I read this sentence a few days ago, or one like it, in an obituary of
Ibsen: 'Let nobody again go back to the old ballad material of
Shakespeare, to murders, and ghosts, for what interests us on the stage
is modern experience and the discussion of our interests;' and in
another part of the article Ibsen was blamed because he had written of
suicides and in other ways made use of 'the morbid terror of death.'
Dramatic literature has for a long time been left to the criticism of
journalists, and all these, the old stupid ones and the new clever ones,
have tried to impress upon it their absorption in the life of the
moment, their delight in obvious originality and in obvious logic, their
shrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The writer I have quoted is
much more than a journalist, but he has lived their hurried life, and
instinctively turns to them for judgment. He is not thinking of the
great poets and painters, of the cloud of witnesses, who are there that
we may become, through our understanding of their minds, spectators of
the ages, but of this age. Drama is a means of expression, not a special
subject matter, and the dramatist is as free to choose where he has a
mind to, as the poet of 'Endymion,' or as the painter of Mary Magdalene
at the door of Simon the Pharisee. So far from the discussion of our
interests and the immediate circumstance of our life being the most
moving to the imagination, it is what is old and far off that stirs us
the most deeply. There is a sentence in _The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell_ that is meaningless until we understand Blake's system of
correspondences. 'The best wine is the oldest, the best water the
newest.'
Water is experience, immediate sensation, and wine is emotion, and it is
with the intellect, as distinguished from imagination, that we enlarge
the bounds of experience and separate it from all but itself, from
illusion, from memory, and create among other things science and good
journalism. Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and
delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions,
with all the uncounted flavours of old experience; and it is necessarily
some antiquity of thought, emotions that have been deepened by the
experiences of many men of genius, that distinguishes the cultivated
man. The subject matter of his meditation and invention is old, and he
will disdain a too conscious originality in the arts as in those matters
of daily life where, is it not Balzac who says, 'we are all
conservatives'? He is above all things well-bred, and whether he write
or paint will not desire a technique that denies or obtrudes his long
and noble descent. Corneille and Racine did not deny their masters, and
when Dante spoke of his master Virgil there was no crowing of the cock.
In their day imitation was conscious or all but conscious, and while
originality was but so much the more a part of the man himself, so much
the deeper because unconscious, no quick analysis could find out their
miracle, that needed, it may be, generations to reveal; but it is our
imitation that is unconscious and that waits the certainties of time.
The more religious the subject matter of an art, the more will it be as
it were stationary, and the more ancient will be the emotion that it
arouses and the circumstances that it calls up before our eyes. When in
the Middle Ages the pilgrim to St. Patrick's Purgatory found himself on
the lake side, he found a boat made out of a hollow tree to ferry him to
the cave of vision. In religious painting and poetry, crowns and swords
of an ancient pattern take upon themselves new meanings, and it is
impossible to separate our idea of what is noble from a mystic stair,
where not men and women, but robes, jewels, incidents, ancient utilities
float upward slowly over the all but sleeping mind, putting on emotional
and spiritual life as they ascend until they are swallowed up by some
far glory that they even were too modern and momentary to endure. All
art is dream, and what the day is done with is dreaming ripe, and what
art has moulded religion accepts, and in the end all is in the wine cup,
all is in the drunken phantasy, and the grapes begin to stammer.