Intentions
laugh; but believe me it is so. Yesterday it was Realism that charmed
one. One gained from it that _nouveau frisson_ which it was its aim to
produce. One analysed it, explained it, and wearied of it. At sunset
came the _Luministe_ in painting, and the _Symboliste_ in poetry, and the
spirit of mediævalism, that spirit which belongs not to time but to
temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia, and stirred us for a moment
by the terrible fascination of pain. To-day the cry is for Romance, and
already the leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple
hill-tops walks Beauty with slim gilded feet. The old modes of creation
linger, of course. The artists reproduce either themselves or each
other, with wearisome iteration. But Criticism is always moving on, and
the critic is always developing.
Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the subjective form of
expression. The method of the drama is his, as well as the method of the
epos. He may use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking to Marvel on
the nature of comedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord Brooke
discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks; or adopt narration, as
Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary Portraits—is not that
the title of the book?—presents to us, under the fanciful guise of
fiction, some fine and exquisite piece of criticism, one on the painter
Watteau, another on the philosophy of Spinoza, a third on the Pagan
elements of the early Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the
most suggestive, on the source of that Aufklärung, that enlightening
which dawned on Germany in the last century, and to which our own culture
owes so great a debt. Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary form
which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from
Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, the
creative critics of the world have always employed, can never lose for
the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression. By its means he can
both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and
reality to every mood. By its means he can exhibit the object from each
point of view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us
things, gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect
that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the
central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more
completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller
completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the
delicate charm of chance.
ERNEST. By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and
convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.
GILBERT. Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to
convert oneself. To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak
through lips different from one’s own. To know the truth one must
imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what is Truth? In matters of
religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of
science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one’s
last mood. And you see now, Ernest, that the critic has at his disposal
as many objective forms of expression as the artist has. Ruskin put his
criticism into imaginative prose, and is superb in his changes and
contradictions; and Browning put his into blank verse and made painter
and poet yield us their secret; and M. Renan uses dialogue, and Mr. Pater
fiction, and Rossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of
Giorgione and the design of Ingres, and his own design and colour also,
feeling, with the instinct of one who had many modes of utterance; that
the ultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium that of
words.
ERNEST. Well, now that you have settled that the critic has at his
disposal all objective forms, I wish you would tell me what are the
qualities that should characterise the true critic.
GILBERT. What would you say they were?
ERNEST. Well, I should say that a critic should above all things be
fair.
GILBERT. Ah! not fair. A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of
the word. It is only about things that do not interest one that one can
give a really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an
unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both
sides of a question, is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all. Art is
a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by
emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine
moods and exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity of a
scientific formula or a theological dogma. It is to the soul that Art
speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of
the body. One should, of course, have no prejudices; but, as a great
Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago, it is one’s business in such
matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences one ceases to
be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire
all schools of Art. No; fairness is not one of the qualities of the true
critic. It is not even a condition of criticism. Each form of Art with
which we come in contact dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of
every other form. We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in
question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret. For the
time, we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed.
ERNEST. The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will he not?
GILBERT. Rational? There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest. One is
to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally. For Art, as Plato saw,
and not without regret, creates in listener and spectator a form of
divine madness. It does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others
inspired. Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals. If one loves
Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and
against such love, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out.
There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to
be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always
seem to the world to be pure visionaries.
ERNEST. Well, at least, the critic will be sincere.
GILBERT. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it
is absolutely fatal. The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in
his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in
every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited
to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped mode of looking at
things. He will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand
different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh
points of view. Through constant change, and through constant change
alone, he will find his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave
of his own opinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual
sphere? The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth. You
must not be frightened by word, Ernest. What people call insincerity is
simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
ERNEST. I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.
GILBERT. Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity and
fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least on the borderland of
morals, and the first condition of criticism is that the critic should be
able to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are
absolutely distinct and separate. When they are confused, Chaos has come
again. They are too often confused in England now, and though our modern
Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their
extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment. It
is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find
expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of
modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps
us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully
chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what
very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing
the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for
culture, and what are not. But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to
write articles upon modern art. When it does this it stultifies itself.
And yet Tartuffe’s articles and Chadband’s notes do this good, at least.
They serve to show how extremely limited is the area over which ethics,
and ethical considerations, can claim to exercise influence. Science is
out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.
Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things
beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and
less intellectual spheres. However, let these mouthing Puritans pass;
they have their comic side. Who can help laughing when an ordinary
journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal
of the artist? Some limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be
placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers. For they give
us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with
degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the
conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details
of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever. But the
artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet transforms them into
shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows
their colour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical import
also, and builds out of them a world more real than reality itself, and
of loftier and more noble import—who shall set limits to him? Not the
apostles of that new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity ‘writ
large.’ Not the apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine
of the hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly. The mere suggestion
is ridiculous. Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed to the
discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the true critic.
ERNEST. And what are they? Tell me yourself.
GILBERT. Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic—a
temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various
impressions that beauty gives us. Under what conditions, and by what
means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not
discuss at present. It is sufficient to note that it exists, and that
there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above
them, separate from the reason and of nobler import, separate from the
soul and of equal value—a sense that leads some to create, and others,
the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely. But to be purified
and made perfect, this sense requires some form of exquisite environment.
Without this it starves, or is dulled. You remember that lovely passage
in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with
what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings, telling us
how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds,
so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the
reception of the beauty that is spiritual. Insensibly, and without
knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of beauty which,
as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education.
By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temperament as
will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to