies, like the paper in the hall declaring itself marble? Why, I have seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime; you should not have such incentives to sin lying about your drawing-rooms.
And hence the enormous importance given to all the decorative arts in our English renaissance; we want children to grow up in England in the simple atmosphere of all fair things so that they will love what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly, long before they know the reason why. If you go into a house where everything is coarse and you find the common cups chipped and the saucers cracked, it will often be because the children have an utter contempt for them, but if everything is dainty and delicate, you teach them practically what beauty is, and gentleness and refinement of manner are unconsciously acquired.
But you will say, these things get broken. When I was in San Francisco, I used to visit the Chinese theatres for their rich dresses, and the Chinese restaurants on account of the beautiful tea they made there. I saw rough Chinese navvies, who did work that the ordinary Californian rightly might be disgusted with and refuse to do, sitting there drinking their tea out of tiny porcelain cups, which might be mistaken for the petals of a white rose, and handling them with care, fully appreciating the influence of their beauty; whereas in all the grand hotels of the land, where thousands of dollars have been lavished on great gilt mirrors and gaudy columns, I have been given my chocolate in the morning and my coffee in the evening in common delft cups about an inch-and-a-half thick. I think I have deserved something nicer. If these men could use cups with that tenderness, your children will learn by the influence of beauty and example to act in a like manner. The great need in America is for good decoration; art is not given to the people by costly foreign paintings in private galleries; people can learn more by a well-shaped vessel for ordinary use.
Most of you will agree that there is an education independent of books that is of far greater service in life. The art systems of the past have been devised by philosophers who look upon human beings as obstructions, and they have tried to educate boys’ minds before they had any. Most of us remember the dreary hours we have spent at our books, and then what we have learned in the woods by watching the work of the artisan in his shop as we passed the door.
In the false education of our present system, minds too young to grapple with the subjects in the right sense are burdened with those bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls of the French and English wars and that calendar of infamy, European history. How much better would it be in these early years to teach children in the useful branches of art, to use their hands in the rational service of mankind. Bring a boy up in the atmosphere of art, give him a mind before trying to teach him, develop his soul before trying to save it.
In every school I would have a workshop, and I would have an hour a day set apart when boys could learn something practically of art: turning a potter’s wheel, beating a leaf of gold, carving wood, working metal, or other such things as could give him an insight into the various decorative arts. This would be a golden hour to the children, and they would enjoy that hour most, learn more of the lessons of life and of the morality of art than in years of book study. And you would soon raise up a race of handicraftsmen who would transform the face of your country.
It is a great mistake of the age not to honour working men and their pursuits as they should be honoured. These men have been educated to use their hands and are useful members of society, a class ever productive of good to all, while in contrast may be found the great army of useless idlers whose costly education tends only to cultivate their memories for a time and is now, in the broad sea of practical life, nearly, if not quite completely, useless to them. For instance, I have seen an example of the uselessness of modern education among well-educated young men in Colorado, among others that of Eton students, men of fine physique and high mental cultivation, but whose knowledge of the names of all the kings of the Saxon Heptarchy, and all the incidents of the second Punic War, was of no use to them in Leadville and Denver.
How much better it would have been if those young men had been taught to use their hands, to make furniture and other things useful to those miners. The best people of all classes should be given to the pursuits of artistic industry, and everyone should be taught to use his hands; the human hand is the most beautiful and delicate piece of mechanism in the world, although many people seem to have no other use for their hands than to squeeze them into gloves that are far too small for them.
The most practical school of morals in the world, the best educator, is true art: it never lies, never misleads, and never corrupts, for all good art, all high art, is founded on honesty, sincerity, and truth. Under its influence children learn to abhor the liar and cheat in art—the man who paints wood to represent marble, or iron to look like stone—and to him retribution comes immediately, and he never succeeds. And if you teach a boy art, the beauty of form and colour will find its way into his heart, and he will love nature more; for there is no better way to learn to love nature than to understand art—it dignifies every flower of the field. He will have more pleasure and joy in nature when he sees how no flower by the wayside is too lowly, no little blade of grass too common, but some great designer has seen it and loved it and made noble use of it in decoration.
And art culture will do more to train children to be kind to animals and all living things than all our harrowing moral tales, for when he sees how lovely the little leaping squirrel is on the beaten brass or the bird arrested in flight on carven marble, he will not throw the customary stone. The boy will learn too to wonder and worship at God’s works more, for all art is perfect praise of God, the duplication of His handiwork. He will look on art and on nature as the craftsman looks on the carving round the arch of a Gothic cathedral, with all its marvels of the animal and vegetable world being a Te Deum in God’s honour, quite as beautiful and far more lasting than that chanted Te Deum sung within its sacred walls, which dies in music at evensong; for art is the one thing that death cannot harm.
The victories of art can give more than heroes yield or the sword demands, for what we want is something spiritual added to life. And if you wish for art you must revolt against the luxury of riches and the tyranny of materialism, for you may lay up treasures by your railways, or open your ports to the galleys of the world, but you will find the independence of art is the perfect expression of freedom. The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa did but give strength to oppression and add lustre to pride. Let it be for you to create an art that is made with the hands of the people, for the joy of the people, too, an art that will be an expression of your delight in life. There is nothing in common life too mean, in common things too trivial to be ennobled by your touch; nothing in life that art cannot sanctify.
And when artisans are among you, don’t dishonour them or leave them in necessity; I hardly think people know how much a word of sympathy means to young artists, who often are sustained and inspired by a word; search out your young artists, cheer them in their race through the asphodel meadows of youth, and bring once more into their faces the proud bright scarlet with your encouragement; and in return there will be no flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or briar that does not live forever in carven arch or window of marble, no bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more precious the preciousness of simple adornment. For the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not alone the chosen music of liberty only; other messages are there in the wonder of windswept h
eight and the majesty of silent deep, messages that, if you will listen to them, will give you the wonder of all new imagination, the treasure of all new beauty.
PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA
I fear I cannot picture America as altogether an Elysium – perhaps, from the ordinary standpoint I know but little about the country. I cannot give its latitude or longitude; I cannot compute the value of its dry goods, and I have no very close acquaintance with its politics. These are matters which may not interest you, and they certainly are not interesting to me.
The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed. Men are seen there with the dreadful chimney-pot hat, but there are very few hatless men; men wear the shocking swallow-tail coat, but few are to be seen with no coat at all. There is an air of comfort in the appearance of the people which is a marked contrast to that seen in this country, where, too often, people are seen in close contact with rags.
The next thing particularly noticeable is that everybody seems in a hurry to catch a train. This is a state of things which is not favourable to poetry or romance. Had Romeo or Juliet been in a constant state of anxiety about trains, or had their minds been agitated by the question of return-tickets, Shakespeare could not have given us those lovely balcony scenes which are so full of poetry and pathos.
America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle. It is surprising that the sound practical sense of the Americans does not reduce this intolerable noise. All art depends upon exquisite and delicate sensibility, and such continual turmoil must ultimately be destructive of the musical facility.
There is not so much beauty to be found in American cities as in Oxford, Cambridge, Salisbury or Winchester, where are lovely relics of a beautiful age; but still there is a good deal of beauty to be seen in them now and then, but only where the American has not attempted to create it. Where the Americans have attempted to produce beauty they have signally failed. A remarkable characteristic of the Americans is the manner in which they have applied science to modern life.
This is apparent in the most cursory stroll through New York. In England an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth. There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.
I have always wished to believe that the line of strength and the line of beauty are one. That wish was realised when I contemplated American machinery. It was not until I had seen the waterworks at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautifully rhythmic thing I have ever seen. One is impressed in America, but not favourably impressed, by the inordinate size of everything. The country seems to try to bully one into a belief in its power by its impressive bigness.
I was disappointed with Niagara – most people must be disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life. One sees it under bad conditions, very far away, the point of view not showing the splendour of the water. To appreciate it really one has to see it from underneath the fall, and to do that it is necessary to be dressed in a yellow oil-skin, which is as ugly as a mackintosh – and I hope none of you ever wears one. It is a consolation to know, however, that such an artist as Madame Bernhardt has not only worn that yellow, ugly dress, but has been photographed in it.
Perhaps the most beautiful part of America is the West, to reach which, however, involves a journey by rail of six days, racing along tied to an ugly tin-kettle of a steam engine. I found but poor consolation for this journey in the fact that the boys who infest the cars and sell everything that one can eat – or should not eat – were selling editions of my poems vilely printed on a kind of grey blotting paper, for the low price of ten cents. Calling these boys on one side I told them that though poets like to be popular they desire to be paid, and selling editions of my poems without giving me a profit is dealing a blow at literature which must have a disastrous effect on poetical aspirations. The invariable reply that they made was that they themselves made a profit out of the transaction and that was all they cared about.
It is a popular superstition that in America a visitor is invariably addressed as ‘stranger’. When I went to Texas I was called ‘Captain’; when I got to the centre of the country I was addressed as ‘Colonel’. On the whole, however, ‘Sir’, the old English method of addressing people, is the most common.
It is, perhaps, worth while to note that what many people call Americanisms are really old English expressions which have lingered in our colonies while they have been lost in our own country. Many people imagine that the term ‘I guess’, which is so common in America, is purely an American expression, but it was used by John Locke in his work on the Understanding, just as we now use ‘I think’.
It is in the colonies, and not in the mother country, that the old life of the country really exists. If one wants to realise what English Puritanism is – not at its worst (when it is very bad), but at its best, and then it is not very good – I do not think one can find much of it in England, but much can be found about Boston and Massachusetts. We have got rid of it. America still preserves it, to be, I hope, a short-lived curiosity.
San Francisco is a really beautiful city. China Town, peopled by Chinese labourers, is the most artistic town I have ever come across. The people – strange, melancholy Orientals, whom many people would call common, and they are certainly very poor – have determined that they will have nothing about them that is not beautiful. In the Chinese restaurants, where these navvies meet to have supper in the evening, I found them drinking out of china cups as delicate as the petals of a rose-leaf, whereas at the gaudy hotels I was supplied with a delft cup an inch and a half thick. When the Chinese bill was presented it was made out on rice paper, the account being done in indian ink as fantastically as if an artist had been etching little birds on a fan.
Salt Lake City contains only two buildings of note, the chief being the Tabernacle, which is in the shape of a soup-kettle. It is decorated by the only native artist, and he has treated religious subjects in the naïve spirit of the early Florentine painters, representing people of our own day in the dress of the period side by side with people of biblical history who are clothed in some romantic costume.
The building next in importance is called the Amelia Palace, in honour of one of Brigham Young’s wives. When he died the present president of the Mormons stood up in the Tabernacle and said that it had been revealed to him that he was to have the Amelia Palace, and that on this subject there were to be no more revelations of any kind!
From Salt Lake City one travels over the great plains of Colorado and up the Rocky Mountains, on the top of which is Leadville, the richest city in the world. It has also got the reputation of being the roughest, and every man carries a revolver. I was told that if I went there they would be sure to shoot me or my travelling manager. I wrote and told them that nothing that they could do to my travelling manager would intimidate me. They are miners – men working in metals, so I lectured to them on the Ethics of Art. I read them passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and they seemed much delighted. I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me. I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the enquiry ‘Who shot him’. They afterwards took me to a dancing-saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice:
* * *
PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT
THE PIANIST.
HE IS DOING HIS BEST.
* * *
The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous. Then they asked me to supper, and having accepted, I had to descend a mine in a rickety bucket in which it was impossible to be graceful. Having got into the heart of the mountain I had supper, the first course being whisky, the second whisky and the third whisky.
I went to the theatre to lecture and I was informed that just before I went there two men had been seized for committing a murder, and in that theatre they had been brought on to the stage at eight o’clock in the evening, and then and there tried and executed before a crowded audience. But I found these miners very charming and not at all rough.
Among the more elderly inhabitants of the South I found a melancholy tendency to date every event of importance by the late war. ‘How beautiful the moon is tonight,’ I once remarked to a gentleman who was standing next to me. ‘Yes,’ was his reply, ‘but you should have seen it before the war.’
So infinitesimal did I find the knowledge of Art, west of the Rocky Mountains, that an art patron – one who in his day had been a miner – actually sued the railroad company for damages because the plaster cast of Venus of Milo, which he had imported from Paris, had been delivered minus the arms. And, what is more surprising still, he gained his case and the damages.
Pennsylvania, with its rocky gorges and woodland scenery, reminded me of Switzerland. The prairie reminded me of a piece of blotting-paper.
The Spanish and French have left behind them memorials in the beauty of their names. All the cities that have beautiful names derive from the Spanish or the French. The English people give intensely ugly names to places. One place had such an ugly name that I refused to lecture there. It was called Grigsville. Supposing I had founded a School of Art there – fancy ‘Early Grigsville’. Imagine a School of Art teaching ‘Grigsville Renaissance’.
