The Critic As Artist / Oscar Wilde

THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING

A DIALOGUE. Part I. Persons: Gilbert and Ernest. Scene: the

library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.

GILBERT (at the Piano). My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

ERNEST (looking up). At a capital story that I have just come

across in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your

table.

GILBERT. What is the book? Ah! I see. I have not read it yet.

Is it good?

ERNEST. Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning

over the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike

modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have

either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything

worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true

explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels

perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

GILBERT. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives

everything except genius. But I must confess that I like all

memoirs. I like them for their form, just as much as for their

matter. In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what

fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as

Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de

Sevigne. Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is

rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it.

Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins,

not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant nymphs that

Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the green

and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows

the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not

given it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the

supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his

splendour and his shame. The opinions, the character, the

achievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a sceptic

like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son

of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm

our ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode of thought

that Cardinal Newman represented--if that can be called a mode of

thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of

the supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot, I think, survive.

But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in

its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely church at

Littlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, and

worshippers are few,' will always be dear to it, and whenever men

see the yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they

will think of that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower's

sure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the

Benign Mother of his days--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or

her folly, suffered not to be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is

irresistible. Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has

chattered his way into the circle of the Immortals, and, conscious

that indiscretion is the better part of valour, bustles about among

them in that 'shaggy purple gown with gold buttons and looped lace'

which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, and

prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue

petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the 'good hog's hars-

let,' and the 'pleasant French fricassee of veal' that he loved to

eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his 'gadding after

beauties,' and his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday, and his playing

of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things. Even

in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people

talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to

us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one

could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one

can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be

perfect absolutely.

ERNEST. There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say.

But do you seriously propose that every man should become his own

Boswell? What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives

and Recollections in that case?

GILBERT. What has become of them? They are the pest of the age,

nothing more and nothing less. Every great man nowadays has his

disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

ERNEST. My dear fellow!

GILBERT. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise our

heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of

great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are

absolutely detestable.

ERNEST. May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?

GILBERT. Oh! to all our second-rate litterateurs. We are overrun

by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at

the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty

is to behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them. They are the

mere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is given to one, and

the ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach. And now,

let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I play you a fantasy

by Dvorak? He writes passionate, curiously-coloured things.

ERNEST. No; I don't want music just at present. It is far too

indefinite. Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner

last night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect,

she insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in

the German language. Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad to

say that it does not sound in the smallest degree like German.

There are forms of patriotism that are really quite degrading. No;

Gilbert, don't play any more. Turn round and talk to me. Talk to

me till the white-horned day comes into the room. There is

something in your voice that is wonderful.

GILBERT (rising from the piano). I am not in a mood for talking

to-night. I really am not. How horrid of you to smile! Where are

the cigarettes? Thanks. How exquisite these single daffodils are!

They seem to be made of amber and cool ivory. They are like Greek

things of the best period. What was the story in the confessions

of the remorseful Academician that made you laugh? Tell it to me.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins

that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were

not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It

creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills

one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears.

I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing

by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering

that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed

through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild

romantic loves, or great renunciations. And so tell me this story,

Ernest. I want to be amused.

ERNEST. Oh! I don't know that it is of any importance. But I

thought it a really admirable illustration of the true value of

ordinary art-criticism. It seems that a lady once gravely asked

the remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated

picture of 'A Spring-Day at Whiteley's,' or, 'Waiting for the Last

Omnibus,' or some subject of that kind, was all painted by hand?

GILBERT. And was it?

ERNEST. You are quite incorrigible. But, seriously speaking, what

is the use of art-criticism? Why cannot the artist be left alone,

to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth

the world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would

each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice

and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it

for us, and give to it a momentary perfection. It seems to me that

the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it,

and works best in silence and in isolation. Why should the artist

be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism? Why should those

who cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value of

creative work? What can they know about it? If a man's work is

easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .

GILBERT. And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is

wicked.

ERNEST. I did not say that.

GILBERT. Ah! but you should have. Nowadays, we have so few

mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of

them. The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians of

the Broad Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott's Great

Writers Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain

their divinity away. Where one had hoped that Browning was a

mystic they have sought to show that he was simply inarticulate.

Where one had fancied that he had something to conceal, they have

proved that he had but little to reveal. But I speak merely of his

incoherent work. Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not

belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the

Titan. He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could

sing. His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he

passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos. Still,

he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a

man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was

not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which

thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine

makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as

dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed,

did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised

language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of

expression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow

hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands

of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of

metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion

also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of

ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some

golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain;

rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme,

the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert

Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made

him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too

often with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he

wounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by

breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in

discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous

wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, or

the interval less harsh. Yet, he was great: and though he turned

language into ignoble clay, he made from it men and women that

live. He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare. If

Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer

through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, and

speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room

the pageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his

cheeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, stands

dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.

Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred,

and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's. The

spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa

pass by, looks on Ottima's haggard face, and loathes her and his

own sin, and himself. Pale as the white satin of his doublet, the

melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal

Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears

the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go

down. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered?

As a poet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer

of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that

we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled,

and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put

problems forth, and what more should an artist do? Considered from

the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him

who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside

him. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George

Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He

used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.

ERNEST. There is something in what you say, but there is not

everything in what you say. In many points you are unjust.

GILBERT. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. But

let us return to the particular point at issue. What was it that

you said?

ERNEST. Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no

art-critics.

GILBERT. I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest. It

has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old

friend.

ERNEST. It is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing your head

in that petulant manner. It is quite true. In the best days of

art there were no art-critics. The sculptor hewed from the marble

block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within it. The

waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to the statue,

and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb. He poured

the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the river of red

metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body of

a god. With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the

sightless eyes. The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his

graver. And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit

portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who

passed by, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], became

conscious of a new influence that had come across their lives, and

dreamily, or with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went to

their homes or daily labour, or wandered, it may be, through the

city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young Phaedrus bathed

his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tall

wind--whispering planes and flowering agnus castus, began to think

of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe. In

those days the artist was free. From the river valley he took the

fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone,

fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to

the dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty

tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and

the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.

On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed

with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with tired feet the

purple white-starred fields of asphodel, one 'in whose eyelids lay

the whole of the Trojan War,' Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or

figured Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords to the

mast-step, that he might listen without hurt to the singing of the

Sirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron, where the

ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persian

in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the

galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay.

He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared

cedar. Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted with

wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated

irons making it firm. Panel and marble and linen canvas became

wonderful as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her own

image, was still, and dared not speak. All life, indeed, was his,

from the merchants seated in the market-place to the cloaked

shepherd lying on the hill; from the nymph hidden in the laurels

and the faun that pipes at noon, to the king whom, in long green-

curtained litter, slaves bore upon oil-bright shoulders, and fanned

with peacock fans. Men and women, with pleasure or sorrow in their

faces, passed before him. He watched them, and their secret became

his. Through form and colour he re-created a world.

All subtle arts belonged to him also. He held the gem against the

revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for

Adonis, and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her

hounds. He beat out the gold into roses, and strung them together

for necklace or armlet. He beat out the gold into wreaths for the

conqueror's helmet, or into palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into

masks for the royal dead. On the back of the silver mirror he

graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or love-sick Phaedra with her

nurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting poppies in her hair.

The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from the silent wheel,

the vase rose up beneath his hands. He decorated the base and stem

and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated acanthus,

or curved and crested wave. Then in black or red he painted lads

wrestling, or in the race: knights in full armour, with strange

heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped

chariot over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or

working their miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their

pain. Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a

ground of white the languid bridegroom and his bride, with Eros

hovering round them--an Eros like one of Donatello's angels, a

little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings. On the

curved side he would write the name of his friend. [Greek text

which cannot be reproduced] or [Greek text which cannot be

reproduced] tells us the story of his days. Again, on the rim of

the wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at

rest, as his fancy willed it. From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed

Aphrodite at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Maenads in his

train, Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained

feet, while, satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated

skins, or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted

fir-cone, and wreathed with dark ivy. And no one came to trouble

the artist at his work. No irresponsible chatter disturbed him.

He was not worried by opinions. By the Ilyssus, says Arnold

somewhere, there was no Higginbotham. By the Ilyssus, my dear

Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing provincialism

to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By the

Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the

industrious prattle of what they do not understand. On the reed-

grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism

monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in

the dock. The Greeks had no art-critics.

GILBERT. Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are

terribly unsound. I am afraid that you have been listening to the

conversation of some one older than yourself. That is always a

dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a

habit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual

development. As for modern journalism, it is not my business to

defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian

principle of the survival of the vulgarest. I have merely to do

with literature.

ERNEST. But what is the difference between literature and

journalism?

GILBERT. Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

That is all. But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had

no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It would be

more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.

ERNEST. Really?

GILBERT. Yes, a nation of art-critics. But I don't wish to

destroy the delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the

relation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his

age. To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is

not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the

inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. Still less

do I desire to talk learnedly. Learned conversation is either the

affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally

unemployed. And, as for what is called improving conversation,

that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish

philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the

criminal classes. No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing

by Dvorak. The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us,

and the heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.

Don't let us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious of

the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated

seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't

degrade me into the position of giving you useful information.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from

time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a

clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round

her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the

night. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful

still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and

hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

ERNEST. You are horribly wilful. I insist on your discussing this

matter with me. You have said that the Greeks were a nation of

art-critics. What art-criticism have they left us?

GILBERT. My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-

criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it

would be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-

critics, and that they invented the criticism of art just as they

invented the criticism of everything else. For, after all, what is

our primary debt to the Greeks? Simply the critical spirit. And,

this spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion and

science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education, they

exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme

and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless system of

criticism that the world has ever seen.

ERNEST. But what are the two supreme and highest arts?

GILBERT. Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of

life. The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we

may not realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.

The principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many

cases, so subtle that we can hardly understand them. Recognising

that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in

all his infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism of

language, considered in the light of the mere material of that art,

to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or

emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for

instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a

modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need

hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were

right, as they were right in all things. Since the introduction of

printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst

the middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a

tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less

and less to the ear which is really the sense which, from the

standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose

canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even the work of Mr.

Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English

prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of

mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack

the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness

of effect that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have

made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as

a form of elaborate design. The Greeks, upon the other hand,

regarded writing simply as a method of chronicling. Their test was

always the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations. The

voice was the medium, and the ear the critic. I have sometimes

thought that the story of Homer's blindness might be really an

artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to remind us,

not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less with

the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but

that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music,

repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has

caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words

that are winged with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not,

it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that

England's great poet owed much of the majestic movement and

sonorous splendour of his later verse. When Milton could no longer

write he began to sing. Who would match the measures of Comus with

the measures of Samson Agonistes, or of Paradise Lost or Regained?

When Milton became blind he composed, as every one should compose,

with the voice purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days

became that mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music

has all the stateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have

its swiftness, and is the one imperishable inheritance of English

literature sweeping through all the ages, because above them, and

abiding with us ever, being immortal in its form. Yes: writing

has done much harm to writers. We must return to the voice. That

must be our test, and perhaps then we shall be able to appreciate

some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism.

As it now is, we cannot do so. Sometimes, when I have written a

piece of prose that I have been modest enough to consider

absolutely free from fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I

may have been guilty of the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic

and tribrachic movements, a crime for which a learned critic of the

Augustan age censures with most just severity the brilliant if

somewhat paradoxical Hegesias. I grow cold when I think of it, and

wonder to myself if the admirable ethical effect of the prose of

that charming writer, who once in a spirit of reckless generosity

towards the uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed the

monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life, will not

some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the paeons

have been wrongly placed.

ERNEST. Ah! now you are flippant.

GILBERT. Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that

the Greeks had no art-critics? I can understand it being said that

the constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but

not that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not

criticise. You will not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art

criticism from Plato to Plotinus. The night is too lovely for

that, and the moon, if she heard us, would put more ashes on her

face than are there already. But think merely of one perfect

little work of aesthetic criticism, Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry.

It is not perfect in form, for it is badly written, consisting

perhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or of isolated

fragments destined for some larger book, but in temper and

treatment it is perfect, absolutely. The ethical effect of art,

its importance to culture, and its place in the formation of

character, had been done once for all by Plato; but here we have

art treated, not from the moral, but from the purely aesthetic

point of view. Plato had, of course, dealt with many definitely

artistic subjects, such as the importance of unity in a work of

art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic value of

appearances, the relation of the visible arts to the external

world, and the relation of fiction to fact. He first perhaps

stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet

satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and

Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order

of the Kosmos. The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets

them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the

metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but

transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they are

still vital and full of meaning. It may be that it is as a critic

of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering the

name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a new

philosophy. But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily

in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and

investigating the material it uses, which is language, its subject-

matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is

action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are

those of theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is

plot, and its final aesthetic appeal, which is to the sense of

beauty realised through the passions of pity and awe. That

purification and spiritualising of the nature which he calls [Greek

text which cannot be reproduced] is, as Goethe saw, essentially

aesthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied. Concerning

himself primarily with the impression that the work of art

produces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, to

investigate its source, to see how it is engendered. As a

physiologist and psychologist, he knows that the health of a

function resides in energy. To have a capacity for a passion and

not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and limited. The

mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom of

much 'perilous stuff,' and by presenting high and worthy objects

for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the

man; nay, not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him

also into noble feelings of which he might else have known nothing,

the word [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] having, it has

sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of

initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to

fancy, its true and only meaning here. This is of course a mere

outline of the book. But you see what a perfect piece of aesthetic

criticism it is. Who indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so

well? After reading it, one does not wonder any longer that

Alexandria devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and that we

find the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every

question of style and manner, discussing the great Academic schools

of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that

sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or

the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing

actual life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the

artistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or

the proper subject-matter for the artist. Indeed, I fear that the

inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in

matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism

were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin

colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those

who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a

reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed.

And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about

painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had their private

views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and

Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and

lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their

art-historians, and their archaeologists, and all the rest of it.

Why, even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought

their dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid

them very handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices.

Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks.

Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism. It is the

Greeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism, and how

fine their critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that

the material they criticised with most care was, as I have already

said, language. For the material that painter or sculptor uses is

meagre in comparison with that of words. Words have not merely

music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid

as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the

Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which

reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and

spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the

Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have

been the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of

the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.

But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud.

Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion's eye. She is

afraid that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, of

Quinctilian and Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of

all those who in the antique world wrote or lectured upon art

matters. She need not be afraid. I am tired of my expedition into

the dim, dull abyss of facts. There is nothing left for me now but

the divine [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of another

cigarette. Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one

unsatisfied.

ERNEST. Try one of mine. They are rather good. I get them direct

from Cairo. The only use of our attaches is that they supply their

friends with excellent tobacco. And as the moon has hidden

herself, let us talk a little longer. I am quite ready to admit

that I was wrong in what I said about the Greeks. They were, as

you have pointed out, a nation of art-critics. I acknowledge it,

and I feel a little sorry for them. For the creative faculty is

higher than the critical. There is really no comparison between

them.

GILBERT. The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary.

Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all,

worthy of the name. You spoke a little while ago of that fine

spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the

artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary

perfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of

omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most

characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical

faculty can create anything at all in art. Arnold's definition of

literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form,

but it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the

critical element in all creative work.

ERNEST. I should have said that great artists work unconsciously,

that they were 'wiser than they knew,' as, I think, Emerson remarks

somewhere.

GILBERT. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work

is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must

sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he

chooses to sing. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are

sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of

poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that

the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they

walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost

without changing could pass into song. The snow lies thick now

upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but

once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from

the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to

the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to

other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our

historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry

is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to

be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the

result of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest,

there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-

consciousness and the critical spirit are one.

ERNEST. I see what you mean, and there is much in it. But surely

you would admit that the great poems of the early world, the

primitive, anonymous collective poems, were the result of the

imagination of races, rather than of the imagination of

individuals?

GILBERT. Not when they became poetry. Not when they received a

beautiful form. For there is no art where there is no style, and

no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.

No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as

Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work,

but they were merely his rough material. He took them, and shaped

them into song. They become his, because he made them lovely.

They were built out of music,

And so not built at all,

And therefore built for ever.

The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one

feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the

individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but

the man who creates the age. Indeed, I am inclined to think that

each myth and legend that seems to us to spring out of the wonder,

or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was in its origin the

invention of one single mind. The curiously limited number of the

myths seems to me to point to this conclusion. But we must not go

off into questions of comparative mythology. We must keep to

criticism. And what I want to point out is this. An age that has

no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic,

and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that

possesses no art at all. There have been critical ages that have

not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in which

the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his

treasure-house, to separate the gold from the silver, and the

silver from the lead, to count over the jewels, and to give names

to the pearls. But there has never been a creative age that has

not been critical also. For it is the critical faculty that

invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself.

It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that

springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand. There

is really not a single form that art now uses that does not come to

us from the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were

either stereotyped or invented or made perfect. I say Alexandria,

not merely because it was there that the Greek spirit became most

self-conscious, and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and

theology, but because it was to that city, and not to Athens, that

Rome turned for her models, and it was through the survival, such

as it was, of the Latin language that culture lived at all. When,

at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned upon Europe, the soil

had been in some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of the

details of history, which are always wearisome and usually

inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been

due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the

lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including

burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure,

the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which

perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the

wide meaning of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, except

the sonnet, to which, however, some curious parallels of thought-

movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism, to

which no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham

Scotch dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has

recently proposed should be made the basis for a final and

unanimous effort on the part of our second-rate poets to make

themselves really romantic. Each new school, as it appears, cries

out against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man

that it owes its origin. The mere creative instinct does not

innovate, but reproduces.

ERNEST. You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of

the creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory. But what

of criticism outside creation? I have a foolish habit of reading

periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is

perfectly valueless.

GILBERT. So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrity

weighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its

brother--that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of

England affords us from time to time. And yet, I feel I am a

little unfair in this matter. As a rule, the critics--I speak, of

course, of the higher class, of those in fact who write for the

sixpenny papers--are far more cultured than the people whose work

they are called upon to review. This is, indeed, only what one

would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation

than creation does.

ERNEST. Really?

GILBERT. Certainly. Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It

merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the

difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style a

standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently

reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, the

chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art. It is

sometimes said of them that they do not read all through the works

they are called upon to criticise. They do not. Or at least they

should not. If they did so, they would become confirmed

misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase from one of the pretty

Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the rest of their

lives. Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and quality of a

wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy

in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth

nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the

instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One

tastes it, and that is quite enough--more than enough, I should

imagine. I am aware that there are many honest workers in painting

as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. They

are quite right. Their work stands in no intellectual relation to

their age. It brings us no new element of pleasure. It suggests

no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty. It should

not be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion that it

deserves.

ERNEST. But, my dear fellow--excuse me for interrupting you--you

seem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a

great deal too far. For, after all, even you must admit that it is

much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.

GILBERT. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not

at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more

difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of

actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history.

Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form

of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is

only by language that we rise above them, or above each other--by

language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.

Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its

most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be

that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have

nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don't talk about action. It

is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an

impulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing

incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and

ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim.

Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource of

those who know not how to dream.

ERNEST. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball.

You hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy.

You do nothing but re-write history.

GILBERT. The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it. That

is not the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit.

When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life,

we shall realise that the one person who has more illusions than

the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the

origin of his deeds nor their results. From the field in which he

thought that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our vintage, and

the fig-tree that he planted for our pleasure is as barren as the

thistle, and more bitter. It is because Humanity has never known

where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

ERNEST. You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious

aim is a delusion?

GILBERT. It is worse than a delusion. If we lived long enough to

see the results of our actions it may be that those who call

themselves good would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those

whom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each little

thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may

grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform

our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and

more splendid than any that has gone before. But men are the

slaves of words. They rage against Materialism, as they call it,

forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has not

spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if any,

spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties in

barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling

creeds. What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress.

Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become

colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the

race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves

us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions

about morality, it is one with the higher ethics. And as for the

virtues! What are the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares

little about chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of the

Magdalen, and not to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern

life owe their freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose

religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge,

creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience,

that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so

ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must

be merged in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply

a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a

survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship

of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world,

and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars

in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you.

Not I. Not any one. It is well for our vanity that we slay the

criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we

had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint

goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his

harvest.

ERNEST. Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note. Let us go back to

the more gracious fields of literature. What was it you said?

That it was more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it?

GILBERT (after a pause). Yes: I believe I ventured upon that

simple truth. Surely you see now that I am right? When man acts

he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet. The whole secret

lies in that. It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy

Ilion to send the notched arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl

against the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ash-handled

spear. It was easy for the adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian

carpets for her lord, and then, as he lay couched in the marble

bath, to throw over his head the purple net, and call to her

smooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the heart that

should have broken at Aulis. For Antigone even, with Death waiting

for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the tainted

air at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the

wretched naked corse that had no tomb. But what of those who wrote

about these things? What of those who gave them reality, and made

them live for ever? Are they not greater than the men and women

they sing of? 'Hector that sweet knight is dead,' and Lucian tells

us how in the dim under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of

Helen, and marvelled that it was for so grim a favour that all

those horned ships were launched, those beautiful mailed men laid

low, those towered cities brought to dust. Yet, every day the

swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the battlements, and looks

down at the tide of war. The greybeards wonder at her loveliness,

and she stands by the side of the king. In his chamber of stained

ivory lies her leman. He is polishing his dainty armour, and

combing the scarlet plume. With squire and page, her husband

passes from tent to tent. She can see his bright hair, and hears,

or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice. In the courtyard

below, the son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass. The

white arms of Andromache are around his neck. He sets his helmet

on the ground, lest their babe should be frightened. Behind the

embroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles, in perfumed

raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his soul

arrays himself to go forth to the fight. From a curiously carven

chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lord

of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that the lip of man

had never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and with fresh

water cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black wine

its burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon the

ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophets

worshipped, and prays to Him, and knows not that he prays in vain,

and that by the hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous' son,

Euphorbus, whose love-locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid,

the lion-hearted, Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his

doom. Phantoms, are they? Heroes of mist and mountain? Shadows

in a song? No: they are real. Action! What is action? It dies

at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The

world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

ERNEST. While you talk it seems to me to be so.

GILBERT. It is so in truth. On the mouldering citadel of Troy

lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze. The owl has built

her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the empty plain wander

shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-

surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as

Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the

great galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the

lonely tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing

corks of his net. Yet, every morning the doors of the city are

thrown open, and on foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors

go forth to battle, and mock their enemies from behind their iron

masks. All day long the fight rages, and when night comes the

torches gleam by the tents, and the cresset burns in the hall.

Those who live in marble or on painted panel, know of life but a

single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its beauty, but limited

to one note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet

makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage

and despair, of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go

in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the

years pass by before them. They have their youth and their

manhood, they are children, and they grow old. It is always dawn

for St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the window. Through the

still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God's pain.

The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from her

brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the

lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon,

of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim

naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear

glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the

chords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot

set free among the silver poplars of France. In eternal twilight

they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white

feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on. But

those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the

labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night

from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting

can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them,

as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that Green-

tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for

their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of

perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no

spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of

death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of

life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence

of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the

future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame.

Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised

by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in

its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.

ERNEST. Yes; I see now what you mean. But, surely, the higher you

place the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.

GILBERT. Why so?

ERNEST. Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo

of rich music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form. It may,

indeed, be that life is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its

martyrdoms are mean and its heroisms ignoble; and that it is the

function of Literature to create, from the rough material of actual

existence, a new world that will be more marvellous, more enduring,

and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, and

through which common natures seek to realise their perfection. But

surely, if this new world has been made by the spirit and touch of

a great artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect that

there will be nothing left for the critic to do. I quite

understand now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far more

difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. But it seems to me

that this sound and sensible maxim, which is really extremely

soothing to one's feelings, and should be adopted as its motto by

every Academy of Literature all over the world, applies only to the

relations that exist between Art and Life, and not to any relations

that there may be between Art and Criticism.

GILBERT. But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. And just as

artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and,

indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is

really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in

fact, both creative and independent.

ERNEST. Independent?

GILBERT. Yes; independent. Criticism is no more to be judged by

any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of

poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the

work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible

world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of

thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art

the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose. And just

as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a

small country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l'Abbaye,

near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make

a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or of no

importance, such as the pictures in this year's Royal Academy, or

in any year's Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris's

poems, M. Ohnet's novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones,

the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste

his faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in

beauty and instinct with intellectual subtlety. Why not? Dulness

is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity

is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave.

To an artist so creative as the critic, what does subject-matter

signify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist and the

painter. Like them, he can find his motives everywhere. Treatment

is the test. There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or

challenge.

ERNEST. But is Criticism really a creative art?

GILBERT. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts

them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can

one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation

within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and

AEschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to

life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and

legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that

others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative

form and colour have been already added. Nay, more, I would say

that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal

impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has

least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in

fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it,

in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never

trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble

considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the

tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever.

One may appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the soul there is

no appeal.

ERNEST. From the soul?

GILBERT. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism

really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating

than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more

delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not

abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of

autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the

thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed

or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative

passions of the mind. I am always amused by the silly vanity of

those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the

primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-

rate work. The best that one can say of most modern creative art

is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the

critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of

delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or

through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos

and clamour of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and

the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own

impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books

written, and marble hewn into form.

ERNEST. I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.

GILBERT. Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we

all revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from

her Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in

vain, the Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to

see the object as in itself it really is. But this is a very

serious error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism's most perfect

form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to

reveal its own secret and not the secret of another. For the

highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as

impressive purely.

ERNEST. But is that really so?

GILBERT. Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on

Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and

majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble

eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and

certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at

least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that

bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery;

greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because

its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller

variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced

lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,

indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and

emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,

with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always

think, even as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares

whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something

that Lionardo never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely

the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I

pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand

before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirque

of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,' I murmur to

myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the

vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of

the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their

fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern

merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as

St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as

the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with

which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the

eyelids and the hands.' And I say to my friend, 'The presence that

thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in

the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire'; and he

answers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world

are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.'

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is,

and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing,

and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was

that flute-player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda

those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo

would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the

thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein

that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the

outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the

reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and

imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the

Borgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplated

none of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain

arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious colour-

harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that

the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.

It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new

creation. It does not confine itself--let us at least suppose so

for the moment--to discovering the real intention of the artist and

accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning

of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of

him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it

is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad

meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new

relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our

lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having

prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The longer I study,

Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts

is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may

be marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual

intention on the part of the artist. For when the work is finished

it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver

a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say.

Sometimes, when I listen to the overture to Tannhauser, I seem

indeed to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-

strewn grass, and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from

the caverned hill. But at other times it speaks to me of a

thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life,

or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of

loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions

that man has not known, and so has sought for. To-night it may

fill one with that ??OS ?O? ??????O?, that Amour de l'Impossible,

which falls like a madness on many who think they live securely and

out of reach of harm, so that they sicken suddenly with the poison

of unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of what they may

not obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. To-morrow, like the

music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music

of the Greek, it may perform the office of a physician, and give us

an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and

'bring the soul into harmony with all right things.' And what is

true about music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as many

meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols.

Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it

shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

ERNEST. But is such work as you have talked about really

criticism?

GILBERT. It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely

the individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with

wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not

understood, or understood incompletely.

ERNEST. The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than

creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as

in itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe?

GILBERT. Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art is

simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not

necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it

criticises. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one

can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one

chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its

universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his

turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not

present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the

panel or graved the gem.

It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of

the highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the

pictures that the critic loves most to write about are those that

belong to the anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes

taken out of literature or history. But this is not so. Indeed,

pictures of this kind are far too intelligible. As a class, they

rank with illustrations, and, even considered from this point of

view are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set

definite bounds to it. For the domain of the painter is, as I

suggested before, widely different from that of the poet. To the

latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not merely

the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to

also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient

gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect

cycle of thought. The painter is so far limited that it is only

through the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the

soul; only through conventional images that he can handle ideas;

only through its physical equivalents that he can deal with

psychology. And how inadequately does he do it then, asking us to

accept the torn turban of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello,

or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of Lear! Yet it seems

as if nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly English painters

spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of

the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving

to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is

invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are,

as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded

the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not

worth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and

painter may not treat of the same subject. They have always done

so and will always do so. But while the poet can be pictorial or

not, as he chooses, the painter must be pictorial always. For a

painter is limited, not to what he sees in nature, but to what upon

canvas may be seen.

And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really

fascinate the critic. He will turn from them to such works as make

him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle

quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from them

there is an escape into a wider world. It is sometimes said that

the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his

ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is

that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal

is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and

becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than

itself. This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.

Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the

explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor

gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual

dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to

avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere

imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would

be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness

that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not

to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to

the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and

recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a

pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and,

taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses

their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be

added to the ultimate impression itself. You see, then, how it is

that the aesthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art that

have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become

dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest

reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all

interpretations true, and no interpretation final. Some

resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will have to

the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such

resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the

painter of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her,

but between Nature and the work of the decorative artist. Just as

on the flowerless carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed

and are lovely to look on, though they are not reproduced in

visible shape or line; just as the pearl and purple of the sea-

shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at Venice; just as the

vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made gorgeous

by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail, though

the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the

work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part

of whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance,

and shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the

mystery of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature,

solves once for all the problem of Art's unity.

But I see it is time for supper. After we have discussed some

Chambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of

the critic considered in the light of the interpreter.

ERNEST. Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally be

allowed to see the object as in itself it really is.

GILBERT. I am not quite sure. Perhaps I may admit it after

supper. There is a subtle influence in supper.

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.