Intentions
ignorant Philistine imagines. It were well for England if it were so.
There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as
this country of ours. With us, Thought is degraded by its constant
association with practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of
actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor
narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant
section of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously
claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any
one thing? Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for
a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the
overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so
industrious that they become absolutely stupid. And, harsh though it may
sound, I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom. The
sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.
ERNEST. A charming doctrine, Gilbert.
GILBERT. I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minor merit
of being true. That the desire to do good to others produces a plentiful
crop of prigs is the least of the evils of which it is the cause. The
prig is a very interesting psychological study, and though of all poses a
moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is
something. It is a formal recognition of the importance of treating life
from a definite and reasoned standpoint. That Humanitarian Sympathy wars
against Nature, by securing the survival of the failure, may make the man
of science loathe its facile virtues. The political economist may cry
out against it for putting the improvident on the same level as the
provident, and so robbing life of the strongest, because most sordid,
incentive to industry. But, in the eyes of the thinker, the real harm
that emotional sympathy does is that it limits knowledge, and so prevents
us from solving any single social problem. We are trying at present to
stave off the coming crisis, the coming revolution as my friends the
Fabianists call it, by means of doles and alms. Well, when the
revolution or crisis arrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall
know nothing. And so, Ernest, let us not be deceived. England will
never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There is
more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for
so fair a land. What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the
moment, and think beyond the day. Those who try to lead the people can
only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying
in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.
But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere joy of beholding,
and contemplating for the sake of contemplation, there is something that
is egotistic. If you think so, do not say so. It takes a thoroughly
selfish age, like our own, to deify self-sacrifice. It takes a
thoroughly grasping age, such as that in which we live, to set above the
fine intellectual virtues, those shallow and emotional virtues that are
an immediate practical benefit to itself. They miss their aim, too,
these philanthropists and sentimentalists of our day, who are always
chattering to one about one’s duty to one’s neighbour. For the
development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and
where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard
is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost. If you meet at dinner
a man who has spent his life in educating himself—a rare type in our
time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met with—you rise from
table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched
and sanctified your days. But oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man
who has spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful
experience that is! How appalling is that ignorance which is the
inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions! How limited
in range the creature’s mind proves to be! How it wearies us, and must
weary himself, with its endless repetitions and sickly reiteration! How
lacking it is in any element of intellectual growth! In what a vicious
circle it always moves!
ERNEST. You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert. Have you had this
dreadful experience, as you call it, lately?
GILBERT. Few of us escape it. People say that the schoolmaster is
abroad. I wish to goodness he were. But the type of which, after all,
he is only one, and certainly the least important, of the
representatives, seems to me to be really dominating our lives; and just
as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the
nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in
trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate
himself. No, Ernest, self-culture is the true ideal of man. Goethe saw
it, and the immediate debt that we owe to Goethe is greater than the debt
we owe to any man since Greek days. The Greeks saw it, and have left us,
as their legacy to modern thought, the conception of the contemplative
life as well as the critical method by which alone can that life be truly
realised. It was the one thing that made the Renaissance great, and gave
us Humanism. It is the one thing that could make our own age great also;
for the real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or
unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes,
or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the
fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.
I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment,
still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years to come, unpopular
with the crowd. It is so easy for people to have sympathy with
suffering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.
Indeed, so little do ordinary people understand what thought really is,
that they seem to imagine that, when they have said that a theory is
dangerous, they have pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such
theories that have any true intellectual value. An idea that is not
dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
ERNEST. Gilbert, you bewilder me. You have told me that all art is, in
its essence, immoral. Are you going to tell me now that all thought is,
in its essence, dangerous?
GILBERT. Yes, in the practical sphere it is so. The security of society
lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability
of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any
intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being
fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that
splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage
so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any
question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a
rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act
in accordance with the dictates of reason. But let us turn from the
practical sphere, and say no more about the wicked philanthropists, who,
indeed, may well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of the
Yellow River Chuang Tsu the wise, who has proved that such well-meaning
and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous virtue
that there is in man. They are a wearisome topic, and I am anxious to
get back to the sphere in which criticism is free.
ERNEST. The sphere of the intellect?
GILBERT. Yes. You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in his
own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be merely of
value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some new mood
of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps
greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of a fresh medium of
expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect. Well, you
seemed to be a little sceptical about the theory. But perhaps I wronged
you?
ERNEST. I am not really sceptical about it, but I must admit that I feel
very strongly that such work as you describe the critic producing—and
creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to be—is, of necessity,
purely subjective, whereas the greatest work is objective always,
objective and impersonal.
GILBERT. The difference between objective and subjective work is one of
external form merely. It is accidental, not essential. All artistic
creation is absolutely subjective. The very landscape that Corot looked
at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind; and those great
figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to possess an actual
existence of their own, apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned
them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves, not
as they thought they were, but as they thought they were not; and by such
thinking came in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to
be. For out of ourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation
what in the creator was not. Nay, I would say that the more objective a
creation appears to be, the more subjective it really is. Shakespeare
might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of
London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each
other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out
of his passion. They were elements of his nature to which he gave
visible form, impulses that stirred so strongly within him that he had,
as it were perforce, to suffer them to realise their energy, not on the
lower plane of actual life, where they would have been trammelled and
constrained and so made imperfect, but on that imaginative plane of art
where Love can indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can
stab the eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-made grave,
and make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and see one’s father’s spirit,
beneath the glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete steel from misty
wall to wall. Action being limited would have left Shakespeare
unsatisfied and unexpressed; and, just as it is because he did nothing
that he has been able to achieve everything, so it is because he never
speaks to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us
absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament far more
completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets, even, in which he
bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart. Yes, the objective
form is the most subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he
talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the
truth.
ERNEST. The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form, will
necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the artist, who
has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.
GILBERT. Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if he recognises that
each mode of criticism is, in its highest development, simply a mood, and
that we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.
The æsthetic critic, constant only to the principle of beauty in all
things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions, winning from the
various schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before
foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods.
What other people call one’s past has, no doubt, everything to do with
them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself. The man who regards
his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to.
When one has found expression for a mood, one has done with it. You