THE CRITIC AS ARTIST--WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF
DISCUSSING EVERYTHING
A DIALOGUE: Part II. Persons: the same. Scene: the same.
ERNEST. The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect,
and now let us return to the point at issue.
GILBERT. Ah! don't let us do that. Conversation should touch
everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing. Let us talk
about Moral Indignation, its Cause and Cure, a subject on which I
think of writing: or about The Survival of Thersites, as shown by
the English comic papers; or about any topic that may turn up.
ERNEST. No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism. You have
told me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as
expressive, but as impressive purely, and is consequently both
creative and independent, is in fact an art by itself, occupying
the same relation to creative work that creative work does to the
visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion
and of thought. Well, now, tell me, will not the critic be
sometimes a real interpreter?
GILBERT. Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses.
He can pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a
whole, to an analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this
lower sphere, as I hold it to be, there are many delightful things
to be said and done. Yet his object will not always be to explain
the work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to
raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is
dear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are
'terribly at ease in Zion.' They propose to walk arm in arm with
the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, 'Why should we
read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read the
plays and the poems. That is enough.' But an appreciation of
Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward
of consummate scholarship. And he who desires to understand
Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which
Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the
age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the
history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical
forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney,
and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe's
greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare's
disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions
of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century,
their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the
literary criticism of Shakespeare's day, its aims and modes and
canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and
blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study
the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator
of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word,
he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of
Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the history
of European drama and the drama of the world. The critic will
certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a
riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed
by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather,
he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province
to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more
marvellous in the eyes of men.
And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens. The critic will
indeed be an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the
sense of one who simply repeats in another form a message that has
been put into his lips to say. For, just as it is only by contact
with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains
that individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by
curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personality
that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others,
and the more strongly this personality enters into the
interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more
satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.
ERNEST. I would have said that personality would have been a
disturbing element.
GILBERT. No; it is an element of revelation. If you wish to
understand others you must intensify your own individualism.
ERNEST. What, then, is the result?
GILBERT. I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by
definite example. It seems to me that, while the literary critic
stands of course first, as having the wider range, and larger
vision, and nobler material, each of the arts has a critic, as it
were, assigned to it. The actor is a critic of the drama. He
shows the poet's work under new conditions, and by a method special
to himself. He takes the written word, and action, gesture and
voice become the media of revelation. The singer or the player on
lute and viol is the critic of music. The etcher of a picture robs
the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a new
material its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the
relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for
the critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form
different from that of the work itself, and the employment of a new
material is a critical as well as a creative element. Sculpture,
too, has its critic, who may be either the carver of a gem, as he
was in Greek days, or some painter like Mantegna, who sought to
reproduce on canvas the beauty of plastic line and the symphonic
dignity of processional bas-relief. And in the case of all these
creative critics of art it is evident that personality is an
absolute essential for any real interpretation. When Rubinstein
plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not
merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven
absolutely--Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic
nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense
personality. When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same
experience. His own individuality becomes a vital part of the
interpretation. People sometimes say that actors give us their own
Hamlets, and not Shakespeare's; and this fallacy--for it is a
fallacy--is, I regret to say, repeated by that charming and
graceful writer who has lately deserted the turmoil of literature
for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the author of Obiter
Dicta. In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare's
Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of
art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are
as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.
ERNEST. As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?
GILBERT. Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is only
to personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of the
two comes right interpretative criticism.
ERNEST. The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will give
no less than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows?
GILBERT. He will be always showing us the work of art in some new
relation to our age. He will always be reminding us that great
works of art are living things--are, in fact, the only things that
live. So much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that,
as civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the
elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will
grow less and less interested in actual life, and WILL SEEK TO GAIN
THEIR IMPRESSIONS ALMOST ENTIRELY FROM WHAT ART HAS TOUCHED. For
life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the
wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror
about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.
One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either
too long, or not long enough.
ERNEST. Poor life! Poor human life! Are you not even touched by
the tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.
GILBERT. Too quickly touched by them, I fear. For when one looks
back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity,
and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all
seems to be a dream and an illusion. What are the unreal things,
but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the
incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed?
What are the improbable things? The things that one has done
oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-
master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with
bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some
noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy
to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take
its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence
and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or
dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had
once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.
ERNEST. Life then is a failure?
GILBERT. From the artistic point of view, certainly. And the
chief thing that makes life a failure from this artistic point of
view is the thing that lends to life its sordid security, the fact
that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion. How different
it is in the world of Art! On a shelf of the bookcase behind you
stands the Divine Comedy, and I know that, if I open it at a
certain place, I shall be filled with a fierce hatred of some one
who has never wronged me, or stirred by a great love for some one
whom I shall never see. There is no mood or passion that Art
cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her secret can
settle beforehand what our experiences are going to be. We can
choose our day and select our hour. We can say to ourselves, 'To-
morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley
of the shadow of death,' and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure
wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through the gate
of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the
horror of another world. The hypocrites go by, with their painted
faces and their cowls of gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless winds
that drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic
rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain. We break
the withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies,
and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds with red blood before us,
and cries aloud with bitter cries. Out of a horn of fire Odysseus
speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame the great
Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that
bed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple air fly
those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and
in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of
body into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia,
the coiner of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we
stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day
and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channels
gush down the green Casentine hills. Sinon, the false Greek of
Troy, mocks at him. He smites him in the face, and they wrangle.
We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us
and leads us away to that city turreted by giants where great
Nimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in store for us, and we
go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart. We
traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat
through the slimy waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. When
we hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us
for the bitterness of our scorn. We tread upon the cold crystal of
Cocytus, in which traitors stick like straws in glass. Our foot
strikes against the head of Bocca. He will not tell us his name,
and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming skull.
Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his face that he may weep a
little. We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered his
dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from
him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who more base than he
who has mercy for the condemned of God? In the jaws of Lucifer we
see the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who
slew Caesar. We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the stars.
In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holy mountain
rises into the pure light of day. There is peace for us, and for
those who for a season abide in it there is some peace also,
though, pale from the poison of the Maremma, Madonna Pia passes
before us, and Ismene, with the sorrow of earth still lingering
about her, is there. Soul after soul makes us share in some
repentance or some joy. He whom the mourning of his widow taught
to drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us of Nella praying in
her lonely bed, and we learn from the mouth of Buonconte how a
single tear may save a dying sinner from the fiend. Sordello, that
noble and disdainful Lombard, eyes us from afar like a couchant
lion. When he learns that Virgil is one of Mantua's citizens, he
falls upon his neck, and when he learns that he is the singer of
Rome he falls before his feet. In that valley whose grass and
flowers are fairer than cleft emerald and Indian wood, and brighter
than scarlet and silver, they are singing who in the world were
kings; but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg do not move to the music
of the others, and Philip of France beats his breast and Henry of
England sits alone. On and on we go, climbing the marvellous
stair, and the stars become larger than their wont, and the song of
the kings grows faint, and at length we reach the seven trees of
gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise. In a griffin-drawn
chariot appears one whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiled
in white, and mantled in green, and robed in a vesture that is
coloured like live fire. The ancient flame wakes within us. Our
blood quickens through terrible pulses. We recognise her. It is
Beatrice, the woman we have worshipped. The ice congealed about
our heart melts. Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bow
our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned. When
we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of the
fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress
of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven. Out of that
eternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us.
Her beauty troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing that
falls through water, she passes away, we gaze after her with
wistful eyes. The sweet planet of Venus is full of lovers.
Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the lady of Sordello's heart, is
there, and Folco, the passionate singer of Provence, who in sorrow
for Azalais forsook the world, and the Canaanitish harlot whose
soul was the first that Christ redeemed. Joachim of Flora stands
in the sun, and, in the sun, Aquinas recounts the story of St.
Francis and Bonaventure the story of St. Dominic. Through the
burning rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida approaches. He tells us of the
arrow that is shot from the bow of exile, and how salt tastes the
bread of another, and how steep are the stairs in the house of a
stranger. In Saturn the soul sings not, and even she who guides us
dare not smile. On a ladder of gold the flames rise and fall. At
last, we see the pageant of the Mystical Rose. Beatrice fixes her
eyes upon the face of God to turn them not again. The beatific
vision is granted to us; we know the Love that moves the sun and
all the stars.
Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make
ourselves one with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altar
with him, and share his rapture and his scorn. And if we grow
tired of an antique time, and desire to realise our own age in all
its weariness and sin, are there not books that can make us live
more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of
shameful years? Close to your hand lies a little volume, bound in
some Nile-green skin that has been powdered with gilded nenuphars
and smoothed with hard ivory. It is the book that Gautier loved,
it is Baudelaire's masterpiece. Open it at that sad madrigal that
begins
Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
Sois belle! et sois triste!
and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never
worshipped joy. Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures
himself, let its subtle music steal into your brain and colour your
thoughts, and you will become for a moment what he was who wrote
it; nay, not for a moment only, but for many barren moonlit nights
and sunless sterile days will a despair that is not your own make
its dwelling within you, and the misery of another gnaw your heart
away. Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one of its
secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to know more,
and will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent of strange
crimes of which it is guiltless, and to make atonement for terrible
pleasures that it has never known. And then, when you are tired of
these flowers of evil, turn to the flowers that grow in the garden
of Perdita, and in their dew-drenched chalices cool your fevered
brow, and let their loveliness heal and restore your soul; or wake
from his forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and bid the
lover of Heliodore make you music, for he too has flowers in his
song, red pomegranate blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh,
ringed daffodils and dark blue hyacinths, and marjoram and crinkled
ox-eyes. Dear to him was the perfume of the bean-field at evening,
and dear to him the odorous eared-spikenard that grew on the Syrian
hills, and the fresh green thyme, the wine-cup's charm. The feet
of his love as she walked in the garden were like lilies set upon
lilies. Softer than sleep-laden poppy petals were her lips, softer
than violets and as scented. The flame-like crocus sprang from the
grass to look at her. For her the slim narcissus stored the cool
rain; and for her the anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that wooed
them. And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus was as fair
as she was.
It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion. We sicken
with the same maladies as the poets, and the singer lends us his
pain. Dead lips have their message for us, and hearts that have
fallen to dust can communicate their joy. We run to kiss the
bleeding mouth of Fantine, and we follow Manon Lescaut over the
whole world. Ours is the love-madness of the Tyrian, and the
terror of Orestes is ours also. There is no passion that we cannot
feel, no pleasure that we may not gratify, and we can choose the
time of our initiation and the time of our freedom also. Life!
Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our
experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in
its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and
spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and
critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its
wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is
monstrous and infinite.
ERNEST. Must we go, then, to Art for everything?
GILBERT. For everything. Because Art does not hurt us. The tears
that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions
that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not
wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter. In the actual
life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a
lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both
purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great art
critic of the Greeks. It is through Art, and through Art only,
that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art
only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual
existence. This results not merely from the fact that nothing that
one can imagine is worth doing, and that one can imagine
everything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, like the
forces of the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy.
One can feel so much, and no more. And how can it matter with what
pleasure life tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks to
maim and mar one's soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of those
who have never existed one has found the true secret of joy, and
wept away one's tears over their deaths who, like Cordelia and the
daughter of Brabantio, can never die?
ERNEST. Stop a moment. It seems to me that in everything that you
have said there is something radically immoral.
GILBERT. All art is immoral.
ERNEST. All art?
GILBERT. Yes. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of
art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of
that practical organisation of life that we call society. Society,
which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the
concentration of human energy, and in order to ensure its own
continuance and healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightly
demands, of each of its citizens that he should contribute some
form of productive labour to the common weal, and toil and travail
that the day's work may be done. Society often forgives the
criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile
emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so
completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful
social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at
Private Views and other places that are open to the general public,
and saying in a loud stentorian voice, 'What are you doing?'
whereas 'What are you thinking?' is the only question that any
single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to
another. They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk.
Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious.
But some one should teach them that while, in the opinion of
society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can
be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper
occupation of man.
ERNEST. Contemplation?
GILBERT. Contemplation. I said to you some time ago that it was
far more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. Let me say
to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in
the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato,
with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy.
To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest
form of energy also. It was to this that the passion for holiness
led the saint and the mystic of mediaeval days.
ERNEST. We exist, then, to do nothing?
GILBERT. It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is
limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him
who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.
But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once
too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too
curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about
life in exchange for life itself. To us the citta divina is
colourless, and the fruitio Dei without meaning. Metaphysics do
not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date.
The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes 'the
spectator of all time and of all existence' is not really an ideal
world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter it, we
starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts of the
city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by
Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our
nature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed.
They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their legacy
to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid. Had they put it
into words, it might not live within us as thought. No, Ernest,
no. We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be
learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher, and
the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere,
would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless
intangible Being which Plato rates so high? What to us is the
Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Bohme,
the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's
blinded eyes? Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one
daffodil of the field, far less than the meanest of the visible
arts, for, just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is
mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus,
even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both
sense and soul alike. To the aesthetic temperament the vague is
always repellent. The Greeks were a nation of artists, because
they were spared the sense of the infinite. Like Aristotle, like
Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete, and nothing
but the concrete can satisfy us.
ERNEST. What then do you propose?
GILBERT. It seems to me that with the development of the critical
spirit we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but
the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves
absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity. For
he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows
nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth
century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and
that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself
one must know all about others. There must be no mood with which
one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make
alive. Is this impossible? I think not. By revealing to us the
absolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self-
imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the
scientific principle of Heredity has become, as it were, the
warrant for the contemplative life. It has shown us that we are
never less free than when we try to act. It has hemmed us round
with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecy
of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may not
see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul. It is Nemesis
without her mask. It is the last of the Fates, and the most
terrible. It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know.
And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has
robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the
subjective sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this
terrible shadow, with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange
temperaments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and
chill moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts of thoughts
that are at variance with each other, and passions that war against
themselves. And so, it is not our own life that we live, but the
lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single
spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for
our service, and entering into us for our joy. It is something
that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has
made its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of
curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter.
It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we
know we cannot gain. One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us.
It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us
by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid
claims are marring the perfection of our development. It can help
us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other
ages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air. It can teach
us how to escape from our experience, and to realise the
experiences of those who are greater than we are. The pain of
Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain. Theocritus
blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and
shepherd. In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the
hounds, and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the
Queen. We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl
of Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame
into song. We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes, and when we
wander with Endymion the Moon grows amorous of our youth. Ours is
the anguish of Atys, and ours the weak rage and noble sorrows of
the Dane. Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us
to live these countless lives? Yes: it is the imagination; and
the imagination is the result of heredity. It is simply
concentrated race-experience.
ERNEST. But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?
GILBERT. The culture that this transmission of racial experiences
makes possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone,
and indeed may be said to be one with it. For who is the true
critic but he who bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, and
feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is
alien, no emotional impulse obscure? And who the true man of
culture, if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious rejection
has made instinct self-conscious and intelligent, and can separate
the work that has distinction from the work that has it not, and so
by contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets of
style and school, and understands their meanings, and listens to
their voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity
which is the real root, as it is the real flower, of the
intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity, and,
having learned 'the best that is known and thought in the world,'
lives--it is not fanciful to say so--with those who are the
Immortals.
Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim
not DOING but BEING, and not BEING merely, but BECOMING--that is
what the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: either
brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as
Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the
tragicomedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might live
like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions
the varied scenes that man and nature afford. We might make
ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become
perfect by the rejection of energy. It has often seemed to me that
Browning felt something of this. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into
active life, and makes him realise his mission by effort. Browning
might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission by
thought. Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning. He
made the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy, and looked on
action as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at any
rate, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is the true
ideal. From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the
world. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic critic
contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce
between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He has
discovered how to live.
Is such a mode of life immoral? Yes: all the arts are immoral,
except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to
excite to action of evil or of good. For action of every kind
belongs to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply to
create a mood. Is such a mode of life unpractical? Ah! it is not
so easy to be unpractical as the ignorant Philistine imagines. It
were well for England if it were so. There is no country in the
world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of
ours. With us, Thought is degraded by its constant association
with practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual
existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor
narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant
section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can
seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual
judgment about any one thing? Each of the professions means a
prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take
sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-
educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they
become absolutely stupid. And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot
help saying that such people deserve their doom. The sure way of
knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.
ERNEST. A charming doctrine, Gilbert.
GILBERT. I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minor
merit of being true. That the desire to do good to others produces
a plentiful crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which it is
the cause. The prig is a very interesting psychological study, and
though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to
have a pose at all is something. It is a formal recognition of the
importance of treating life from a definite and reasoned
standpoint. That Humanitarian Sympathy wars against Nature, by
securing the survival of the failure, may make the man of science
loathe its facile virtues. The political economist may cry out
against it for putting the improvident on the same level as the
provident, and so robbing life of the strongest, because most
sordid, incentive to industry. But, in the eyes of the thinker,
the real harm that emotional sympathy does is that it limits
knowledge, and so prevents us from solving any single social
problem. We are trying at present to stave off the coming crisis,
the coming revolution as my friends the Fabianists call it, by
means of doles and alms. Well, when the revolution or crisis
arrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall know nothing. And
so, Ernest, let us not be deceived. England will never be
civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There is
more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage
surrender for so fair a land. What we want are unpractical people
who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day. Those who try
to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is
through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of
the gods must be prepared.
But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of
beholding, and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, there
is something that is egotistic. If you think so, do not say so.
It takes a thoroughly selfish age, like our own, to deify self-
sacrifice. It takes a thoroughly grasping age, such as that in
which we live, to set above the fine intellectual virtues, those
shallow and emotional virtues that are an immediate practical
benefit to itself. They miss their aim, too, these philanthropists
and sentimentalists of our day, who are always chattering to one
about one's duty to one's neighbour. For the development of the
race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-
culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is
instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost. If you meet at
dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself--a rare
type in our time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met
with--you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal
has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But oh! my dear
Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to
educate others! What a dreadful experience that is! How appalling
is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit
of imparting opinions! How limited in range the creature's mind
proves to be! How it wearies us, and must weary himself, with its
endless repetitions and sickly reiteration! How lacking it is in
any element of intellectual growth! In what a vicious circle it
always moves!
ERNEST. You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert. Have you had
this dreadful experience, as you call it, lately?
GILBERT. Few of us escape it. People say that the schoolmaster is
abroad. I wish to goodness he were. But the type of which, after
all, he is only one, and certainly the least important, of the
representatives, seems to me to be really dominating our lives; and
just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere,
so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so
occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any
time to educate himself. No, Ernest, self-culture is the true
ideal of man. Goethe saw it, and the immediate debt that we owe to
Goethe is greater than the debt we owe to any man since Greek days.
The Greeks saw it, and have left us, as their legacy to modern
thought, the conception of the contemplative life as well as the
critical method by which alone can that life be truly realised. It
was the one thing that made the Renaissance great, and gave us
Humanism. It is the one thing that could make our own age great
also; for the real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete
armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps
through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome
courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and
not intellectual.
I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of
attainment, still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years to
come, unpopular with the crowd. It is so easy for people to have
sympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to have
sympathy with thought. Indeed, so little do ordinary people
understand what thought really is, that they seem to imagine that,
when they have said that a theory is dangerous, they have
pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such theories that
have any true intellectual value. An idea that is not dangerous is
unworthy of being called an idea at all.
ERNEST. Gilbert, you bewilder me. You have told me that all art
is, in its essence, immoral. Are you going to tell me now that all
thought is, in its essence, dangerous?
GILBERT. Yes, in the practical sphere it is so. The security of
society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of
the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete
absence of any intelligence amongst its members. The great
majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves
naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to
the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusion
of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life,
that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always
loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with
the dictates of reason. But let us turn from the practical sphere,
and say no more about the wicked philanthropists, who, indeed, may
well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of the Yellow
River Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such well-meaning
and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous
virtue that there is in man. They are a wearisome topic, and I am
anxious to get back to the sphere in which criticism is free.
ERNEST. The sphere of the intellect?
GILBERT. Yes. You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in
his own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be
merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion
for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with
equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the
use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and
more perfect. Well, you seemed to be a little sceptical about the
theory. But perhaps I wronged you?
ERNEST. I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit that
I feel very strongly that such work as you describe the critic
producing--and creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to
be--is, of necessity, purely subjective, whereas the greatest work
is objective always, objective and impersonal.
GILBERT. The difference between objective and subjective work is
one of external form merely. It is accidental, not essential. All
artistic creation is absolutely subjective. The very landscape
that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own
mind; and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem
to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the
poets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate
analysis, simply the poets themselves, not as they thought they
were, but as they thought they were not; and by such thinking came
in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to be. For
out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation
what in the creator was not. Nay, I would say that the more
objective a creation appears to be, the more subjective it really
is. Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the
white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses
bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came
out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion. They were elements
of his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses that stirred
so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer
them to realise their energy, not on the lower plane of actual
life, where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so
made imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art where Love can
indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can stab the
eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave, and
make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one's father's
spirit, beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete
steel from misty wall to wall. Action being limited would have
left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it is
because he did nothing that he has been able to achieve everything,
so it is because he never speaks to us of himself in his plays that
his plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true nature
and temperament far more completely than do those strange and
exquisite sonnets, even, in which he bares to crystal eyes the
secret closet of his heart. Yes, the objective form is the most
subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he talks in his
own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
ERNEST. The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form,
will necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the
artist, who has always at his disposal the forms that are
impersonal and objective.
GILBERT. Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if he
recognises that each mode of criticism is, in its highest
development, simply a mood, and that we are never more true to
ourselves than when we are inconsistent. The aesthetic critic,
constant only to the principle of beauty in all things, will ever
be looking for fresh impressions, winning from the various schools
the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before foreign
altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods. What
other people call one's past has, no doubt, everything to do with
them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself. The man who
regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look
forward to. When one has found expression for a mood, one has done
with it. You laugh; but believe me it is so. Yesterday it was
Realism that charmed one. One gained from it that nouveau frisson
which it was its aim to produce. One analysed it, explained it,
and wearied of it. At sunset came the Luministe in painting, and
the Symboliste in poetry, and the spirit of mediaevalism, that
spirit which belongs not to time but to temperament, woke suddenly
in wounded Russia, and stirred us for a moment by the terrible
fascination of pain. To-day the cry is for Romance, and already
the leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple hill-tops
walks Beauty with slim gilded feet. The old modes of creation
linger, of course. The artists reproduce either themselves or each
other, with wearisome iteration. But Criticism is always moving
on, and the critic is always developing.
Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of
expression. The method of the drama is his, as well as the method
of the epos. He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking
to Marvel on the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and
Lord Brooke discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks; or
adopt narration, as Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose
Imaginary Portraits--is not that the title of the book?--presents
to us, under the fanciful guise of fiction, some fine and exquisite
piece of criticism, one on the painter Watteau, another on the
philosophy of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan elements of the early
Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the most
suggestive, on the source of that Aufklarung, that enlightening
which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to which our own
culture owes so great a debt. Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful
literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to
Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom
Carlyle took such delight, the creative critics of the world have
always employed, can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a
mode of expression. By its means he can both reveal and conceal
himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood.
By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and
show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining
in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes
from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central
idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely,
or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller
completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the
delicate charm of chance.
ERNEST. By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist,
and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical
argument.
GILBERT. Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult
to convert oneself. To arrive at what one really believes, one
must speak through lips different from one's own. To know the
truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what is Truth?
In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived.
In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of
art, it is one's last mood. And you see now, Ernest, that the
critic has at his disposal as many objective forms of expression as
the artist has. Ruskin put his criticism into imaginative prose,
and is superb in his changes and contradictions; and Browning put
his into blank verse and made painter and poet yield us their
secret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater fiction, and
Rossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione and
the design of Ingres, and his own design and colour also, feeling,
with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that the
ultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium that
of words.
ERNEST. Well, now that you have settled that the critic has at his
disposal all objective forms, I wish you would tell me what are the
qualities that should characterise the true critic.
GILBERT. What would you say they were?
ERNEST. Well, I should say that a critic should above all things
be fair.
GILBERT. Ah! not fair. A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary
sense of the word. It is only about things that do not interest
one that one can give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt
the reason why an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.
The man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who sees
absolutely nothing at all. Art is a passion, and, in matters of
art, Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid
rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine moods and exquisite
moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a scientific
formula or a theological dogma. It is to the soul that Art speaks,
and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of the
body. One should, of course, have no prejudices; but, as a great
Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago, it is one's business in
such matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences one
ceases to be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can equally and
impartially admire all schools of Art. No; fairness is not one of
the qualities of the true critic. It is not even a condition of
criticism. Each form of Art with which we come in contact
dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of every other form.
We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in question,
whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret. For the time,
we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed.
ERNEST. The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will he
not?
GILBERT. Rational? There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest.
One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally. For Art,
as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener and
spectator a form of divine madness. It does not spring from
inspiration, but it makes others inspired. Reason is not the
faculty to which it appeals. If one loves Art at all, one must
love it beyond all other things in the world, and against such
love, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out. There is
nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be
sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always
seem to the world to be pure visionaries.
ERNEST. Well, at least, the critic will be sincere.
GILBERT. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal
of it is absolutely fatal. The true critic will, indeed, always be
sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will
seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will never
suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or
stereotyped mode of looking at things. He will realise himself in
many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be
curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through
constant change, and through constant change alone, he will find
his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his own
opinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?
The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth. You
must not be frightened by word, Ernest. What people call
insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our
personalities.
ERNEST. I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.
GILBERT. Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity
and fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least on the
borderland of morals, and the first condition of criticism is that
the critic should be able to recognise that the sphere of Art and
the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. When
they are confused, Chaos has come again. They are too often
confused in England now, and though our modern Puritans cannot
destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary
prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment. It is
chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find
expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour
of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated,
it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By
carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it
shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By
invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what
things are requisite for culture, and what are not. But it should
not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art. When it
does this it stultifies itself. And yet Tartuffe's articles and
Chadband's notes do this good, at least. They serve to show how
extremely limited is the area over which ethics, and ethical
considerations, can claim to exercise influence. Science is out of
the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.
Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon
things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong
the lower and less intellectual spheres. However, let these
mouthing Puritans pass; they have their comic side. Who can help
laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit
the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist? Some limitation
might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of our
newspapers and newspaper writers. For they give us the bald,
sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading
avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the
conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic
details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest
whatsoever. But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet
transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of
pity or of awe, and shows their colour-element, and their wonder,
and their true ethical import also, and builds out of them a world
more real than reality itself, and of loftier and more noble
import--who shall set limits to him? Not the apostles of that new
Journalism which is but the old vulgarity 'writ large.' Not the
apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine of the
hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly. The mere suggestion
is ridiculous. Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed to
the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the
true critic.
ERNEST. And what are they? Tell me yourself.
GILBERT. Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic--a
temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various
impressions that beauty gives us. Under what conditions, and by
what means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual,
we will not discuss at present. It is sufficient to note that it
exists, and that there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the
other senses and above them, separate from the reason and of nobler
import, separate from the soul and of equal value--a sense that
leads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as I think, to
contemplate merely. But to be purified and made perfect, this
sense requires some form of exquisite environment. Without this it
starves, or is dulled. You remember that lovely passage in which
Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with what
insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings, telling
us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and
sounds, so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul
for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual. Insensibly, and
without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of
beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true
aim of education. By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him
such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose
the good in preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar
and discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all that
possesses grace and charm and loveliness. Ultimately, in its due
course, this taste is to become critical and self-conscious, but at
first it is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and 'he who
has received this true culture of the inner man will with clear and
certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature,
and with a taste that cannot err, while he praises, and finds his
pleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and so
becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now
in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason
why': and so, when, later on, the critical and self-conscious
spirit develops in him, he 'will recognise and salute it as a
friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.' I need
hardly say, Ernest, how far we in England have fallen short of this
ideal, and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy
face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that the
true aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methods
by which education should work were the development of temperament,
the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.
Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and
the dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one
can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some
flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the
green meadow, among the strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and
watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded
vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted
ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of
Laud's building in the College of St. John. Nor is it merely at
Oxford, or Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed and
trained and perfected. All over England there is a Renaissance of
the decorative Arts. Ugliness has had its day. Even in the houses
of the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are not
rich have been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in.
Caliban, poor noisy Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to make
mows at a thing, the thing ceases to exist. But if he mocks no
longer, it is because he has been met with mockery, swifter and
keener than his own, and for a moment has been bitterly schooled
into that silence which should seal for ever his uncouth distorted
lips. What has been done up to now, has been chiefly in the
clearing of the way. It is always more difficult to destroy than
it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is vulgarity and
stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage but
also contempt. Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure,
done. We have got rid of what was bad. We have now to make what
is beautiful. And though the mission of the aesthetic movement is
to lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet, as
the creative instinct is strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt who
leads in art, there is no reason why in future years this strange
Renaissance should not become almost as mighty in its way as was
that new birth of Art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of
Italy.
Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the
decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that
teach us. Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at.
At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live
with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their
meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One
exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they
become as tedious as one's relations. I am very fond of the work
of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London.
Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school. Some of
their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of the
unapproachable beauty of Gautier's immortal Symphonie en Blanc
Majeur, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may
have suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best
pictures. For a class that welcomes the incompetent with
sympathetic eagerness, and that confuses the bizarre with the
beautiful, and vulgarity with truth, they are extremely
accomplished. They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of
epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes, and as for
their portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them, no
one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm
which belongs to works of pure fiction. But even the
Impressionists, earnest and industrious as they are, will not do.
I like them. Their white keynote, with its variations in lilac,
was an era in colour. Though the moment does not make the man, the
moment certainly makes the Impressionist, and for the moment in
art, and the 'moment's monument,' as Rossetti phrased it, what may
not be said? They are suggestive also. If they have not opened
the eyes of the blind, they have at least given great encouragement
to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may have all the
inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to be
ever sensible. Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it
were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the
illiterate, and are always prating to us on their coarse gritty
canvases of their unnecessary selves and their unnecessary
opinions, and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt
of nature which is the best and only modest thing about them. One
tires, at the end, of the work of individuals whose individuality
is always noisy, and generally uninteresting. There is far more to
be said in favour of that newer school at Paris, the Archaicistes,
as they call themselves, who, refusing to leave the artist entirely
at the mercy of the weather, do not find the ideal of art in mere
atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the imaginative beauty of
design and the loveliness of fair colour, and rejecting the tedious
realism of those who merely paint what they see, try to see
something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual and
physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is
as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in
artistic purpose. They, at any rate, work under those decorative
conditions that each art requires for its perfection, and have
sufficient aesthetic instinct to regret those sordid and stupid
limitations of absolute modernity of form which have proved the
ruin of so many of the Impressionists. Still, the art that is
frankly decorative is the art to live with. It is, of all our
visible arts, the one art that creates in us both mood and
temperament. Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with
definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.
The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and
masses becomes mirrored in the mind. The repetitions of pattern
give us rest. The marvels of design stir the imagination. In the
mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements
of culture. Nor is this all. By its deliberate rejection of
Nature as the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method
of the ordinary painter, decorative art not merely prepares the
soul for the reception of true imaginative work, but develops in it
that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of
critical achievement. For the real artist is he who proceeds, not
from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He
does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, 'I will
put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,' but, realising
the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of
music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to
fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From
time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic
poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has
'nothing to say.' But if he had something to say, he would
probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just
because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. He
gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist
should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs
is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be
inartistic.
ERNEST. I wonder do you really believe what you say?
GILBERT. Why should you wonder? It is not merely in art that the
body is the soul. In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of
things. The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Plato
tells us, both rhythm and harmony into the mind. Forms are the
food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments of
sincerity that make us admire and know the man. He was right,
though he may not have known how terribly right he was. The Creeds
are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are
repeated. Yes: Form is everything. It is the secret of life.
Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find
expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish
to love? Use Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearning
from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief
that corrodes your heart? Steep yourself in the Language of grief,
learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you
will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that
Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.
And so, to return to the sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not
merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct,
that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their
conditions of beauty. Start with the worship of form, and there is
no secret in art that will not be revealed to you, and remember
that in criticism, as in creation, temperament is everything, and
that it is, not by the time of their production, but by the
temperaments to which they appeal, that the schools of art should
be historically grouped.
ERNEST. Your theory of education is delightful. But what
influence will your critic, brought up in these exquisite
surroundings, possess? Do you really think that any artist is ever
affected by criticism?
GILBERT. The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his
own existence. He will represent the flawless type. In him the
culture of the century will see itself realised. You must not ask
of him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself. The
demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel
itself alive. The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise
influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with the
individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into
consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it new desires
and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler
moods. The actual art of to-day will occupy him less than the art
of to-morrow, far less than the art of yesterday, and as for this
or that person at present toiling away, what do the industrious
matter? They do their best, no doubt, and consequently we get the
worst from them. It is always with the best intentions that the
worst work is done. And besides, my dear Ernest, when a man
reaches the age of forty, or becomes a Royal Academician, or is
elected a member of the Athenaeum Club, or is recognised as a
popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at suburban
railway stations, one may have the amusement of exposing him, but
one cannot have the pleasure of reforming him. And this is, I dare
say, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation
is a much more painful process than punishment, is indeed
punishment in its most aggravated and moral form--a fact which
accounts for our entire failure as a community to reclaim that
interesting phenomenon who is called the confirmed criminal.
ERNEST. But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of
poetry, and the painter of painting? Each art must appeal
primarily to the artist who works in it. His judgment will surely
be the most valuable?
GILBERT. The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic
temperament. Art does not address herself to the specialist. Her
claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations
she is one. Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is
the best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of
other people's work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his
own. That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist,
limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation.
The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his own goal. The
wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him. The
gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise their
worshippers. That is all.
ERNEST. You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty of
work different from his own.
GILBERT. It is impossible for him to do so. Wordsworth saw in
Endymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his
dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth's message, being
repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human
incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud
nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from
him. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles. Those
droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his
sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of
Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of
Gainsborough. Bad artists always admire each other's work. They
call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly
great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty
fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has
selected. Creation employs all its critical faculty within its own
sphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others.
It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper
judge of it.
ERNEST. Do you really mean that?
GILBERT. Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens, the
vision.
ERNEST. But what about technique? Surely each art has its
separate technique?
GILBERT. Certainly: each art has its grammar and its materials.
There is no mystery about either, and the incompetent can always be
correct. But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and
certain, to find their true realisation they must be touched by the
imagination into such beauty that they will seem an exception, each
one of them. Technique is really personality. That is the reason
why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and
why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet,
there is only one method of music--his own. To the great painter,
there is only one manner of painting--that which he himself
employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can
appreciate all forms and modes. It is to him that Art makes her
appeal.
ERNEST. Well, I think I have put all my questions to you. And now
I must admit -
GILBERT. Ah! don't say that you agree with me. When people agree
with me I always feel that I must be wrong.
ERNEST. In that case I certainly won't tell you whether I agree
with you or not. But I will put another question. You have
explained to me that criticism is a creative art. What future has
it?
GILBERT. It is to criticism that the future belongs. The subject-
matter at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited
in extent and variety. Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have
exhausted the obvious. If creation is to last at all, it can only
do so on the condition of becoming far more critical than it is at
present. The old roads and dusty highways have been traversed too
often. Their charm has been worn away by plodding feet, and they
have lost that element of novelty or surprise which is so essential
for romance. He who would stir us now by fiction must either give
us an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in
its innermost workings. The first is for the moment being done for
us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. As one turns over the pages of his
Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a
palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright
colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The jaded, second-rate
Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings.
The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd
journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view
of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.
From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows
vulgarity better than any one has ever known it. Dickens knew its
clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its
seriousness. He is our first authority on the second-rate, and has
seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are
real works of art. As for the second condition, we have had
Browning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much to be
done in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that
fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned,
it has never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the
surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the
brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more
terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le
Rouge et le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its most
secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins. Still,
there is a limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it
is possible that a further development of the habit of
introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it
seeks to supply fresh material. I myself am inclined to think that
creation is doomed. It springs from too primitive, too natural an
impulse. However this may be, it is certain that the subject-
matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the
subject-matter of criticism increases daily. There are always new
attitudes for the mind, and new points of view. The duty of
imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances.
There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is
now. It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of
the point at which it has arrived.
Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism. You might
just as well have asked me the use of thought. It is Criticism, as
Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the
age. It is Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that
makes the mind a fine instrument. We, in our educational system,
have burdened the memory with a load of unconnected facts, and
laboriously striven to impart our laboriously-acquired knowledge.
We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
It has never occurred to us to try and develop in the mind a more
subtle quality of apprehension and discernment. The Greeks did
this, and when we come in contact with the Greek critical
intellect, we cannot but be conscious that, while our subject-
matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs,
theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can be
interpreted. England has done one thing; it has invented and
established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the
ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of
physical force. But Wisdom has always been hidden from it.
Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse
and undeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is the growth
of the critical instinct.
It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture
possible. It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and
distils it into a finer essence. Who that desires to retain any
sense of form could struggle through the monstrous multitudinous
books that the world has produced, books in which thought stammers
or ignorance brawls? The thread that is to guide us across the
wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism. Nay more, where
there is no record, and history is either lost, or was never
written, Criticism can re-create the past for us from the very
smallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as the man of
science can from some tiny bone, or the mere impress of a foot upon
a rock, re-create for us the winged dragon or Titan lizard that
once made the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth out
of his cave, and make Leviathan swim once more across the startled
sea. Prehistoric history belongs to the philological and
archaeological critic. It is to him that the origins of things are
revealed. The self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly always
misleading. Through philological criticism alone we know more of
the centuries of which no actual record has been preserved, than we
do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls. It can do for
us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics. It can
give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming. It
can do for us what History cannot do. It can tell us what man
thought before he learned how to write. You have asked me about
the influence of Criticism. I think I have answered that question
already; but there is this also to be said. It is Criticism that
makes us cosmopolitan. The Manchester school tried to make men
realise the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the commercial
advantages of peace. It sought to degrade the wonderful world into
a common market-place for the buyer and the seller. It addressed
itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed. War followed upon
war, and the tradesman's creed did not prevent France and Germany
from clashing together in blood-stained battle. There are others
of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or
to the shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics.
They have their Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists,
and their proposals for unarmed International Arbitration, so
popular among those who have never read history. But mere
emotional sympathy will not do. It is too variable, and too
closely connected with the passions; and a board of arbitrators
who, for the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived of the
power of putting their decisions into execution, will not be of
much avail. There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and that
is Justice without her sword in her hand. When Right is not Might,
it is Evil.
No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the
greed for gain could do so. It is only by the cultivation of the
habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise
superior to race-prejudices. Goethe--you will not misunderstand
what I say--was a German of the Germans. He loved his country--no
man more so. Its people were dear to him; and he led them. Yet,
when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard and
cornfield, his lips were silent. 'How can one write songs of
hatred without hating?' he said to Eckermann, 'and how could I, to
whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation
which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe
so great a part of my own cultivation?' This note, sounded in the
modern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting
point for the cosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism will
annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the
human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make
war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to
destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most
important element. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will
always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it
will cease to be popular. The change will of course be slow, and
people will not be conscious of it. They will not say 'We will not
war against France because her prose is perfect,' but because the
prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.
Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far
closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist.
It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.
Nor is this all. It is Criticism that, recognising no position as
final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of
any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which
loves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it
knows it to be unattainable. How little we have of this temper in
England, and how much we need it! The English mind is always in a
rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid
quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. It
was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example of
that 'sweet reasonableness' of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and,
alas! to so little effect. The author of the Origin of Species
had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. If one contemplates the
ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel the
contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne. We are
dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.
Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically
unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is
not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin
except stupidity.
ERNEST. Ah! what an antinomian you are!
GILBERT. The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian
always. To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness,
is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of
sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain
low passion for middle-class respectability. Aesthetics are higher
than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern
the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive.
Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the
individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Aesthetics, in fact,
are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the
sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection.
Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible.
Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful,
fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and
change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we
attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the
perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they
make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do
everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for
nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so
divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer
experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought,
acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with
the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is this
dangerous? Yes; it is dangerous--all ideas, as I told you, are so.
But the night wearies, and the light flickers in the lamp. One
more thing I cannot help saying to you. You have spoken against
Criticism as being a sterile thing. The nineteenth century is a
turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men,
Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the
other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to
miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress
of the world. Creation is always behind the age. It is Criticism
that leads us. The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.
ERNEST. And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this
spirit possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?
GILBERT. Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet
pensive Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and
amaranth are blooming, he will sit contented 'in that deep,
motionless quiet which mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.' He
will look out upon the world and know its secret. By contact with
divine things he will become divine. His will be the perfect life,
and his only.
ERNEST. You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert.
You have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing
than to do it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult
thing in the world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, and
all thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative than
creation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in
the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is
exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge
of it; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not
rational. My friend, you are a dreamer.
GILBERT. Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only
find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the
dawn before the rest of the world.
ERNEST. His punishment?
GILBERT. And his reward. But, see, it is dawn already. Draw back
the curtains and open the windows wide. How cool the morning air
is! Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A
faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white
houses are purple. It is too late to sleep. Let us go down to
Covent Garden and look at the roses. Come! I am tired of thought.
