A mode of style, an exquisite fancy

Years ago I came across a quotation from Oscar Wilde to the effect that the Japanese do not exist - they are "an exquisite fancy of art". I've been on the look out for the source ever since. Now, of course, it is just a Google away.

It turns out to be from an 1889 essay of Oscar's called The Decay of Lying: An Observation. It's in the form of a dialogue between two typically irritating aesthetes named Cyril and Vivian. It begins thus:

A DIALOGUE

Persons: Cyril and Vivian
Scene: the Library of a country house in Nottinghamshire

CYRIL: [coming in through the open window from the terrace] My dear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.

VIVIAN: Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her . . . blah, blah, blahedy-blah . . .

Vivian is a chap, by the way.

It takes a bit of getting used to but, as usual with Oscar, perseverance is quickly rewarded. The passage on Japan comes towards the end. When I first saw the quotation from it years ago, I took it to be an example of what has become known as Orientalism, the distancing and exoticising of a foreign culture,a habit to which the imperial British over the years have been particularly prone. In fact, the opposite is true.

Here is the passage (it's Vivian speaking, as usual):

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

The image at then top is Van Gogh's Portrait of Pere Tanguy.

Comments

[Richard Lloyd Parry]

I do like the line "Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature". It reads like an English slogan on a Japanese T shirt, or perhaps a slogan for a new brand of Japanese cigarettes ("Wildes"?). I intend to slip it into conversation as soon as possible.

[chen yongzi]

a good brand: Wilderness to be enjoyed, not to be conquered. I like the Russian sensibility in the 19 century, too. Lying on the grass(not the Shibafu)in an autumn day, they can perceive the change of the smell fo the grass and thus know where the autumn go on.

[A gaijin in Japan]

If it were Japan, it might read something like: let's slip away to the smoke-filled pachinko parlour and play bagatelle and enjoy beautiful human warmth.

[Mark Devlin]

Nice find. Nowadays this passage could be applied to manga, anime and other Japan-fetishes.

[Cultural Snow]

Were OW's sons not called Cyril and Vivian?

I wonder if they talked like this.

[Richard Lloyd Parry]

Cyril and Vyvyan. From Wikipedia: "The couple had two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). After Oscar's downfall, Constance took the surname Holland for herself and the boys. She died in 1898 following spinal surgery and was buried in Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa, Italy. Cyril was killed in France in World War I. Vyvyan survived the war and went on to become an author and translator. He published his memoirs in 1954. His son, Merlin Holland, has edited and published several works about his grandfather. Oscar Wilde's niece, Dolly Wilde, was involved in a lengthy lesbian affair with writer Natalie Clifford Barney."