Intentions
Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid
perils of actual existence. This results not merely from the fact that
nothing that one can imagine is worth doing, and that one can imagine
everything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, like the
forces of the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy. One can
feel so much, and no more. And how can it matter with what pleasure life
tries to tempt one, or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one’s
soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed
one has found the true secret of joy, and wept away one’s tears over
their deaths who, like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio, can never
die?
ERNEST. Stop a moment. It seems to me that in everything that you have
said there is something radically immoral.
GILBERT. All art is immoral.
ERNEST. All art?
GILBERT. Yes. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art,
and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that
practical organisation of life that we call society. Society, which is
the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of
human energy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy
stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, of each of its
citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour to the
common weal, and toil and travail that the day’s work may be done.
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The
beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its
eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this
dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one
at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public,
and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas
‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilised
being should ever be allowed to whisper to another. They mean well, no
doubt, these honest beaming folk. Perhaps that is the reason why they
are so excessively tedious. But some one should teach them that while,
in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any
citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the
proper occupation of man.
ERNEST. Contemplation?
GILBERT. Contemplation. I said to you some time ago that it was far
more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. Let me say to you
now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world,
the most difficult and the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion
for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy. To Aristotle, with his
passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also. It was
to this that the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of
mediæval days.
ERNEST. We exist, then, to do nothing?
GILBERT. It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited
and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at
ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. But we who are
born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too
critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite
pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life
itself. To us the _città divina_ is colourless, and the _fruitio Dei_
without meaning. Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and
religious ecstasy is out of date. The world through which the Academic
philosopher becomes ‘the spectator of all time and of all existence’ is
not really an ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we
enter it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts
of the city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by
Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our nature
is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed. They have
exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the
scepticism of which they were afraid. Had they put it into words, it
might not live within us as thought. No, Ernest, no. We cannot go back
to the saint. There is far more to be learned from the sinner. We
cannot go back to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray. Who,
as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single
rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high?
What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision
of Böhme, the monstrous Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg’s
blinded eyes? Such things are less than the yellow trumpet of one
daffodil of the field, far less than the meanest of the visible arts,
for, just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind
expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the
lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike.
To the æsthetic temperament the vague is always repellent. The Greeks
were a nation of artists, because they were spared the sense of the
infinite. Like Aristotle, like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire
the concrete, and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.
ERNEST. What then do you propose?
GILBERT. It seems to me that with the development of the critical spirit
we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective
life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true
meaning of the word modernity. For he to whom the present is the only
thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To
realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has
preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything
about oneself one must know all about others. There must be no mood with
which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make
alive. Is this impossible? I think not. By revealing to us the
absolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self-imposed
and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the scientific principle
of Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative
life. It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to
act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written
upon the wall the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is
within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.
It is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of the Fates, and the
most terrible. It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know.
And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has robbed
energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the subjective
sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow,
with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange temperaments and subtle
susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference,
complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other,
and passions that war against themselves. And so, it is not our own life
that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within
us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual,
created for our service, and entering into us for our joy. It is
something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has
made its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of
curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter. It
fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we
cannot gain. One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us. It can lead
us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of
familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the
perfection of our development. It can help us to leave the age in which
we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled
from their air. It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and
to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are. The
pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain. Theocritus
blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd. In
the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armour
of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen. We have whispered the
secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained
raiment of Villon have put our shame into song. We can see the dawn
through Shelley’s eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows
amorous of our youth. Ours is the anguish of Atys, and ours the weak
rage and noble sorrows of the Dane. Do you think that it is the
imagination that enables us to live these countless lives? Yes: it is
the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity. It is
simply concentrated race-experience.
ERNEST. But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?
GILBERT. The culture that this transmission of racial experiences makes
possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may
be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears
within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations,
and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure?
And who the true man of culture, if not he who by fine scholarship and
fastidious rejection has made instinct self-conscious and intelligent,
and can separate the work that has distinction from the work that has it
not, and so by contact and comparison makes himself master of the secrets
of style and school, and understands their meanings, and listens to their
voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the
real root, as it is the real flower, of the intellectual life, and thus
attains to intellectual clarity, and, having learned ‘the best that is
known and thought in the world,’ lives—it is not fanciful to say so—with
those who are the Immortals.
Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not
_doing_ but _being_, and not _being_ merely, but _becoming_—that is what
the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: either brooding
over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus
fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragicomedy of
the world that they have made. We, too, might live like them, and set
ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man
and nature afford. We might make ourselves spiritual by detaching
ourselves from action, and become perfect by the rejection of energy. It
has often seemed to me that Browning felt something of this. Shakespeare
hurls Hamlet into active life, and makes him realise his mission by
effort. Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised
his mission by thought. Incident and event were to him unreal or
unmeaning. He made the soul the protagonist of life’s tragedy, and
looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at any
rate, the ΒΙΟΣ ΘΕΩΡΗΤΙΚΟΣ is the true ideal. From the high tower of
Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and
complete, the æsthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a
venture can pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is
safe. He has discovered how to live.
Is such a mode of life immoral? Yes: all the arts are immoral, except
those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite to
action of evil or of good. For action of every kind belongs to the
sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply to create a mood. Is such a
mode of life unpractical? Ah! it is not so easy to be unpractical as the