VIVIAN.Quite so.They are so like them that a hundred years from now no one will believe in them.The only portraits in which one believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter,and a very great deal of the artist.Holbein's drawings of the men and women of his time impress us with a sense of their absolute reality.But this is simply because Holbein compelled life to accept his conditions,to restrain itself within his limitations,to reproduce his type,and to appear as he wished it to appear.It is style that makes us believe in a thing -nothing but style.
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion.They never paint what they see.They paint what the public sees,and the public never sees anything.
CYRIL.Well,after that I think I should like to hear the end of your article.
VIVIAN.With pleasure.Whether it will do any good I really cannot say.Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible.Why,even Sleep has played us false,and has closed up the gates of ivory,and opened the gates of horn.The dreams of the great middle classes of this country,as recorded in Mr.
Myers's two bulky volumes on the subject,and in the Transactions of the Psychical Society,are the most depressing things that Ihave ever read.There is not even a fine nightmare among them.
They are commonplace,sordid and tedious.As for the Church,Icannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural,to perform daily miracles,and to keep alive that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination.But in the English Church a man succeeds,not through his capacity for belief,but through his capacity for disbelief.Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar,and where St.Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle.Many a worthy clergyman,who passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity,lives and dies unnoticed and unknown;but it is sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah's ark,or Balaam's ass,or Jonah and the whale,for half of London to flock to hear him,and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect.The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted.It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism.It is silly,too.It springs from an entire ignorance of psychology.Man can believe the impossible,but man can never believe the improbable.However,I must read the end of my article:-'What we have to do,what at any rate it is our duty to do,is to revive this old art of Lying.Much of course may be done,in the way of educating the public,by amateurs in the domestic circle,at literary lunches,and at afternoon teas.But this is merely the light and graceful side of lying,such as was probably heard at Cretan dinner-parties.There are many other forms.Lying for the sake of gaining some immediate personal advantage,for instance -lying with a moral purpose,as it is usually called -though of late it has been rather looked down upon,was extremely popular with the antique world.Athena laughs when Odysseus tells her "his words of sly devising,"as Mr.William Morris phrases it,and the glory of mendacity illumines the pale brow of the stainless hero of Euripidean tragedy,and sets among the noble women of the past the young bride of one of Horace's most exquisite odes.Later on,what at first had been merely a natural instinct was elevated into a self-conscious science.Elaborate rules were laid down for the guidance of mankind,and an important school of literature grew up round the subject.Indeed,when one remembers the excellent philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question,one cannot help regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheap and condensed edition of the works of that great casuist.A short primer,"When to Lie and How,"if brought out in an attractive and not too expensive a form,would no doubt command a large sale,and would prove of real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people.Lying for the sake of the improvement of the young,which is the basis of home education,still lingers amongst us,and its advantages are so admirably set forth in the early books of Plato's REPUBLIC that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them here.It is a mode of lying for which all good mothers have peculiar capabilities,but it is capable of still further development,and has been sadly overlooked by the School Board.
