Intentions
or censuring Cæsar Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets
of a play. They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they
do not harm us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We have
nothing to fear from them. They have passed into the sphere of art and
science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or
disapproval. And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb’s friend. At
present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be treated in that
fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming
studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens
of Mr. John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee,
and other distinguished writers. However, Art has not forgotten him. He
is the hero of Dickens’s _Hunted Down_, the Varney of Bulwer’s
_Lucretia_; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some
homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison.’ To be
suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE
IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING
_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 personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and
Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné. Whenever we come across it, and,
strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not
easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having
confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant
nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the
green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows
the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given
it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme
scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his
shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter
very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or
a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own
secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to
silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented—if that
can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual
problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I
think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that troubled
soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely church at
Littlemore, where ‘the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are
few,’ will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow
snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that
gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower’s sure recurrence a prophecy
that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his days—a
prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be
fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible. Poor, silly, conceited
Mr. Secretary Pepys 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 _littérateurs_. 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
Dvorák? Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorák? He writes passionate,
curiously-coloured things.
ERNEST. No; I don’t want music just at present. It is far too
indefinite. Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner last
night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect, she
insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in the German
language. Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad to say that it does
not sound in the smallest degree like German. There are forms of
patriotism that are really quite degrading. No; Gilbert, don’t play any
more. Turn round and talk to me. Talk to me till the white-horned day
comes into the room. There is something in your voice that is wonderful.
GILBERT (_rising from the piano_). I am not in a mood for talking
to-night. 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. 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