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
Dvorák? Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorák? 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,
δια λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες αβρως αιθέρος, 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 Phædrus 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 Phædra 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. ΚΑΛΟΣ
ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ or ΚΑΛΟΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΗΣ 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 Mænads 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
Dvorák. 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 æsthetic 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 pæons
have been wrongly placed.
ERNEST. Ah! now you are flippant.