Vinci’s Mona Lisa breathes strange longings. Leonardo’s painting (also called La
Gioconda, ‘The Smiling Lady’), Pater wrote, embodies ‘the animalism of Greece, the
lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imag-
inative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than
the rocks among which she sits ....’
Matthew Arnold had said that it was the task of Criticism ‘to see the object as in
itself it really is’. Taking Pater’s subjectivity to a logical conclusion, Wilde argued that
‘the highest Criticism’ aims ‘to see the object as in itself it really is not’ (The Critic as
Artist, 1890), and indeed Leonardo’s lady and what Pater saw in her are not at all the
same thing. Yet Yeats chose ‘She is older than the rocks’ as the first item in his Oxford
Book of Modern English Verse in 1936 – a grandly perverse gesture, since it is not
verse. For Yeats, however, it was modern; he was 8 when it was published.
Pater relates art to life in ‘Style’, an essay in Appreciations(1889). Art must first be
beautiful, then true:
I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables,that prose literature was the
characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the
youth of Bach, have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one
sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to the imagination,
through the intelligence, a range of interest, as free and various as those which music
presents to it through sense. And certainly the tendency of what has been here said is to
bring literature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music takes rank as
the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in
music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject
from the expression, then literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute
correspondence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all
artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art.
Good art, but not necessarily great art, the distinction between great art and good art
depending immediately, as regards literature at all events, not on its form, but on the
matter ....Give n the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art – then, if
it be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the
oppressed, or to the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such
presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may
ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of
God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and
soul – that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it has something
of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, architectural place, in the great
structure of human life.
A song from the comic opera Patience (1881), with words by W. S. Gilbert and
music by Sir Arthur Sullivan and produced by D’Oyly Carte, shows that Wilde had
been noticed in London. Gilbert and Sullivan operas had the confident rapport with
a broad public which serious writers were losing. ‘If You’re Anxious for to Shine in
the High Aesthetic Line’ ends:
Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your languid spleen,
An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean!
Though the Philistines may jostle,you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band,
If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medi-eval hand.
And everyone will say,
As you walk your flowery way,
‘If he’s content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit me,
Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!’DIFFERENTIATION 313