An Exposure of Naturalism by Oscar Wilde — Read

After all, what the imitative arts really give us are merely the various / styles of particular artists, or of certain schools of artists. Surely / you don't imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance / at all to the figures on mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stone / and wood carving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, or / illuminated MSS. They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with / nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance. The / Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style, / and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be / produced in the nineteenth century. 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 {3} 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. Or, to return again / to the past, take as another instance the ancient Greeks. Do you think / that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you / believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures / of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in / the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the / art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes, / for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore / high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their / faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of / our own day. The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through / the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the / truth. -- _The Decay of Lying_.