Intentions
monstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the
strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no
Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory
horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh. Yet, he
was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from
it men and women that live. He is the most Shakespearian creature since
Shakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could
stammer through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, and
speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the
pageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks
still burning from some girl’s hot kiss. There, stands dread Saul with
the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred Tresham is
there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben
Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed’s. The spawn of Setebos gibbers in
the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima’s haggard
face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself. Pale as the white
satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous
eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as
he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go
down. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a
poet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer of fiction,
as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.
His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not
answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what
more should an artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator
of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet. Had he been
articulate, he might have sat beside him. The only man who can touch the
hem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and
so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
ERNEST. There is something in what you say, but there is not everything
in what you say. In many points you are unjust.
GILBERT. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. But let us
return to the particular point at issue. What was it that you said?
ERNEST. Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no
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,
δια λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες αβρως αιθέρος, 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 Phædrus 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 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;
from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon, to
the king whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon
oil-bright shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans. Men and women, with
pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passed before him. He watched them,
and their secret became his. Through form and colour he re-created a
world.
All subtle arts belonged to him also. He held the gem against the
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 Phædra 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. ΚΑΛΟΣ
ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ or ΚΑΛΟΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΗΣ 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 Mænads 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, there was no Higginbotham. By the
Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing
provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth.
By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the
industrious prattle of what they do not understand. On the reed-grown
banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous 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 Greeks had no
art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It would be more just to
say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.
ERNEST. Really?
GILBERT. Yes, a nation of art-critics. But I don’t wish to destroy the
delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the relation of the
Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his age. To give an
accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper
occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of
parts and culture. Still less do I desire to talk learnedly. Learned
conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession
of the mentally unemployed. And, as for what is called improving
conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more
foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the
criminal classes. No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by
Dvorák. The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, and the
heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep. Don’t let us
discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious of the fact that we
are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live
in terror of not being misunderstood. Don’t degrade me into the position
of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but
it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth
knowing can be taught. Through the parted curtains of the window I see
the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars
cluster round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out
into the night. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear
the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?
ERNEST. You are horribly wilful. I insist on your discussing this
matter with me. You have said that the Greeks were a nation of
art-critics. What art-criticism have they left us?
GILBERT. My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism
had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none
the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they
invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of
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.