Intentions
so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified
for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already
added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the
purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than
creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself,
and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would
put it, in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never
trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations
of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of
domestic or public life, affect it ever. One may appeal from fiction
unto fact. But from the soul there is no appeal.
ERNEST. From the soul?
GILBERT. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism really
is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history,
as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than
philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not
vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not
with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s
physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods
and imaginative passions of the mind. I am always amused by the silly
vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that
the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate
work. The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it
is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his
fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will
prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will
turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though
the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to
chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted,
books written, and marble hewn into form.
ERNEST. I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.
GILBERT. Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all
revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her
Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the
Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as
in itself it really is. But this is a very serious error, and takes no
cognisance of Criticism’s most perfect form, which is in its essence
purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret
of another. For the highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive
but as impressive purely.
ERNEST. But is that really so?
GILBERT. Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on
Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic
prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so
rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best,
in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art
as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted
canvases in England’s Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at
times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on
account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in
those long-cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though
through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual
and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,
with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think,
even as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares whether Mr.
Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo
never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely the slave of an
archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool
galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange
figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in
some faint light under sea,’ I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than the
rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many
times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep
seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange
webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of
Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her
but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with
which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and
the hands.’ And I say to my friend, ‘The presence that thus so strangely
rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand
years man had come to desire’; and he answers me, ‘Hers is the head upon
which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little
weary.’
And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and
reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the
music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that
flute-player’s music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle
and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had
any one told him of this picture that ‘all the thoughts and experience of
the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to
refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the
lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition
and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias?’ He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none
of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious
colour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that
the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It
treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It
does not confine itself—let us at least suppose so for the moment—to
discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.
And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing
is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in
his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the
beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and
sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital
portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of
what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The longer I
study, Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts
is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may be
marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention
on the part of the artist. For when the work is finished it has, as it
were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other
than that which was put into its lips to say. Sometimes, when I listen
to the overture to _Tannhäuser_, I seem indeed to see that comely knight
treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass, and to hear the voice of
Venus calling to him from the caverned hill. But at other times it
speaks to me of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my
own life, or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of
loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions that
man has not known, and so has sought for. To-night it may fill one with
that ΕΡΩΣ ΤΩΝ ΑΔΥΝΑΤΩΝ, that _Amour de l’Impossible_, which falls like a
madness on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm, so
that they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in
the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain, grow faint and swoon or
stumble. To-morrow, like the music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us,
the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it may perform the office of a
physician, and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that
is wounded, and ‘bring the soul into harmony with all right things.’ And
what is true about music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as many
meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty
reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us
itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
ERNEST. But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?
GILBERT. It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the
individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form
which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood
incompletely.
ERNEST. The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and
the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really
is not; that is your theory, I believe?
GILBERT. Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art is
simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily
bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. The one
characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever
one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty,
that gives to creation its universal and æsthetic element, makes the
critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things
which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or
painted the panel or graved the gem.
It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the
highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures
that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the
anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature
or history. But this is not so. Indeed, pictures of this kind are far
too intelligible. As a class, they rank with illustrations, and, even
considered from this point of view are failures, as they do not stir the
imagination, but set definite bounds to it. For the domain of the
painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of the
poet. To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not
merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to
also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of
colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought.
The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the
body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only through
conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical
equivalents that he can deal with psychology. And how inadequately does
he do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban of the Moor for the
noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of
Lear! Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly
English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the
domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and
striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is
invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a
natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded the
invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking
at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of
the same subject. They have always done so and will always do so. But
while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must
be pictorial always. For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in
nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen.