_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 ΒΙΟΣ ΘΕΩΡΗΤΙΚΟΣ is the true ideal. From the high tower of
Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and
complete, the æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 mediævalism, 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 Aufklärung, 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.