question. What do you mean by saying that life, 'poor, probable,
uninteresting human life,' will try to reproduce the marvels of
art? I can quite understand your objection to art being treated as
a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of a
cracked looking-glass. But you don't mean to say that you
seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the
mirror, and Art the reality?

VIVIAN. Certainly I do. Paradox though it may seem--and paradoxes
are always dangerous things--it is none the less true that Life
imitates art far more than Art imitates life. 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