Intentions
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 æsthetic 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 _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 pæons
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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 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 æsthetic 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 κάθαρσις is, as Goethe saw, essentially
æsthetic, 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 κάθαρσις
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 æsthetic criticism it is. Who
indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so well? After reading it,
one does not wonder any longer that Alexandria devoted itself so largely
to art-criticism, and that we find the artistic temperaments of the day
investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great
Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon,
that sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or
the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual
life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value
of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper
subject-matter for the artist. Indeed, I fear that the inartistic
temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature
and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such
accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or
from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own,
fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they
have been robbed. And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks
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 archæologists, and all the rest of it. Why,
even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought their
dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid them very
handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices. Whatever, in fact, is
modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is
due to mediævalism. It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system
of art-criticism, and how fine their critical instinct was, may be seen
from the fact that the material they criticised with most care was, as I
have already said, language. For the material that painter or sculptor
uses is meagre in comparison with that of words. Words have not merely
music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any
that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and
plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in
marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs
also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticised nothing but
language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world.
To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of
all the arts.
But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud. Out
of a tawny mane 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 μονόχρονος ηδονή 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 _attachés_ 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.