Intentions
the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine
instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveliness.
Ultimately, in its due course, this taste is to become critical and
self-conscious, but at first it is to exist purely as a cultivated
instinct, and ‘he who has received this true culture of the inner man
will with clear and certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in
art or nature, and with a taste that cannot err, while he praises, and
finds his pleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and so
becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now in
the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why’:
and so, when, later on, the critical and self-conscious spirit develops
in him, he ‘will recognise and salute it as a friend with whom his
education has made him long familiar.’ I need hardly say, Ernest, how
far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the
smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one
ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of
beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the
development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of
the critical spirit.
Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the
dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter
in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice
singing in Waynfleete’s chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the
strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to
a finer gold the tower’s gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church
staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling’s shadowy fans, or pass through the
sculptured gateway of Laud’s building in the College of St. John. Nor is
it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed
and trained and perfected. All over England there is a Renaissance of
the decorative Arts. Ugliness has had its day. Even in the houses of
the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are not rich have
been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in. Caliban, poor noisy
Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to make mows at a thing, the
thing ceases to exist. But if he mocks no longer, it is because he has
been met with mockery, swifter and keener than his own, and for a moment
has been bitterly schooled into that silence which should seal for ever
his uncouth distorted lips. What has been done up to now, has been
chiefly in the clearing of the way. It is always more difficult to
destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is
vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage
but also contempt. Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure, done.
We have got rid of what was bad. We have now to make what is beautiful.
And though the mission of the æsthetic movement is to lure people to
contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet, as the creative instinct is
strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt who leads in art, there is no
reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not become
almost as mighty in its way as was that new birth of Art that woke many
centuries ago in the cities of Italy.
Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the
decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that teach
us. Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least,
some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are
too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too
obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they
have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as
one’s relations. I am very fond of the work of many of the Impressionist
painters of Paris and London. Subtlety and distinction have not yet left
the school. Some of their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one
of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier’s immortal _Symphonie en Blanc
Majeur_, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have
suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.
For a class that welcomes the incompetent with sympathetic eagerness, and
that confuses the bizarre with the beautiful, and vulgarity with truth,
they are extremely accomplished. They can do etchings that have the
brilliancy of epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes, and
as for their portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them, no
one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm which
belongs to works of pure fiction. But even the Impressionists, earnest
and industrious as they are, will not do. I like them. Their white
keynote, with its variations in lilac, was an era in colour. Though the
moment does not make the man, the moment certainly makes the
Impressionist, and for the moment in art, and the ‘moment’s monument,’ as
Rossetti phrased it, what may not be said? They are suggestive also. If
they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least given
great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may
have all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to
be ever sensible. Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it
were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the illiterate, and
are always prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their
unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by a
vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and
only modest thing about them. One tires, at the end, of the work of
individuals whose individuality is always noisy, and generally
uninteresting. There is far more to be said in favour of that newer
school at Paris, the _Archaicistes_, as they call themselves, who,
refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather, do not
find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the
imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour, and
rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see,
try to see something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual
and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as
far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic
purpose. They, at any rate, work under those decorative conditions that
each art requires for its perfection, and have sufficient æsthetic
instinct to regret those sordid and stupid limitations of absolute
modernity of form which have proved the ruin of so many of the
Impressionists. Still, the art that is frankly decorative is the art to
live with. It is, of all our visible arts, the one art that creates in
us both mood and temperament. Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and
unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand
different ways. The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of
lines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind. The repetitions of
pattern give us rest. The marvels of design stir the imagination. In
the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements
of culture. Nor is this all. By its deliberate rejection of Nature as
the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary
painter, decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the reception of
true imaginative work, but develops in it that sense of form which is the
basis of creative no less than of critical achievement. For the real
artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to
thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to
himself, ‘I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,’
but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain
modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is
to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From
time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet,
because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has ‘nothing to say.’
But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result
would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message, that he can
do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form
purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever
actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine
feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be
inartistic.
ERNEST. I wonder do you really believe what you say?
GILBERT. Why should you wonder? It is not merely in art that the body
is the soul. In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of things.
The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing convey, Plato tells us, both
rhythm and harmony into the mind. Forms are the food of faith, cried
Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that make us admire and
know the man. He was right, though he may not have known how terribly
right he was. The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational,
but because they are repeated. Yes: Form is everything. It is the
secret of life. Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to
you. Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you
wish to love? Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning
from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief that
corrodes your heart? Steep yourself in the Language of grief, learn its
utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that
mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, which is the
birth of passion, is also the death of pain. And so, to return to the
sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not merely the critical
temperament, but also the æsthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that
reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty. Start with
the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be
revealed to you, and remember that in criticism, as in creation,
temperament is everything, and that it is, not by the time of their
production, but by the temperaments to which they appeal, that the
schools of art should be historically grouped.
ERNEST. Your theory of education is delightful. But what influence will
your critic, brought up in these exquisite surroundings, possess? Do you
really think that any artist is ever affected by criticism?
GILBERT. The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own
existence. He will represent the flawless type. In him the culture of
the century will see itself realised. You must not ask of him to have
any aim other than the perfecting of himself. The demand of the
intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel itself alive. The
critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will
concern himself not with the individual, but with the age, which he will
seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it
new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his
nobler moods. The actual art of to-day will occupy him less than the art
of to-morrow, far less than the art of yesterday, and as for this or that
person at present toiling away, what do the industrious matter? They do
their best, no doubt, and consequently we get the worst from them. It is
always with the best intentions that the worst work is done. And
besides, my dear Ernest, when a man reaches the age of forty, or becomes
a Royal Academician, or is elected a member of the Athenæum Club, or is
recognised as a popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at