Intentions
barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, 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 colourless. 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 he is a poet. The whole secret lies in that.
It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy Ilion to send the notched
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? What 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, and, 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, οινοψ πόντος, as
Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great
galleys of the 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 little 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 poplars 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
perfection. 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 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 artist, it will be a thing 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 work 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 Æschylus, 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,