Explore "Life the Disciple" by Oscar Wilde on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and / fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative / painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view / or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's / dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosened / shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of / 'The Golden Stair,' the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the / 'Laus Amoris,' the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and / lithe beauty of the Vivian in 'Merlin's Dream. ' And it has always been / so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to / reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither / Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They / brought their types with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty / set herself to supply the master with models. The Greeks, with their / quick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride's chamber / the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely / as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. They / knew that Life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth of thought / and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself on / the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity of / Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection / to realism.
They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that / it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We try / to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free / sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better / housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health, / they do not produce beauty. For this, Art is required, and the true / disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who / become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or / pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best, Art's only / pupil. -- _The Decay of Lying_.