Intentions
GILBERT. The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary. Without the
critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the
name. You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and
delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us,
and gives to it a momentary perfection. Well, that spirit of choice,
that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of
its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this
critical faculty can create anything at all in art. Arnold’s definition
of literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form, but
it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the critical element
in all creative work.
ERNEST. I should have said that great artists work unconsciously, that
they were ‘wiser than they knew,’ as, I think, Emerson remarks somewhere.
GILBERT. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work is
self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At
least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to
sing. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are sometimes apt to
think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler,
fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early
poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical
quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song.
The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are
bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed
the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to
sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to
other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our
historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so
far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most
natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most
self-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 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 affords us from
time to time. And yet, I feel I am a little unfair in this matter. As a
rule, the critics—I speak, of course, of the higher class, of those in
fact who write for the sixpenny papers—are far more cultured than the
people whose work they are called upon to review. This is, indeed, only
what one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation
than creation does.
ERNEST. Really?
GILBERT. Certainly. Anybody can write a three-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 to be the
reporters of the police-court of literature, 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
criticise. They do not. Or at least they should not. If they did so,
they would become confirmed misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase
from one of the pretty Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the
rest of their lives. Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and
quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be
perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or
worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the
instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes
it, and that is quite enough—more than enough, I should imagine. I am
aware that there are many honest workers in painting as well as in
literature who object to criticism entirely. They are quite right.
Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age. It brings us
no new element of pleasure. It suggests no fresh departure of thought,
or passion, or beauty. It should not be spoken of. It should be left to
the oblivion that it deserves.
ERNEST. But, my dear fellow—excuse me for interrupting you—you seem to
me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too
far. For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult
to do a thing than to talk about it.
GILBERT. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at
all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to
talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is
of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write
it. There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share
with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them,
or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child,
of thought. Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in
its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be
that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have
nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don’t talk about action. It is a
blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of
whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incomplete in its essence,
because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always
at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is
the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
ERNEST. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball. You
hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy. You do
nothing but 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 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