Intentions
And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate
the critic. He will turn from them to such works as make him brood and
dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion,
and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider
world. It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that
he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of
most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when
the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and
becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than
itself. This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art. Music
can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of
the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders
imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because
by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation
of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a
realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is
through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and
so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty
of reason, but to the æsthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both
reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both
to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking
whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very
complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the
ultimate impression itself. You see, then, how it is that the æsthetic
critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to
deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks
rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their
imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation
final. Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will
have to the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such
resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the painter
of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between
Nature and the work of the decorative artist. Just as on the flowerless
carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to look
on, though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the
pearl and purple of the sea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at
Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is
made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock’s tail,
though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of
whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows
us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty,
and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the
problem of Art’s unity.
But I see it is time for supper. After we have discussed some Chambertin
and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of the critic
considered in the light of the interpreter.
ERNEST. Ah! you admit, then, that the critic may occasionally be allowed
to see the object as in itself it really is.
GILBERT. I am not quite sure. Perhaps I may admit it after supper.
There is a subtle influence in supper.
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE
OF DISCUSSING EVERYTHING
_A DIALOGUE_: _Part II._ _Persons_: _the same_.
_Scene_: _the same_.
ERNEST. The ortolans were delightful, and the Chambertin perfect, and
now let us return to the point at issue.
GILBERT. Ah! don’t let us do that. Conversation should touch
everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing. Let us talk about
_Moral Indignation_, _its Cause and Cure_, a subject on which I think of
writing: or about _The Survival of Thersites_, as shown by the English
comic papers; or about any topic that may turn up.
ERNEST. No; I want to discuss the critic and criticism. You have told
me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as expressive, but as
impressive purely, and is consequently both creative and independent, is
in fact an art by itself, occupying the same relation to creative work
that creative work does to the visible world of form and colour, or the
unseen world of passion and of thought. Well, now, tell me, will not the
critic be sometimes a real interpreter?
GILBERT. Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses. He can
pass from his synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, to an
analysis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I
hold it to be, there are many delightful things to be said and done. Yet
his object will not always be to explain the work of art. He may seek
rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker,
that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike.
Ordinary people are ‘terribly at ease in Zion.’ They propose to walk arm
in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, ‘Why
should we read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read
the plays and the poems. That is enough.’ But an appreciation of Milton
is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate
scholarship. And he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must
understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance
and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he
must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between
the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school
of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and
Marlowe’s greater son; he must know the materials that were at
Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the
conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the
literary criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons;
he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed
verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the
connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of
the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan
London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true
position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.
The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as
a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by
one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will
look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify,
and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of
men.
And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens. The critic will indeed be
an interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the sense of one who
simply repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips
to say. For, just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign
nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life
that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by
intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the
personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality
enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes,
the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.
ERNEST. I would have said that personality would have been a disturbing
element.
GILBERT. No; it is an element of revelation. If you wish to understand
others you must intensify your own individualism.
ERNEST. What, then, is the result?
GILBERT. I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by definite
example. It seems to me that, while the literary critic stands of course
first, as having the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material,
each of the arts has a critic, as it were, assigned to it. The actor is
a critic of the drama. He shows the poet’s work under new conditions,
and by a method special to himself. He takes the written word, and
action, gesture and voice become the media of revelation. The singer or
the player on lute and viol is the critic of music. The etcher of a
picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of
a new material its true colour-quality, its tones and values, and the
relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the
critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from
that of the work itself, and the employment of a new material is a
critical as well as a creative element. Sculpture, too, has its critic,
who may be either the carver of a gem, as he was in Greek days, or some
painter like Mantegna, who sought to reproduce on canvas the beauty of
plastic line and the symphonic dignity of processional bas-relief. And
in the case of all these creative critics of art it is evident that
personality is an absolute essential for any real interpretation. When
Rubinstein plays to us the _Sonata Appassionata_ of Beethoven, he gives
us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven
absolutely—Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and
made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality. When a
great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience. His own
individuality becomes a vital part of the interpretation. People
sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not
Shakespeare’s; and this fallacy—for it is a fallacy—is, I regret to say,
repeated by that charming and graceful writer who has lately deserted the
turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the
author of _Obiter Dicta_. In point of fact, there is no such thing as
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a
work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There
are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.
ERNEST. As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?
GILBERT. Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is only to
personality that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of the two
comes right interpretative criticism.
ERNEST. The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will give no
less than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows?
GILBERT. He will be always showing us the work of art in some new
relation to our age. He will always be reminding us that great works of
art are living things—are, in fact, the only things that live. So much,
indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that, as civilisation
progresses and we become more highly organised, the elect spirits of each
age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less
interested in actual life, and _will seek to gain their impressions
almost entirely from what Art has touched_. For life is terribly
deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the
wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its
tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one
approaches it. Things last either too long, or not long enough.
ERNEST. Poor life! Poor human life! Are you not even touched by the
tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.
GILBERT. Too quickly touched by them, I fear. For when one looks back
upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled