(Part 1)

A Dialogue


PERSONS: Gilbert and Ernest, SCENE: the library of a house in
Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.


GILBERT (at the piano): My dear Ernest, what you are laughing at?

ERNEST (looking up): At a capital story that I have just come across in
this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.

GILBERT: What is the book? Ah! I see. I have not read it yet. Is it good?

ERNEST: Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over
the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern
memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost
their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which,
however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the
English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is
talking to it.

GILBERT: Yes; the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything
except genius. But I must confess that I like all memoirs. I like them for
their form, just as much as for their matter. In literature mere egotism is
delightful. It is what fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different
as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné.
Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we
cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it. Humanity will always
love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the
world, and the couchant nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the
castle of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open
Loggia at Florence shows the moon the dead terror that once turned life to
stone, have not given it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which
the supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour
and his shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man,
matter very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne,
or a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets
he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode
of thought that Cardinal Newman represented – if that can be called a mode
of thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of the
supremacy of the intellect – may not, cannot, I think, survive. But the world
will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its progress from
darkness to darkness. The lonely church at Littlemore, where ‘the breath of
the morning is damp, and worshippers are few,’ will always be dear to it,
and whenever men see the yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of
Trinity they will think of that gracious undergraduate who saw in the
flower’s sure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the
Benign Mother of his days – a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her
folly, suffered not to be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible. Poor,
silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys had chattered his way into the circle of
the Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the better part of valour,
bustles about among them in that ‘shaggy purple gown with gold buttons
and looped lace’ which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at his
ease, and prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue
petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the ‘good hog’s harslet,’ and the
‘pleasant French fricassee of veal’ that he loved to eat, of his game of bowls
with Will Joyce, and his ‘gadding after beauties,’ and his reciting of Hamlet
on a Sunday, and his playing of the viol on week days, and other wicked or
trivial things. Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions.
When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to
us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could
shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a
book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.

ERNEST: There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say. But
do you seriously propose that every man should become his own Boswell?
What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and Recollect-
ions in that case?

GILBERT: What has become of them? They are the pest of the age,
nothing more and nothing less. Every great man nowadays has his disciples,
and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

ERNEST: My dear fellow!

GILBERT: I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise our
heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great
books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely
detestable.

ERNEST: May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?

GILBERT: Oh! To all our second-rate litterateurs. We are overrun by a
set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house
along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as
mutes. But we won’t talk about them. They are the mere body-snatchers of
literature. The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul is
out of their reach. And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I
play you a fantasy by Dvorak? He writes passionate, curiously-coloured
things.

ERNEST: No; I don’t want music just at present. It is far too indefinite.
Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner last night, and,
though absolutely charming in every other respect, she insisted on
discussing music as if it were actually written in the German language.
Now, whatever music sounds like, I am glad to say that it does not sound in
the smallest degree like German. There are forms of patriotism that are
really quite degrading. No; Gilbert, don’t play any more. Turn round and
talk to me. Talk to me till the white-horned day comes into the room. There
is something in your voice that is wonderful.

GILBERT: (rising from the piano): I am not in a mood for talking to-
night. How horrid of you to smile! I really am not. Where are the
cigarettes? Thanks. How exquisite these single daffodils are! They seem
to be made of amber and cool ivory. They are like Greek things of the
best period. What was the story in the confessions of the remorseful
Academician that made you laugh? Tell it to me. After playing Chopin, I
feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and
mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me
to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been
ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from
one’s tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life,
hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering
that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible
experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great
renunciations. And so tell me this story, Ernest. I want to be amused.

ERNEST: Oh! I don’t know that it is of any importance. But I thought it
a really admirable illustration of the true value of ordinary art-criticism. It
seems that a lady once gravely asked the remorseful Academician, as you
call him, if his celebrated picture of ‘A Spring-Day at Whiteley’s,’ or
‘Waiting for the Last Omnibus,’ or some subject of that kind, was all
painted by hand?

GILBERT: And was it?

ERNEST: You are quite incorrigible. But, seriously speaking, what is the
use of art-criticism? Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create a new
world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which we already
know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be wearied if Art,
with her fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it
were, purify it for us, and give to it a momentary perfection. It seems to me
that the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it, and
works best in silence and in isolation. Why should the artist be troubled by
the shrill clamour of criticism? Why should those who cannot create take
upon themselves to estimate the value of creative work? What can they
know about it? If a man’s work is easy to understand, an explanation is
unnecessary…

GILBERT: And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is
wicked.

ERNEST: I did not say that.

GILBERT: Ah! But you should have. Nowadays we have so few mysteries
left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them. The members
of the Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad Church Party,
or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott’s Great Writers’ Series, seem to me
to spend their time in trying to explain their divinity away. Where one
had hoped that Browning was a mystic they have sought to show that he was
simply inarticulate. Where one had fancied that he had something to con-
ceal, they have proved that he had but little to reveal. But I speak merely
of his incoherent work. Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not
belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the Titan. He
did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could sing. His work is marred
by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form,
but from thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker,
and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinking
aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by
which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine
makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him
as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, did the subtle
mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or looked
upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, that exquisite
echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice;
rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material
element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion
also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or
opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at
which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn
man’s utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have
added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning’s hands a grotesque,
misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low
comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. There
are moments when he wounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he can only
get his music by breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they
snap in discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous
wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, or the
interval less harsh. Yet, he was great: and though he turned language into
ignoble clay, he made from it men and women that live. He is the most
Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with
myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths. Even
now, as I am speaking, and speaking not against him but for him, there
glides through the room the pageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo
Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some girl’s hot kiss. There, stands
dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred
Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram,
and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed’s. The spawn of Setebos gibbers
in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima’s haggard
face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself. Pale as the white satin of
his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too
loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears the
cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go down. Yes,
Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a poet? Ah,
not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most
supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had. His sense of
dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not answer his own
problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what more should an
artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator of character he
ranks next to him who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have
sat beside him. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is
George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He
used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.

ERNEST: There is something in what you say, but there is not
everything in what you say. In many points you are unjust.

GILBERT: It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. But let us
return to the particular point at issue. What was it that you said?

ERNEST: Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no artcritics.

GILBERT: I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest. It has
all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.

ERNEST: It is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that
petulant manner. It is quite true. In the best days of art there were no
art-critics. The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great white-limbed
Hermes that slept within it. The waxers and gilders of images gave tone and
texture to the statue, and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was
dumb. He poured the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the river
of red metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body of a
god. With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the sightless eyes. The
hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his graver. And when, in some dim
frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit portico, the child of Leto stood upon his
pedestal, those who passed by, became conscious of a new influence that had
come across at their lives, and dreamily, or with a sense of strange and
quickening joy, went to their homes or daily labour, or wandered, it may
be, through the city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young Phae-
drus bathed his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tall
wind-whispering planes and flowering agnus castus, began to think of the
wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe. In those days the
artist was free. From the river valley he took the fine clay in his fingers,
and with a little tool of wood or bone, fashioned it into forms so exqui-
site that the people gave them to the dead as their playthings, and we find
them still in the dusty tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the
faint gold and the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and
raiment. On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed
with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with tired feet the purple
white-starred fields of asphodel, one ‘in whose eyelids lay the whole of
the Trojan War' Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or figured Odysseus, the
wise and cunning, bound by tight cords to the mast-step, that he might lis-
ten without hurt to the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear
river of Acheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed;
or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Mara-
thon, or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salamin-
ian bay. He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared
cedar. Upon ivory and rose-coloured terra-cotta he painted with wax, making
the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated irons making it firm.
Panel and marble and linen canvas became wonderful as his brush swept across
them; and life seeing her own image, was still, and dared not speak. All
life, indeed, was his, from the merchants seated in the market-place to the
cloaked shepherd lying on the hill; from the nymph hidden in the laurels
and the faun that pipes at noon, to the king whom, in long green-curtained
litter, slaves bore upon oil-bright shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans.
Men and women, with pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passed before him.
He watched them, and their secret became his. Through form and colour he
re-created a world.

All subtle arts belonged to him also. He held the gem against the rev-
olving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for Adonis, and
across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds. He beat out the
gold into roses, and strung them together for necklace or armlet. He beat
out the gold into wreaths for the conqueror's helmet, or into palmates for
the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the royal dead. On the back of the silver
mirror he graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or love-sick Phaedra with her
nurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting poppies in her hair. The pot-
ter sat in his shed, and, flowerlike from the silent wheel, the vase rose up
beneath his hands. He decorated the base and stem and ears with pattern of
dainty oliveleaf, of foliated acanthus, or curved and crested wave. Then in
black or red he painted lads wrestling, or in the race: knights in full armour,
with strange heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped
chariot over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or working their
miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their pain. Sometimes he would
etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground of white the languid bridegroom
and his bride, with Eros hovering round them – an Eros like one of Dona-
tello's angels, a little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings.
On the curved side he would write the name of his friend. Noble Alcibiades
or noble Charmides tells us the story of his days. Again, on the rim of the
wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at rest, as his
fancy willed it. From the tiny perfumebottle laughed Aphrodite at her toi-
let, and, with bare-limbed Maenads in his train, Dionysus danced round the
wine-jar on naked must-stained feet, while, satyr-like, the old Silenus
sprawled upon the bloated skins, or shook that magic spear which was tipped
with a fretted fircone, and wreathed with dark ivy. And no one came to trou-
ble the artist at his work. No irresponsible chatter disturbed him. He was
not worried by opinions. By the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was
no Higginbotham. By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art
congresses bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the medio-
crity how to mouth. By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about
art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand. On
the reed-grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journ-
alism monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in
the dock. The Greeks had no art-critics.

GILBERT: Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are terribly
unsound. I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of
some one older than yourself. That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if
you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it absolutely fatal to
any intellectual development. As for modern journalism, it is not my busi-
ness to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian
principle of the survival of the vulgarest. I have merely to do with lit-
erature.

ERNEST: But what is the difference between literature and journalism?

GILBERT: Oh! Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read. That is
all. But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no art-critics,
I assure you that is quite absurd. It would be more just to say that the
Greeks were a nation of art-critics.

ERNEST: Really?

GILBERT: Yes, a nation of art-critics. But I don't wish to destroy the
delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the relation of the
Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his age. To give an accurate
description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation
of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and
culture. Still less do I desire to talk learnedly. Learned conversation
is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally
unemployed. And as for what is called improving conversation, that is
merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist
feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes. No; let
me play to you some mad scarlet thing by Dvorak. The Pallid figures on the
tapestry are smiling at us, and the heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus
are folded in sleep. Don't let us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too
conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are
treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't
degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education
is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that
nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Through the parted curtains of
the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees
the stars cluster round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go
out into the night. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear the
fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

ERNEST: You are horribly wilful. I insist on your discussing this matter
with me. You have said that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics. What
art-criticism have they left us?

GILBERT: My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism
had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none
the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they
invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of every-
thing else. For, after all, what is our primary debt to the Greeks? Simply
the critical spirit. And this spirit, which they exercised on questions of
religion and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education,
they exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme and
highest arts they have left us the most flawless system of criticism that
the world has ever seen.

ERNEST: But what are the two supreme and highest arts?

GILBERT: Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life.
The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not
realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of
the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we
can hardfy understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is that
which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated
the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material of
that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or
emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for instance,
the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern musician
studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say, with much keener
aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they were right in all things.
Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit
of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country, there has
been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less
and less to the ear, which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of
pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should
abide always. Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most
perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more
like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to
lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of
effect that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have made writing a
definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate
design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a
method of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its musical
and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear the critic. I
have sometimes thought that the story of Homer's blindness might be really
an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to remind us, not
merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the
body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but he is a true singer also,
building his song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to
himself till he has caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the
words that are winged with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it
was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England's great
poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later
verse. When Milton could no longer write he began to sing. Who would match
the measures of Comus with the measures of Samson Agonistes, or of Paradise
Lost or Regained? When Milton became blind he composed, as every one should
compose, with the voice purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days be-
came that mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all
the stateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have its swiftness,
and is the one imperishable inheritance of English literature sweeping
through all the ages, because above them, and abiding with us ever, being
immortal in its form. Yes: writing has done much harm to writers. We must
return to the voice. That must be our test, and perhaps then we shall be
able to appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek artcriticism. As it
now is, we cannot do so. Sometimes, when I have written a piece of prose
that I have been modest enough to consider absolutely free from fault, a
dreadful thought comes over me that I may have been guilty of the immoral
effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachic movements, a crime for which
a learned critic of the Augustan age censures with most just severity the
brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias. I grow cold when I think of
it, and wonder to myself if the admirable ethical effect of the prose
of the charming writer, who once in a spirit of reckless generosity to-
wards the uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed the monstrous
doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life, will not some day be en-
tirely annihilated by the discovery that the paeons have been wrongly
placed.

ERNEST: Ah! Now you are flippant.

GILBERT: Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that the
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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 intel-
lectual 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 aesthetic
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
1 is, as Goethe saw, essentially aesthetic, 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 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 aesthetic 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 chat-
tered about painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had their pri-
vate 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 ar-
chaeologists, 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 mediaevalism. 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 or 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 1 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 attaches 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-
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 of 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-volume 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 doing 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 rewrite 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 intens-
ified 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 flame-like 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 corpse 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 underworld 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 swan-like 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, 1 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 sol-
stice 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 twi-
light 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 vis-
ible 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.

ERNEST: Yes; I see now what you mean. But, surely, the higher you
place the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.

GILBERT: Why so?

ERNEST: Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo of rich
music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form. It may, indeed, be that life
is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms are mean and its
heroisms ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature to create, from
the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more
marvellous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes
look upon, and through which common natures seek to realise their per-
fection. But surely, if this new world has been made by the spirit and
touch of a great artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect that there
will be nothing left for the critic to do. I quite understand now, and indeed
admit most readily, that it is far more difficult to talk about a thing than to
do it. But it seems to me that this sound and sensible maxim, which is really
extremely soothing to one's feelings, and should be adopted as its motto by
every Academy of Literature all over the world, applies only to the relations
that exist between Art and Life, and not to any relations that there may be
between Art and Criticism.

GILBERT: But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic
creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it
cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the highest
sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.

ERNEST: Independent?

GILBERT: Yes; independent. Criticism is no more to be judged by any
low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or
sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he
criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the
unseen world of passion and of thought. He does not even require for the
perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose.
And just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of
a small country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l'Abbaye, near
Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make a master-
piece of style, so, from subjects of little or of no importance, such as
the pictures in this year's Royal Academy, or in any year's Royal Academy
for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris's poems, M. Ohnet's novels, or the plays
of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to
direct or waste his faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be
flawless in beauty and instinct with intellectual subtlety. Why not? Dullness
is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the
permanent Bestia Trionfans1 that calls wisdom from its cave. To an artist so
creative as the critic, what does subject-matter signify? No more and no less
than it does to the novelist and the painter. Like them, he can find his
motives everywhere. Treatment is the test. There is nothing that has not
in it suggestion or challenge.

ERNEST: But is Criticism really a creative art?

GILBERT: Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts them
into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of
poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just
as the great artists, from Homer and Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and
Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it
in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that
others have, as it were purified for him, and to which imaginative form and
colour have been already added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest
Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more
creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to
itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would
put it, in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never trammelled by
any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations of probability, that
cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life,
effect it ever. One may appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the soul
there is no appeal.

ERNEST: From the soul?

GILBERT: Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism really is,
the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is
concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its
subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only
civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with
the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or
circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the
mind. I am always amused by the silly vanity of those writers and artists of
our day who seem to imagine that the primary function of the critic is to
chatter about their second-rate work. The best that one can say of most
modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so
the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate
refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven
veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual
existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim
is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted,
books written, and marble hewn into form.

ERNEST: I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.

GILBERT: Yes; it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all
revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her Sicilian
fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the Cumnor cowslips,
that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is.
But this is a very serious error, and takes no cognizance of Criticism's most
perfect form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal
its own secret and not the secret of another. For the highest Criticism deals
with art not as expressive but as impressive purely.

ERNEST: But is that really so?

GILBERT: Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner
are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of
his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in
its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle
choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of
those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely
because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller
variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines,
not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely
and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty
passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic
aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater art. Who,
again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Mona Lisa
something that Leonardo never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely
the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass
into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that
strange figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks,
as in some faint light under sea,' I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than
the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many
times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep
seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange webs
with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and,
as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the
sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has
moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.'
And I say to my friend, ‘The presence that thus so strangely rose beside
the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come
to desire;' and he answers me, ‘Hers is the head upon which all “the ends
of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary.'

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and
reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music
of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-player's
music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous
curves. Do you ask me what Leonardo would have said had any one told him
of this picture that ‘all the thoughts and experience of the world had etch-
ed and moulded therein that which they had of power to refine and make
expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome,
the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative
loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias?' He would
probably have answered that he had contemplated none of these things, but
had concerned himself simply with certain arrangements of lines and masses,
and with new and curious colour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for
this very reason that the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the
highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a
new creation. It does not confine itself – let us at least suppose so for the
moment – to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as
final. And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing
is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it was in his soul
who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful
thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in
some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives,
and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for,
we fear that we may receive. The longer I study, Ernest, the more clearly I
see that the beauty of the visible arts is, as the beauty of music, impressive
primarily, and that it may be marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess
of intellectual intention on the part of the artist. For when the work is
finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver
a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say. Sometimes,
when I listen to the overture to Tannhäuser, I seem indeed to see that
comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass, and to hear
the voice of Venus calling to him from the caverned hill. But at other times
it speaks to me of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my
own life, or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of
loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions that man
has not known, and so has sought for. To-night it may fill one with that
,1 that Amour de l'Impossible, which falls like a madness on many who
think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so that they sicken sud-
denly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of
what they may not obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. To-morrow, like
the music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music of
the Greek, it may perform the office of a physician, and give us an anodyne
against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and ‘bring the soul
into harmony with all right things.' And what is true about music is true
about all the arts. Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty
is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses
nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured
world.

ERNEST: But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?

GILBERT: It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the
individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form which
the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely.

ERNEST: The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and
the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is
not; that is your theory, I believe?

GILBERT: Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art is simply a
suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any
obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. The one characteristic of a
beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it
whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its
universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic creator in his turn, and
whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind
of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.

It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the high-
est Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures that the
critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the anecdotage of
painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature or history. But
this is not so. Indeed, pictures of this kind are far too intelligible. As a
class they rank with illustrations, and even considered from this point of
view are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set definite
bounds to it. For the domain of the painter is, as I suggested before, wide-
ly different from that of the poet. To the latter belongs life in its full
and absolutely entirety; not merely the beauty that men look at, but the
beauty that men listen to also; not merely the momentary grace of form or
the transient gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the per-
fect cycle of thought. The painter is so far limited that it is only through
the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only
through conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its phy-
sical equivalents that he can deal with psychology. And how inadequately
does he do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban of the Moor for the
noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of Lear!
Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly English paint-
ers spend their wicked and wasted lives in preaching upon the domain of the
poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by
visible form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of
what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably
tedious. They have degraded the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the
one thing not worth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and
painter may not treat of the same subject. They have always done so, and will
always do so. But while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the
painter must be pictorial always. For a painter is limited, not to what he
sees in nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen.

And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate
the critic. He will turn from them to such works as made him brood and
dream and fancy to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and
seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world.
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot
realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is
that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised,
it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-
point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is the reason why music is
the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This,
also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor
gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of
form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a
presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a
realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is
through its very incompleteness that Art becomes complete in beauty, and so
addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of
reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which while accepting both reason
and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure
synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever
alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity
as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression
itself. You see, then, how it is that the aesthetic critic rejects these ob-
vious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having deliv-
ered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest
reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations
true, and no interpretation final. Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative
work of the critic will have to the work that has stirred him to creation,
but it will be such resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror
that the painter of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her,
but between Nature and the work of the decorative artist. Just as on the
flowerless carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely
to look on, though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just
as the pearl and purple of the seashell is echoed in the church of St. Mark
at Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is
made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail,
though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the work
that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of whose charm
may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows us in this way
not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty and, by transforming
each art into literature, solves once for all the problem of Art's unity.

But I see it is time for supper. After we have discussed some
Chambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of the critic
considered in the light of the interpreter.

ERNEST: Ah! You admit, then, that the critic may occasionally be
allowed to see the object as in itself it really is.

GILBERT: I am not quite sure. Perhaps I may admit it after supper.
There is a subtle influence in supper.




Part Two


With some remarks upon the importance of discussing everything



ERNEST: The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect, and
now let us return to the point at issue.

GILBERT: Ah! Don't let us do that. Conversation should touch
everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing. Let us talk about
Moral Indignation, its Cause and Cure, a subject on which I think of
writing: or about The Survival of Thersites, as shown by the English comic
papers; or about any topic that may turn up.

ERNEST: No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism. You have told
me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as expressive, but as
impressive purely, and is consequently both creative and independent, is in
fact an art by itself, occupying the same relation to creative work that
creative work does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen
world of passion and of thought. Well, now, tell me, will not the critic be
sometimes a real interpreter?

GILBERT: Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses. He can
pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, to an
analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I hold
it to be, there are many delightful things to be said and done. Yet his object
will not always be to explain the work of art. He may seek rather to deepen
its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder
which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are
‘terribly at ease in Zion.' They propose to walk arm in arm with the poets,
and have a glib ignorant way of saying, ‘Why should we read what is
written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read the plays and the
poems. That is enough.' But an appreciation of Milton is, as the late Rector
of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate scholarship. And he
who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations
in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the
age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the history
of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical forms and the new
spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson,
and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe's greater son; he must know the
materials that were at Shakespeare's disposal, and the method in which he
used them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom,
and the literary criticism of Shakespeare's day, its aims and modes and
canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or
rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama,
and the connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and
the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind
Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's
true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.
The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a
riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one
whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look
upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and
whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men.
And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens. The critic will indeed be
an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the sense of one who
simply repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips to
say. For, just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that
the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call
nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own
personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others,
and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation, the
more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more
convincing, and the more true.

ERNEST: I would have said that personality would have been a
disturbing element.

GILBERT: No; it is an element of revelation. If you wish to understand
others you must intensify your own individualism.

ERNEST: What, then, is the result?

GILBERT: I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by definite ex-
ample. 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 So-
nata Appassionata of Beethoven he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also
himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely – Beethoven reinterpreted
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 inter-
pretation. 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 Shake-
speare'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 rela-
tion 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 pup-
pet-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 things
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 exact-
ly 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 of 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, ‘Tomorrow, 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 though 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 dullhued 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 sepulcher 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 mon-
strous 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 marches 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 traitor's 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 was
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 Caesar. 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 Nilegreen 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 the sad madrigal that begins:

　　　　　Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
　　　　　Sois belle! et sois triste!1

and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have never wor-
shipped 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 commun-
icate their joy. We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine, and we fol-
low 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 corre-
spondence 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 mon-
strous 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 mediaeval 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 divina1 is
colourless, and the fruitio Dei1 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 aesthetic 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 proceeded 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 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 develop 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.

Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not
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 tragi-comedy 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 1 is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought
we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centered, and complete, the
aesthetic 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 e-
thics. 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 Phil-
istine imagines. It were well for England if it were so. There is no coun-
try 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 prac-
tice. 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 pro-
fessions 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-educa-
ted; the age in which people are so industrious that they become abso-
lutely 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 of 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 lit-
tle 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 our-
selves 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 un-
satisfied 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 nec-
essarily 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
aesthetic 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, and wearied of it. At sunset came
the Luministe in painting, and the Symboliste in poetry, and the spirit of
mediaevalism, 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 dis-
course 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, an-
other 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 him-
self, 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 up 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 unbiased 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 theologi-
cal 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 words, Ernest. What people call insin-
cerity 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 beau-
tiful 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 seri-
ously 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 apos-
tles 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 rid-
iculous. 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.

GILBERT: Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic – a temp-
erament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions
that beauty gives us. Under what conditions, and by what means, this tem-
perament is engendered in race or individual, we will not discuss at pre-
sent. It is sufficient to note that it exists, and that there is in us
a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above them, separate
from the reason and of nobler import, separate from the soul and of equal
value – a sense that leads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as
I think, to contemplate merely. But to be purified and made perfect, this
sense requires some form of exquisite environment. Without this it starves,
or is dulled. You remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how
a young Greek should be educated, and with what insistence he dwells upon
the importance of surroundings, telling us how the lad is to be brought up in
the midst of fair sights and sounds, so that the beauty of material things may
prepare his soul for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual. Insensi-
bly, and without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of
beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of
education. By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temper-
ament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference
to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine
instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveliness. Ulti-
mately, in its due course, this taste is to become critical and self-con-
scious, but at first it is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and 'he
who has received this true culture of the inner man will with clear and
certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature, and with a
taste that cannot err, while he praises, and finds his pleasure in what is
good, and receives it into his soul, and so becomes good and noble, he will
rightly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he
is able to know the reason why': and so, when, later on, the critical and self-
conscious spirit develops in him, he 'will recognise and salute it as a friend
with whom his education has made him long familiar.' I need hardly say, Ernest,
how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the
smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one ventured
to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of beauty, and
that the methods by which education should work were the development of tem-
perament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the
dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in
the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in
Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange
snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold
the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath
the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway
of Laud's building in the College of St. John. Nor is it merely at Oxford, or
Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed and trained and
perfected. All over England there is a Renaissance of the decorative Arts.
Ugliness has had its day. Even in the houses of the rich there is taste, and
the houses of those who are not rich have been made gracious and comely
and sweet to live in. Caliban, poor noisy Caliban, thinks that when he has
ceased to make mows at a thing, the thing ceases to exist. But if he mocks
no longer, it is because he has been met with mockery, swifter and keener
than his own, and for a moment has been bitterly schooled into that silence
which should seal for ever his uncouth distorted lips. What has been done
up to now has been chiefly in the clearing of the way. It is always more
difficult to destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is
vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage but
also contempt. Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure, done. We
have got rid of what was bad. We have now to make what is beautiful. And
though the mission of the aesthetic movement is to lure people to contem-
plate, not to lead them to create, yet, as the creative instinct is strong in
the Celt, and it is the Celt who leads in art, there is no reason why in
future years this strange Renaissance should not become almost as mighty
in its way as was that new birth of Art that woke many centuries ago in the
cities of Italy.

Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the
decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that teach us.
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them
are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too
assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method
too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short
time, and then they become as tedious as one's relations. I am very fond
of the work of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London.
Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school. Some of their
arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of the unapproachable
beauty of Gautier's immortal Symphonie en Blanc Majeur, that flawless
masterpiece of colour and music which may have suggested the type as well
as the titles of many of their best pictures. For a class that welcomes the
incompetent with sympathetic eagerness, and that confuses the bizarre with
the beautiful, and vulgarity with truth, they are extremely accomplished.
They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of epigrams, pastels that
are as fascinating as paradoxes, and as for their portraits, whatever the
commonplace may say against them, no one can deny that they possess that
unique and wonderful charm which belongs to works of pure fiction. But
even the Impressionists, earnest and industrious as they are, will not do.
I like them. Their white keynote, with its variations in lilac, was an era
in colour. Though the moment does not make the man, the moment certainly
makes the Impressionist, and for the moment in art, and the 'moment's
monument,' as Rossetti phrased it, what may not be said? They are
suggestive also. If they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at
least given great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders
may have all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise
to be ever sensible. Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it were a
mode of autobiography invented for the use of the illiterate, and are always
prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their unnecessary selves and
their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine
contempt of nature which is the best and only modest thing about them.
One tires, at the end, of the work of individuals whose individuality is
always noisy, and generally uninteresting. There is far more to be said in
favour of that newer school at Paris, the Archaicistes, as they call
themselves, who, refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the
weather, do not find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect, but seek
rather for the imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour,
and rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see,
try to see something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual and
physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as far wider
in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic purpose. They, at any
rate, work under those decorative conditions that each art requires for its
perfection, and have sufficient aesthetic instinct to regret those sordid and
stupid limitations of absolute modernity of form which have proved the ruin
of so many of the Impressionists. Still, the art that is frankly decorative is
the art to live with. It is, of all our visible arts, the one art that creates
in us both mood and temperament. Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and
unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different
ways. The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and
masses becomes mirrored in the mind. The repetitions of pattern give us
rest. The marvels of design stir the imagination. In the mere loveliness of
the materials employed there are latent elements of culture. Nor is this all.
By its deliberate rejection of Nature as the ideal of beauty, as well as of the
imitative method of the ordinary painter, decorative art not merely prepares
the soul for the reception of true imaginative work, but develops in it that
sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of critical
achievement. For the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to
form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an
idea, and then say to himself, 'I will put my idea into a complex metre of
fourteen lines,' but realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives
certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests
what is to fill and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From
time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet,
because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has 'nothing to say.' But
if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would
be tedious. It is just because he had no new message that he can do
beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely,
as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs
is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural
is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

ERNEST: I wonder do you really believe what you say?

GILBERT: Why should you wonder? It is not merely in art that the body
is the soul. In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of things. The
rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Plato tells us, both
rhythm and harmony into the mind. Forms are the food of faith, cried
Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that make us admire
and know the man. He was right, though he may not have known how terribly
right he was. The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational,
but because they are repeated. Yes; Form is everything. It is the secret of
life. Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find
expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish to love? Use
Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world
fancies that they spring. Have you a grief that corrodes your heart? Steep
yourself in the language of grief, learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet
and Queen Constance, and you will find that mere expression is a mode of
consolation, and that Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death
of pain. And so, to return to the sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not
merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, that unerring
instinct that reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty. Start
with the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be
revealed to you, and remember that in criticism, as in creation, temperament
is everything, and that it is, not by the time of their production, but by the
temperaments to which they appeal, that the schools of art should be
historically grouped.

ERNEST: Your theory of education is delightful. But what influence will
your critic, brought up in these exquisite surroundings, possess? Do you
really think that any artist is ever affected by criticism?

GILBERT: The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own
existence. He will represent the flawless type. In him the culture of the
century will see itself realised. You must not ask of him to have any aim
other than the perfecting of himself. The demand of the intellect, as has
been well said, is simply to feel itself alive. The critic may, indeed,
desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with
the individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into conscious-
ness, and to make responsive, creating in it new desires and appetites, and
lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods. The actual art of to-day
will occupy him less than the art of to-morrow, far less than the art of
yesterday, and as for this or that person at present toiling away, what do
the industrious matter? They do their best, no doubt, and consequently we
get the worst from them. It is always with the best intentions that the
worst work is done. And besides, my dear Ernest, when a man reaches the age
of forty, or becomes a Royal Academician, or is elected a member of the
Athenaeum Club, or recognised as a popular novelist, whose books are in
great demand at suburban railway stations, one may have the amusement of
exposing him, but one cannot have the pleasure of reforming him. And this
is, I dare say, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation
is a much more painful process than punishment, is indeed punishment in its
most aggravated and moral form – a fact which accounts for our entire
failure as a community to reclaim that interesting phenomenon who is
called the confirmed criminal.

ERNEST: But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry,
and the painter of painting? Each art must appeal primarily to the artist
who works in it. His judgment will surely be the most valuable?

GILBERT: The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic temperament.
Art does not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is
universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so far from
its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really great artist
can never judge of other people's work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of
his own. That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limits
by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation. The energy of creation
hurries him blindly on to his own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the
dust as a cloud around him. The gods are hidden from each other. They can
recognise their worshippers. That is all.

ERNEST: You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty of work
different from his own.

GILBERT: It is impossible for him to do so. Wordsworth saw in Endymion
merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of act-
ivity, was deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form,
and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could ap-
preciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and
the wonder of Keats was hidden from him. The realism of Euripides was
hateful to Sophokles. Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him.
Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not understand the
method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of
Gainsborough. Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it
being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot
conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions
other than those that he has selected. Creation employs all its critical
faculty within its own sphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs
to others. It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the
proper judge of it.

ERNEST: Do you really mean that?

GILBERT: Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens, the
vision.

ERNEST: But what about technique? Surely each art has its separate
technique?

GILBERT: Certainly: each art has its grammar and its materials. There is
no mystery about either, and the incompetent can always be correct. But
while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and certain, to find their
true realisation they must be touched by the imagination into such beauty
that they will seem an exception, each one of them. Technique is really
personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil
cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great
poet, there is only one method of music – his own. To the great painter,
there is only one manner of painting – that which he himself employs. The
aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms
and modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

ERNEST: Well, I think I have put all my questions to you. And now I
must admit –

GILBERT: Ah! Don't say that you agree with me. When people agree
with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

ERNEST: In that case I certainly won't tell you whether I agree with you
or not. But I will put another question. You have explained to me that
criticism is a creative art. What future has it?

GILBERT: It is to criticism that the future belongs. The subject-matter at
the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and
variety. Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted the obvious. If
creation is to last at all, it can only do so on the condition of becoming far
more critical than it is at present. The old roads and dusty highways have
been traversed too often. Their charm has been worn away by plodding feet,
and they have lost that element of novelty or surprise which is so essential
for romance. He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an
entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost
workings. The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard
Kipling. As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one
feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes
of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The
jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their
surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd
journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of literature
Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of
life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever
known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its
essence and its seriousness. He is our first authority on the second-rate,
and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are
real works of art. As for the second condition, we have had Browning, and
Meredith is with us. But there is still much to be done in the sphere of
introspection. People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid. As
far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We have
merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell
of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible
than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le Rouge et le noir,
have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life
confess its dearest sins. Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried
backgrounds, and it is possible that a further development of the habit of
introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it seeks to
supply fresh material. I myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed.
It springs from too primitive, too natural an impulse. However this may be,
it is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always
diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily. There are
always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view. The duty of
imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances. There
was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only
by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it
has arrived.

Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism. You might just
as well have asked me the use of thought. It is Criticism, as Arnold points
out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age. It is Criticism, as
I hope to point out myself some day, that makes the mind a fine instrument.
We, in our educational system, have burdened the memory with a load of
unconnected facts, and laboriously striven to impart our laboriously
acquired knowledge. We teach people how to remember, we never teach
them how to grow. It has never occurred to us to try and develop in the
mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and discernment. The Greeks
did this, and when we come in contact with the Greek critical intellect, we
cannot but be conscious that, while our subject-matter is in every respect
larger and more varied than theirs, theirs is the only method by which this
subject-matter can be interpreted. England has done one thing; it has
invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise
the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical
force. But Wisdom has always been hidden from it. Considered as an
instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped. The
only thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.
It is Criticism, again, that by concentration makes culture possible. It
takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a finer
essence. Who that desires to retain any sense of form could struggle through
the monstrous multitudinous books that the world has produced, books in
which thought stammers or ignorance brawls? The thread that is to guide us
across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism. Nay, more,
where there is no record, and history is either lost, or was never written,
Criticism can re-create the past for us from the very smallest fragment of
language or art, just as surely as the man of science can from some tiny
bone, or the mere impress of a foot upon a rock, re-create for us the winged
dragon or Titan lizard that once made the earth shake beneath its tread, can
call Behemoth out of his cave, and make Leviathan swim once more across
the startled sea. Prehistoric history belongs to the philological and
archaeological critic. It is to him that the origins of things are revealed. The
self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly always misleading. Through
philological criticism alone we know more of the centuries of which no
actual record has been preserved, than we do of the centuries that have left
us their scrolls. It can do for us what can be done neither by physics nor
metaphysics. It can give us the exact science of mind in the progress of
becoming. It can do for us what History cannot do. It can tell us what man
thought before he learned how to write. You have asked me about the
influence of Criticism. I think I have answered that question already; but
there is this also to be said. It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan. The
Manchester school tried to make men realise the brotherhood of humanity
by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace. It sought to degrade
the wonderful world into a common marketplace for the buyer and the
seller. It addressed itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed. War followed
upon war, and the tradesman's creed did not prevent France and Germany
from clashing together in bloodstained battle. There are others of our own
day, who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or to the shallow
dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics. They have their Peace
Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and their proposals for unarmed
International Arbitration, so popular among those who have never read
history. But mere emotional sympathy will not do. It is too variable, and too
closely connected with the passions; and a board of arbitrators who, for the
general welfare of the race, are to be deprived of the power of putting their
decisions into execution, will not be of much avail. There is only one thing
worse than Injustice, and that is Justice without her sword in her hand.
When Right is not Might, it is Evil.

No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the
greed for gain could do so. It is only by the cultivation of the habit of
intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race-pre-
judices. Goethe – you will not misunderstand what I say – was a German of
the Germans. He loved his country – no man more so. Its people were dear to
him; and he led them. Yet when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon
vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent. 'How can one write songs of
hatred without hating?' he said to Eckermann, 'and how could I, to whom
culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is
among the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I owe so great a part
of my own cultivation?' This note, sounded in the modern world by Goethe
first, will become, I think, the starting point for the cosmopolitanism of the
future. Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity
of the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make
war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy
an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element. As
long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When
it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change will, of
course, be slow, and people will not be conscious of it. They will not say
'We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,' but because
the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land. Intellectual
criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can
be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us the peace that
springs from understanding.

Nor is this all. It is Criticism that, recognising no position as final, and
refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school,
creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake,
and loves it not the less because it knows it to be unattainable. How little
we have of this temper in England, and how much we need it! The English
mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid
and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. It
was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example of that
'sweet reasonableness' of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! To so
little effect. The author of the Origin of Species had, at any rate, the
philosophic temper. If one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms
of England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of
Montaigne. We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his
sincerity. Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically
unknown amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the
sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

ERNEST: Ah! What an antinomian you are!

GILBERT: The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always.
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite
easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack
of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respect-
ability. Aesthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual
sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which
we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of
the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Aesthetics, in fact, are to
Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the
external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection,
make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely
and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and
change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that
perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to
whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the
ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the
soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an
entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer
experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or
passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated
ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is this dangerous? Yes; it is dangerous
– all ideas, as I told you, are so. But the night wearies, and the light
flickers in the lamp. One more thing I cannot help saying to you. You
have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing. The nineteenth
century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two
men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other
the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning
of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world. Creation is
always behind the age. It is Criticism that leads us. The Critical Spirit
and the World Spirit are one.

ERNEST: And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this spirit
possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?

GILBERT: Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet
pensive Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and amaranth
are blooming, he will sit contended 'in that deep, motionless quiet which
mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.' He will look out upon the world
and know its secret. By contact with divine things he will become divine.
His will be the perfect life, and his only.

ERNEST: You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert. You have
told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it, and
that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world; you have
told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought dangerous; that criticism is
more creative than creation, and that the highest criticism is that which
reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is exactly
because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that
the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational. My friend, you are a
dreamer.

GILBERT; Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find
his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before
the rest of the world.

ERNEST: His punishment?

GILBERT: And his reward. But, see, it is dawn already. Draw back the
curtains and open the windows wide. How cool the morning air is! Picca-
dilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A faint purple mist
hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple. It is
too late to sleep. Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the roses.
Come! I am tired of thought.

With some remarks upon the importance of doing nothing

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