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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 κάθαρσις is, as Goethe saw, essentially
æsthetic, 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 κάθαρσις
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 æsthetic 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 archæologists, 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 mediævalism. 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 μονόχρονος ηδονή 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 _attachés_ 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, οινοψ πόντος, 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.