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 Cæsar. 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
mediæval 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 _città 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 Böhme, 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 æsthetic 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.