1 THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING By Oscar Wilde A DIALOGUE. Part I. Persons: Gilbert and Ernest. Scene:… [628688]

1 THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE
OF DOING NOTHING

By Oscar Wilde

A DIALOGUE. Part I. Persons: Gilbert and Ernest. Scene: the library of a house
in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.

GILBERT (at the Piano). My dear Ernest, what are you 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 personalit ies so different as Cicero and Balzac,
Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sevigne. 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 a lways 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

2 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 has 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 hars- let,' 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 Recollections 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

3 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. I really
am not. How horrid of you to smile! 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.

4 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 conceal, 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 ag ainst 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

5 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 art-critics.

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, [Greek text which cannot
be reproduced], became conscious of a new influence that had come across 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 Phaedrus 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 exquisite 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 listen 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

6 mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the galleys clashing their beaks of
brass in the little Salaminian bay. He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon
parchment and prepared cedar. Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta 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; fr om 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 revolving 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 potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from the
silent wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands. He decorated the base and
stem and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or 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 Donatello's
angels, a little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings. On the curved side
he would write the name of his friend. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
or [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] 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 perfume-bottle laughed Aphrodite at her
toilet, 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
fir-cone, and wreathed with dark ivy. And no one came to trouble the artist at his
work. No irresponsible chatter disturbed him. He was not worried by opinions. By
the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, th ere was no Higginbotham. By the Ilyssus,
my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art c ongresses bringing provincialism to the
provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By the Ilyssus there were
no tedious magazines about art, in which th e industrious prattle of what they do
not understand. On the reed- grown banks of that little stream strutted no

7 ridiculous journalism 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 business 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 literature.

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 Gr eeks 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. Bu t 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?

8 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 everything 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 hardly 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 that 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

9 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 became
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 art-criticism.

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 that charming writer, who once in a spirit
of reckless generosity towards the uncultivated portion of our community
proclaimed the monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life, will not
some day be entirely 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 intellectual order of the Kosmos. The problems of
idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat
barren of result in the metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places

10 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 [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] 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 [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] 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 t he thin colourless lips of impotence, or
from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy
that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been
robbed. And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about
painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had their private views, and
shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements,
and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on
art, and produced their art-historians, and their archaeologists, 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

11 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-critic ism, 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 langu age, they would still have been the
great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of the highest art is to know
the principles of all the arts.

But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud. Out of a tawny
mane of drift she gleams like a lion's eye. She is afraid that I will talk to you of
Lucian and Longinus, of Quinctilian and Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and
Pausanias, of all those who in the antique world wrote or lectured upon art
matters. She need not be afraid. I am tired of my expedition into the dim, dull
abyss of facts. There is nothing left for me now but the divine [Greek text which
cannot be reproduced] 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

12 always been so. We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at
the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that
the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a
kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into
song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are
bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the
dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to
the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what
we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every
century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that
seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the
result of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art
without self-consciousness, and self- consciousness and the critical spirit are
one.

ERNEST. I see what you mean, and there is much in it. But surely you would
admit that the great poems of the early world, the primitive, anonymous collective
poems, were the result of the imagination of races, rather than of the imagination
of individuals?

GILBERT. Not when they became poetry. Not when they received a beautiful
form. For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no
unity, and unity is of the individual. No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories
to deal with, as Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to
work, but they were merely his rough material. He took them, and shaped them
into song. They become his, because he made them lovely. They were built out
of music,

And so not built at all,
And therefore built for ever.

The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind
everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment
that makes the man, but the man who creates the age. Indeed, I am inclined to
think that each myth and legend that seems to us to spring out of the wonder, or
terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was in its origin the invention of one single
mind. The curiously limited number of the myths seems to me to point to this
conclusion. But we must not go off into questions of comparative mythology. We
must keep to criticism. And what I want to point out is this. An age that has no
criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the
reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all. There have
been critical ages that have not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word,
ages in which the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his
treasure-house, to separate the gold from the silver, and the silver from the lead,
to count over the jewels, and to give names to the pearls. But there has never
been a creative age that has not been critical also. For it is the critical faculty that

13 invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. It is to the critical
instinct that we owe each new school that springs up, each new mould that art
finds ready to its hand. There is really not a single form that art now uses that
does not come to us from the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were
either stereotyped or invented or made perfect. I say Alexandria, not merely
because it was there that the Greek spirit became most self-conscious, and
indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and theology, but because it was to that
city, and not to Athens, that Rome turned for her models, and it was through the
survival, such as it was, of the Latin language that culture lived at all. When, at
the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned upon Europe, the soil had been in
some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of the details of history, which are
always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of
art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the
entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the
romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the
lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the
wide meaning of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, except the sonnet, to
which, however, some curious parallels of thought- movement may be traced in
the Anthology, American journalism, to which no parallel can be found anywhere,
and the ballad in sham Scotch dialect, which one of our most industrious writers
has recently proposed should be made the basis for a final and unanimous effort
on the part of our second-rate poets to make themselves really romantic. Each
new school, as it appears, cries out against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty
in man that it owes its origin. The mere creative instinct does not innovate, but
reproduces.

ERNEST. You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of the creative
spirit, and I now fully accept your theory. But what of criticism outside creation? I
have a foolish habit of reading periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern
criticism is perfectly valueless.

GILBERT. So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrity weighing mediocrity
in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother–that is the spectacle
which the artistic activity of England afford s us from time to time. And yet, I feel I
am a little unfair in this matter. As a ru le, the critics–I speak, of course, of the
higher class, of those in fact who write for the sixpenny papers–are far more
cultured than the people whose work they are called upon to review. This is,
indeed, only what one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more
cultivation than creation does.

ERNEST. Really?

GILBERT. Certainly. Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires
a complete ignorance of both life and literature. The difficulty that I should fancy
the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no
style a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently reduced

14 to be the reporters of the police-court of lit erature, the chroniclers of the doings of
the habitual criminals of art. It is sometimes said of them that they do not read all
through the works they are called upon to cr iticise. They do not. Or at least they
should not. If they did so, they would bec ome confirmed misanthropes, or if I may
borrow a phrase from one of the pretty Newnham graduates, confirmed
womanthropes for the rest of their lives. Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage
and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy
in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten
minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade
through a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough–more than
enough, I should imagine. I am aware that there are many honest workers in
painting as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. They are quite
right. Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age. It brings us no new
element of pleasure. It suggests no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or
beauty. It should not be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion that it
deserves.

ERNEST. But, my dear fellow–excuse me for interrupting you–you seem to me
to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too far. For, after
all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk
about it.

GILBERT. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a
gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do
it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make
history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form of
emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that
we rise above them, or above each other–by language, which is the parent, and
not the child, of thought. Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to
us in its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be that
of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have nothing
whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don't talk about action. It is a blind thing dependent
on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is
unconscious. It is a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident,
and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the
lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

ERNEST. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball. You hold it in
your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy. You do nothing but re-write
history.

GILBERT. The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it. That is not the least of
the tasks in store for the critical spirit. When we have fully discovered the
scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise that the one person who has more
illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the
origin of his deeds nor their results. From the field in which he thought that he

15 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 aspira tions, 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 colourle ss. By its curiosity Sin increases the
experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves
us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it
is one with the higher ethics. And as for the virtues! What are the virtues? Nature,
M. Renan tells us, cares little about chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame
of the Magdalen, and not to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe
their freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a
formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.
The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much
nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It
must be merged in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply a method
by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation
of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the
history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has
its altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you. Not I.
Not any one. It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered
him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his
peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of
his harvest.

ERNEST. Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note. Let us go back to the more
gracious fields of literature. What was it you said? That it was more difficult to talk
about a thing than to do it?

GILBERT (after a pause). Yes: I believe I ventured upon that simple truth. Surely
you see now that I am right? When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes

16 he is a poet. The whole secret lies in that. It was easy enough on the sandy
plains by windy Ilion to send the notc hed arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl
against the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ash-handled spear. It was
easy for the adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian carpets for her lord, and then,
as he lay couched in the marble bath, to throw over his head the purple net, and
call to her smooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the heart that
should have broken at Aulis. For Antigone even, with Death waiting for her as her
bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the tainted air at noon, and climb the hill,
and strew with kindly earth the wretched naked corse that had no tomb. But what
of those who wrote about these things? Wh at of those who gave them reality,
and made them live for ever? Are they not greater than the men and women they
sing of? 'Hector that sweet knight is dead,' and Lucian tells us how in the dim
under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen, and marvelled that it
was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships were launched, those
beautiful mailed men laid low, those towered cities brought to dust. Yet, every
day the swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the battlements, and looks
down at the tide of war. The greybeards wonder at her loveliness, and she
stands by the side of the king. In his chamber of stained ivory lies her leman. He
is polishing his dainty armour, and combing the scarlet plume. With squire and
page, her husband passes from tent to tent. She can see his bright hair, and
hears, or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice. In the courtyard below, the
son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass. The white arms of Andromache
are around his neck. He sets his helmet on the ground, lest their babe should be
frightened. Behind the embroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles, in
perfumed raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his soul arrays
himself to go forth to the fight. From a curiously carven chest that his mother
Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lord of the Myrmidons takes out that
mystic chalice that the lip of man had never touched, and cleanses it with
brimstone, and with fresh water cools it, an d, 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, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as Homer
calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great galleys of the

17 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 li ttle hill by the city of Florence, where the
lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, of noon made so
languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim naked girl dip into the
marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute-
player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs
whom Corot set free among the silver poplar s 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 perfec tion. The image stained upon the canvas
possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of
death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong
to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess
not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of
shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by
Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the
soul in its unrest.

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

18 true than the world that common eyes look upon, and through which common
natures seek to realise their perfection. But surely, if this new world has been
made by the spirit and touch of a great ar tist, it will be a thi ng 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 wo rk 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 masterpiece 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? Dulness is always an
irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent Bestia
Trionfans 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 AEschylus, 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

19 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 repetiti ons of domestic or
public life, affect 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 va gue. 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 pr efer 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 Pr oserpina 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 cognisance 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

20 epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that
bleach or rot on their corrupted canvas es 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 Monna Lisa something
that Lionardo 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
Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the
thoughts and experience of the world had etched 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

21 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 Tannhauser, 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 ??OS ?O? ??????O?, 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 suddenly 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 me anings 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 wis hes, and see in it whatever one chooses
to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element,
makes the critic a 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 highest
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

22 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, widely different from that of the poet. To the latter belongs life
in its full and absolute 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 perfect 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 physical 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 painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching
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 make 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 re nunciations 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 reco gnition 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

23 it is that the aesthetic critic rejects t hese obvious modes of art that have but one
message to deliver, and having delivered 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 sea- shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at Venice;
just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondr ous 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.

THE CRITIC AS ARTIST–WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE
OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING

A DIALOGUE: Part II. Persons: the same. Scene: the same.

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 expr essive, but as impressive purely, and
is consequently both creative and independent, is in fact an art by itself,

24 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 interp reter, 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 an d 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 thi ng 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.

25 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 example. It
seems to me that, while the literary critic stands of course first, as having the
wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material, each of the arts has a critic,
as it were, assigned to it. The actor is a critic of the drama. He shows the poet's
work under new conditions, and by a method special to himself. He takes the
written word, and action, gesture and voice become the media of revelation. The
singer or the player on lute and viol is the critic of music. The etcher of a picture
robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a new material its
true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the relations of its masses, and so
is, in his way, a critic of it, for the critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a
form different from that of the work itself, and the employment of a new material
is a critical as well as a creative element. Sculpture, too, has its critic, who may
be either the carver of a gem, as he was in Greek days, or some painter like
Mantegna, who sought to reproduce on canvas the beauty of plastic line and the
symphonic dignity of processional bas-relief. And in the case of all these creative
critics of art it is evident that personality is an absolute essential for any real
interpretation. When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of
Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us
Beethoven absolutely–Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature,
and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality. When a
great actor plays Shakespeare we ha ve the same experience. His own
individuality becomes a vital part of the interpretation. People sometimes say that
actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare's; and this fallacy–for it is
a fallacy–is, I regret to say, repeated by that charming and graceful writer who
has lately deserted the turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of
Commons, I mean the author of Obiter Dicta . In point of fact, there is no such
thing as Shakespeare's Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a
work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many
Hamlets as there are melancholies.

ERNEST. As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?

GILBERT. Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is only to personality
that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of the two comes right interpretative
criticism.

ERNEST. The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will give no less than he
receives, and lend as much as he borrows?

26
GILBERT. He will be always showing us the work of art in some new relation to
our age. He will always be reminding us that great works of art are living things–
are, in fact, the only things that live. So much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am
certain that, as civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised,
the elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and
less interested in actual life, and WILL SEEK TO GAIN THEIR IMPRESSIONS
ALMOST ENTIRELY FROM WHAT ART HAS TOUCHED. For life is terribly
deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong
people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem
to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things
last either too long, or not long enough.

ERNEST. Poor life! Poor human life! Are you not even touched by the tears that
the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.

GILBERT. Too quickly touched by them, I fear. For when one looks back upon
the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent
moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a dream and an illusion. What
are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are
the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the
improbable things? The things that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats
us with shadows, like a puppet- master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us,
with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief
that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes
away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey windy
dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with
callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we
had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.

ERNEST. Life then is a failure?

GILBERT. From the artistic point of view, certainly. And the chief thing that
makes life a failure from this artistic point of view is the thing that lends to life its
sordid security, the fact that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion.
How different it is in the world of Art! On a shelf of the bookcase behind you
stands the Divine Comedy, and I know that, if I open it at a certain place, I shall
be filled with a fierce hatred of some one who has never wronged me, or stirred
by a great love for some one whom I shall never see. There is no mood or
passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her secret
can settle beforehand what our experiences are going to be. We can choose our
day and select our hour. We can say to ourselves, 'To- morrow, at dawn, we shall
walk with grave Virgil through the valley of the shadow of death,' and lo! the dawn
finds us in the obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass
through the gate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the
horror of another world. The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces and their

27 cowls of gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless winds that drive them, the carnal look
at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the
rain. We break the withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies,
and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds with red blood before us, and cries
aloud with bitter cries. Out of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when
from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs
over the torture of that bed becomes ou rs for a moment. Through the dim purple
air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit
of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the semblance of
a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false coin. He bids us
listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he
dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channels
gush down the green Casentine hills. Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, mocks at
him. He smites him in the face, and they wrangle. We are fascinated by their
shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by
giants where great Nimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in store for us, and
we go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart. We traverse the
marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat through the slimy waves. He
calls to us, and we reject him. When we hear the voice of his agony we are glad,
and Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our scorn. We tread upon the cold
crystal of Cocytus, in which traitors sti ck like straws in glass. Our foot strikes
against the head of Bocca. He will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in
handfuls from the screaming skull. Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his
face that he may weep a little. We pledge our word to him, and when he has
uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from
him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who more base than he who has
mercy for the condemned of God? In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man who
sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew 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

28 larger than their wont, and the song of the kings grows faint, and at length we
reach the seven trees of gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise. In a griffin-
drawn chariot appears one whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiled in
white, and mantled in green, and robed in a vesture that is coloured like live fire.
The ancient flame wakes within us. Our blood quickens through terrible pulses.
We recognise her. It is Beatrice, the woman we have worshipped. The ice
congealed about our heart melts. Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we
bow our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned. When we
have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of the fountain of Lethe
and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress of our soul raises us to the
Paradise of Heaven. Out of that eternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda
Donati leans to us. Her beauty troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing
that falls through water, she passes away, we gaze after her with wistful eyes.
The sweet planet of Venus is full of lovers. Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the lady
of Sordello's heart, is there, and Folco, the passionate singer of Provence, who in
sorrow for Azalais forsook the world, and the Canaanitish harlot whose soul was
the first that Christ redeemed. Joachim of Flora stands in the sun, and, in the
sun, Aquinas recounts the story of St. Francis and Bonaventure the story of St.
Dominic. Through the burning rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida approaches. He tells
us of the arrow that is shot from the bow of exile, and how salt tastes the bread of
another, and how steep are the stairs in the house of a stranger. In Saturn the
soul sings not, and even she who guides us dare not smile. On a ladder of gold
the flames rise and fall. At last, we see the pageant of the Mystical Rose.
Beatrice fixes her eyes upon the face of God to turn them not again. The beatific
vision is granted to us; we know the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.

Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses and make ourselves one
with the great Florentine, kneel at the same altar with him, and share his rapture
and his scorn. And if we grow tired of an antique time, and desire to realise our
own age in all its weariness and sin, are there not books that can make us live
more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?
Close to your hand lies a little volume, bound in some Nile-green skin that has
been powdered with gilded nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory. It is the
book that Gautier loved, it is Baudelaire's masterpiece. Open it at that sad
madrigal that begins

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

and you will find yourself worshipping sorr ow as you have never worshipped joy.
Pass on to the poem on the man who tortures himself, let its subtle music steal
into your brain and colour your thoughts, and you will become for a moment what
he was who wrote it; nay, not for a moment only, but for many barren moonlit
nights and sunless sterile days will a despair that is not your own make its
dwelling within you, and the misery of another gnaw your heart away. Read the
whole book, suffer it to tell even one of it s secrets to your soul, and your soul will

29 grow eager to know mo re, and will f eed 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 know n. 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 sl eep-laden poppy petals were her lips, softer than violets
and as scented. The flame-like crocus sprang from the grass to look at her. For
her the slim narcissus stored the cool rain; and for her the anemones forgot the
Sicilian winds that wooed them. And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus
was as fair as she was.

It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion. We sicken with the same
maladies as the poets, and the singer lends us his pain. Dead lips have their
message for us, and hearts that have fallen to dust can communicate their joy.
We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine, and we follow Manon Lescaut over
the whole world. Ours is the love-madness of the Tyrian, and the terror of
Orestes is ours also. There is no passion that we cannot feel, no pleasure that
we may not gratify, and we can choose the time of our initiation and the time of
our freedom also. Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our
experience. It is a thing narrowed by circ umstances, incoherent in its utterance,
and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing
that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a
price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is
monstrous and infinite.

ERNEST. Must we go, then, to Art for everything?

GILBERT. For everything. Because Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed
at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to
awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter.
In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a
lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates,
if I may quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks. It is through Art,
and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through
Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
This results not merely from the fact that nothing that one can imagine is worth
doing, and that one can imagine everything, but from the subtle law that
emotional forces, like the forces of the ph ysical sphere, are limited in extent and
energy. One can feel so much, and no more. And how can it matter with what

30 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

31 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 citta divina is colourless, and the fruitio Dei
without meaning. Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and religious
ecstasy is out of date. The world through which the Academic philosopher
becomes 'the spectator of all time and of all existence' is not really an ideal world,
but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter it, we starve amidst the chill
mathematics of thought. The courts of the city of God are not open to us now. Its
gates are guarded by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that
in our nature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed. They have
exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the scepticism of
which they were afraid. Had they put it into words, it might not live within us as
thought. No, Ernest, no. We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be
learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic
leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater su ggests 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
Bohme, 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 manife stations, 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 preceded it and that has contributed to its making.
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others. There must be
no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one
cannot make alive. Is this impossible? I think not. By revealing to us the absolute
mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self- imposed and
trammelling burden of moral responsibility, th e scientific principle of Heredity has
become, as it were, the warrant for the co ntemplative 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.

32
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 impossi ble 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 exil ed from their air. It can teach us how
to escape from our experience, and to r ealise 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 myri ad generations, and to whom no form of
thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure? And who the true man of culture,
if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious rejection has made instinct self-
conscious and intelligent, and can separate the work that has distinction from the
work that has it not, and so by contact and comparison makes himself master of
the secrets of style and school, and understands their meanings, and listens to
their voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real
root, as it is the real flower, of the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual
clarity, and, having learned 'the best that is known and thought in the world,'
lives–it is not fanciful to say so–with those who are the Immortals.

33
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 tragicomedy of the world t hat 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 [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought we can look out at
the world. Calm, and self-centred, 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 ethics. The aim of art is simply to
create a mood. Is such a mode of life unpractical? Ah! it is not so easy to be
unpractical as the ignorant Philistine imagines. It were well for England if it were
so. There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as this
country of ours. With us, Thought is degraded by its constant association with
practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence, noisy
politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by
the sufferings of that unimportant section of the community among whom he has
cast his lot, can seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual
judgment about any one thing? Each of the professions means a prejudice. The
necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the
overworked, and the under- educated; the age in which people are so industrious
that they become absolutely stupid. And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot
help saying that such people deserve their doom. The sure way of knowing
nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

ERNEST. A charming doctrine, Gilbert.

GILBERT. I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minor merit of being
true. That the desire to do good to others produces a plentiful crop of prigs is the
least of the evils of which it is the cause. The prig is a very interesting
psychological study, and though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive,
still to have a pose at all is something. It is a formal recognition of the importance
of treating life from a definite and reasoned standpoint. That Humanitarian

34 Sympathy wars against Nature, by securing the survival of the failure, may make
the man of science loathe its facile virtues. The political economist may cry out
against it for putting the improvident on the same level as the provident, and so
robbing life of the strongest, because most sordid, incentive to industry. But, in
the eyes of the thinker, the real harm that emotional sympathy does is that it
limits knowledge, and so prevents us from solving any single social problem. We
are trying at present to stave off the coming crisis, the coming revolution as my
friends the Fabianists call it, by means of doles and alms. Well, when the
revolution or crisis arrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall know
nothing. And so, Ernest, let us not be de ceived. 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 i nevitable 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

35 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 di fficult 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 abs ence 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 offe nsive 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

36 the use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and more
perfect. Well, you seemed to be a little sceptical about the theory. But perhaps I
wronged you?

ERNEST. I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit that I feel very
strongly that such work as you describe the critic producing–and creative such
work must undoubtedly be admitted to be–is, of necessity, purely subjective,
whereas the greatest work is objective always, objective and impersonal.

GILBERT. The difference between objective and subjective work is one of
external form merely. It is accidental, not essential. All artistic creation is
absolutely subjective. The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said
himself, but a mood of his own mind; and those great figures of Greek or English
drama that seem to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from
the poets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply
the poets themselves, not as they thought they were, but as they thought they
were not; and by such thinking came in strange manner, though but for a
moment, really so to be. For out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there
be in creation what in the creator was not. Nay, I would say that the more
objective a creation appears to be, the more subjective it really is. Shakespeare
might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or
seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open
square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion. They
were elements of his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses that stirred
so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer them to realise
their energy, not on the lower plane of actual life, where they would have been
trammelled and constrained and so made imperfect, but on that imaginative
plane of art where Love can indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one
can stab the eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave,
and make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one's father's spirit, beneath
the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete steel from misty wall to wall.
Action being limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed;
and, just as it is because he did nothing that he has been able to achieve
everything, so it is because he never speaks to us of himself in his plays that his
plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament
far more completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets, even, in which
he bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart. Yes, the objective form is
the most subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he talks in his own
person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

ERNEST. The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form, will necessarily be
less able fully to express himself than the artist, who has always at his disposal
the forms that are impersonal and objective.

GILBERT. Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if he recognises that each
mode of criticism is, in its highest development, simply a mood, and that we are

37 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, explained 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 discourse on letters beneath the
Penshurst oaks; or adopt narration, as Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose
Imaginary Portraits–is not that the title of the book?–presents to us, under the
fanciful guise of fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of criticism, one on the
painter Watteau, another on the philosophy of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan
elements of the early Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the most
suggestive, on the source of that Aufklarung, that enlightening which dawned on
Germany in the last century, and to which our own culture owes so great a debt.
Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and
from Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom
Carlyle took such delight, the creative critics of the world have always employed,
can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression. By its
means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and
reality to every mood. By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of
view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this
manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues
that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really
illumine the idea more completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give
a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the
delicate charm of chance.

ERNEST. By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and convert
him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.

38 GILBERT. Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from
one's own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what
is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In
matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last
mood. And you see now, Ernest, that the critic has at his disposal as many
objective forms of expression as the artist has. Ruskin put his criticism into
imaginative prose, and is superb in his changes and contradictions; and
Browning put his into blank verse and made painter and poet yield us their
secret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater fiction, and Rossetti
translated into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione and the design of Ingres,
and his own design and colour also, feeling, with the instinct of one who had
many modes of utterance; that the ultimate art is literature, and the finest and
fullest medium that of words.

ERNEST. Well, now that you have settled that the critic has at his disposal all
objective forms, I wish you would tell me what are the qualities that should
characterise the true critic.

GILBERT. What would you say they were?

ERNEST. Well, I should say that a critic should above all things be fair.

GILBERT. Ah! not fair. A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It
is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiassed
opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed opinion is always
absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question, is a man who
sees absolutely nothing at all. Art is a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is
inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed, and, depending
upon fine moods and exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of
a scientific formula or a theological dogma. It is to the soul that Art speaks, and
the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of the body. One
should, of course, have no prejudices; but, as a great Frenchman remarked a
hundred years ago, it is one's business in such matters to have preferences, and
when one has preferences one ceases to be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can
equally and impartially admire all schools of Art. No; fairness is not one of the
qualities of the true critic. It is not even a condition of criticism. Each form of Art
with which we come in contact dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of
every other form. We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in
question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret. For the time, we must
think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed.

ERNEST. The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will he not?

GILBERT. Rational? There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest. One is to dislike
it. The other, to like it rationally. For Art, as Plato saw, and not without regret,

39 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, i ndeed, 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 lim ited to any settled custom of thought
or stereotyped mode of looking at things. He will realise himself in many forms,
and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and
fresh points of view. Through constant change, and through constant change
alone, he will find his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his own
opinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? The essence of
thought, as the essence of life, is growth. You must not be frightened by word,
Ernest. What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply
our personalities.

ERNEST. I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.

GILBERT. Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity and fairness,
were, if not actually moral, at least on the borderland of morals, and the first
condition of criticism is that the critic should be able to recognise that the sphere
of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. When they
are confused, Chaos has come again. They are too often confused in England
now, and though our modern Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by
means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a
moment. It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find
expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern
journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with
the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of
contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really
are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what
things are requisite for culture, and what are not. But it should not allow poor
Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art. When it does this it stultifies itself. And
yet Tartuffe's articles and Chadband's notes do this good, at least. They serve to
show how extremely limited is the area over which ethics, and ethical
considerations, can claim to exercise infl uence. Science is out of the reach of
morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of
morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-
changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres. However, let

40 these mouthing Puritans pass; they have their comic side. Who can help
laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-
matter at the disposal of the artist? Some limitation might well, and will soon, I
hope, be placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers. For they
give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading
avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the
illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely
no interest whatsoever. But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet
transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of
awe, and shows their colour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical
import also, and builds out of them a world more real than reality itself, and of
loftier and more noble import–who shall set limits to him? Not the apostles of that
new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity 'writ large.' Not the apostles of that
new Puritanism, which is but the whine of the hypocrite, and is both writ and
spoken badly. The mere suggestion is ri diculous. 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 r equisite for the critic–a temperament
exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty
gives us. Under what conditions, and by what means, this temperament is
engendered in race or individual, we will not discuss at present. 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. Insensibly, 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 hi m such a temperament 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. Ultimately, in its due course, this taste is to
become critical and self-conscious, 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 nobl e, he will rightly
blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to

41 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 nee d 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 temperament, the cultivation of
taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dulness 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 snake-spotted 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, s wifter 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 contemplate, 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

42 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 monum ent,' 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 gri tty 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

43 certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what
is to fill it 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 has 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, Pl ato 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 fi nd 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 t he individual, but with the age, which he will seek to
wake into consciousness, and to make re sponsive, creating in it new desires and

44 appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods. The actual art of
to-day will occupy him less t han the art of to-morrow, far less than the art of
yesterday, and as for this or that pers on 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 re aches the age of forty, or becomes
a Royal Academician, or is elected a member of the Athenaeum Club, or is
recognised as a popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at suburban
railway stations, one may have the amusemen t 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 pr imarily 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 actuality, was deaf to
Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great
passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate 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 sphe re that belongs to others. It is exactly
because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it.

45
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 q uestions 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 ex hausted 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 hi ghways 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 wo rkings. 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

46 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 larg er 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 fo rm 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

47 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 process 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
market-place 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 blood-stained 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 cosm opolitan, 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-prejudices. 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 thin k, the starting point for the cosmopolitanism of the
future. Criticism will annihilate race-prejudi ces, 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 fa scination. When it is looked upon as

48 vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change will of co urse be slow, and people
will not be conscious of it. They will not say 'We will not war against France
because her prose is perfec t,' 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 respectability. 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

49 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 su ppose, 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 contented '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! Piccadilly 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.