the public and the public press misuse these words. I do not see how,
with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they could possibly use
them in the proper sense. I am merely pointing out the misuse; and as
for the origin of the misuse and the meaning that lies behind it all, the
explanation is very simple. It comes from the barbarous conception of
authority. It comes from the natural inability of a community corrupted
by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism. In a word, it
comes from that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public
Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control
action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought
or Art.
Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical force of
the public than there is in favour of the public’s opinion. The former
may be fine. The latter must be foolish. It is often said that force is
no argument. That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove.
Many of the most important problems of the last few centuries, such as
the continuance of personal government in England, or of feudalism in
France, have been solved entirely by means of physical force. The very
violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a
moment. It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is
mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the
brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed
him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly
to be regretted, for both their sakes. Behind the barricade there may be
much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the
leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle? And when
these four are joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute
the new authority.
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an
improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and
demoralising. Somebody—was it Burke?—called journalism the fourth
estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present moment
it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The
Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and
the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by
Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and
Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately in America Journalism
has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a
natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People
are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.
But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated.
In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having
been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a
really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over
people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact
is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,
except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having
tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours
the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite
hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the
keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that
the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who
write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the
serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing
at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the
private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political
thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to
discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their
views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action,
to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to
dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous,
offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be
told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In
France they manage these things better. There they do not allow the
details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be
published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the
public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was
granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties
concerned. In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the
artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the
journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that
is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes
things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail
things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we
have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent
newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion. There are
possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing horrible
things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of
permanent basis for an income. But there are other journalists, I feel
certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing
these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because
the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on
oblige them to supply the public with what the public wants, and to
compete with other journalists in making that supply as full and
satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible. It is a very
degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I
have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.
However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject,
and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by
which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is
to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which
he is to work. I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best
in England are the arts in which the public have not been interested.
They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain advance has
been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is
important to point out that this advance is entirely due to a few
individual artists refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their
standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter of demand and
supply. With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that has
really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not
over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr
Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted,
could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made
as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his object
was not that. His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist,
under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art. At first he
appealed to the few: now he has educated the many. He has created in the
public both taste and temperament. The public appreciate his artistic
success immensely. I often wonder, however, whether the public
understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not
accept their standard, but realised his own. With their standard the
Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the
popular theatres in London are at present. Whether they understand it or
not the fact however remains, that taste and temperament have, to a
certain extent been created in the public, and that the public is capable
of developing these qualities. The problem then is, why do not the
public become more civilised? They have the capacity. What stops them?
The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to
exercise authority over the artist and over works of art. To certain
theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come
in a proper mood. In both of these theatres there have been individual
artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences—and every
theatre in London has its own audience—the temperament to which Art
appeals. And what is that temperament? It is the temperament of
receptivity. That is all.
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority
over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot
receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to
dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the
master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly
views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art
should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and
appreciate the work of art in question. This is, of course, quite
obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and
women. But it is equally true of what are called educated people. For
an educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has
been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has
never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure
it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and
under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only
temperament that can appreciate a work of art. And true as this is in
the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more
true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a
statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession.
In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature
it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is
realised. And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the
play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the
spectator till the third or fourth act is reached. Is the silly fellow
to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists?
No. The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions
of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose
a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic
temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament.
He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to
contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its
contemplation and the egotism that mars him—the egotism of his ignorance,
or the egotism of his information. This point about the drama is hardly,
I think, sufficiently recognised. I can quite understand that were
‘Macbeth’ produced for the first time before a modern London audience,
many of the people present would strongly and vigorously object to the
introduction of the witches in the first act, with their grotesque
phrases and their ridiculous words. But when the play is over one
realises that the laughter of the witches in ‘Macbeth’ is as terrible as
the laughter of madness in ‘Lear,’ more terrible than the laughter of
Iago in the tragedy of the Moor. No spectator of art needs a more
perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play. The moment he
seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of
himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.
With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the
recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray’s ‘Esmond’ is a
beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself. In his
other novels, in ‘Pendennis,’ in ‘Philip,’ in ‘Vanity Fair’ even, at
times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by
appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly
mocking at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.
The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes
through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to
the popular novelist. One incomparable novelist we have now in England,
Mr George Meredith. There are better artists in France, but France has
no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true.
There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of
what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction.
His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them
from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them
and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made
them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own
pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never
cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate
to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying his own
personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came
to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not
change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He is an
incomparable novelist.
With the decorative arts it is not different. The public clung with
really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions of
the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that were so
appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind
people to live in. Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours
came from the dyer’s hand, beautiful patterns from the artist’s brain,
and the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set
forth. The public were really very indignant. They lost their temper.
They said silly things. No one minded. No one was a whit the worse. No
one accepted the authority of public opinion. And now it is almost
impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of
good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some
sign of appreciation of beauty. In fact, people’s houses are, as a rule,
quite charming nowadays. People have been to a very great extent
civilised. It is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary
success of the revolution in house-decoration and furniture and the like
has not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very
fine taste in such matters. It has been chiefly due to the fact that the
craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was
beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and
vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply
starved the public out. It would be quite impossible at the present
moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago, without
going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from some
third-rate lodging-house. The things are no longer made. However they
may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming in their
surroundings. Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority in
these art-matters came to entire grief.
It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad. People
sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist
to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of
government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that
under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite
so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over,
but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to
be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to
create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being
an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has
none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush
for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw
mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In
fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But
there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority
is equally bad.
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises
over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There
is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is
called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called
the People. The Prince may be cultivated. Many Princes have been. Yet
in the Prince there is danger. One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast
in Verona, of Tasso in Ferrara’s madman’s cell. It is better for the
artist not to live with Princes. The Pope may be cultivated. Many Popes
have been; the bad Popes have been. The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost
as passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated
Thought. To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much. The
goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity. Yet, though the
Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost the rod of its
lightning, it is better for the artist not to live with Popes. It was a
Pope who said of Cellini to a conclave of Cardinals that common laws and
common authority were not made for men such as he; but it was a Pope who
thrust Cellini into prison, and kept him there till he sickened with
rage, and created unreal visions for himself, and saw the gilded sun
enter his room, and grew so enamoured of it that he sought to escape, and
crept out from tower to tower, and falling through dizzy air at dawn,
maimed himself, and was by a vine-dresser covered with vine leaves, and
carried in a cart to one who, loving beautiful things, had care of him.
There is danger in Popes. And as for the People, what of them and their
authority? Perhaps of them and their authority one has spoken enough.
Their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic,
amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live
with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalise.
Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen,
and to love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marred
themselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the sceptre
of the Prince. How should they use it? They have taken the triple tiara
of the Pope. How should they carry its burden? They are as a clown
whose heart is broken. They are as a priest whose soul is not yet born.
Let all who love Beauty pity them. Though they themselves love not
Beauty, yet let them pity themselves. Who taught them the trick of
tyranny?
There are many other things that one might point out. One might point
out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social
problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the
individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had
great and individual artists, and great and individual men. One might
point out how Louis XIV., by creating the modern state, destroyed the
individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony
of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule, and
destroyed throughout all France all those fine freedoms of expression
that had made tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique
form. But the past is of no importance. The present is of no
importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is
what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be.
The future is what artists are.
It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is
quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly
true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why
it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a
practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already
in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing
conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects
to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and
foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will
change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that
it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The
systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature,
and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV. was that
he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his
error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result. All the
results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.
It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any
sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want
because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is
merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man
with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out
of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the
differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that
is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life
quickens. And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the
contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be
exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It
knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop
Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism.
To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether
Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no
evolution except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not
expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease,
or of death.