Intentions
suburban railway stations, one may have the amusement of exposing him,
but one cannot have the pleasure of reforming him. And this is, I dare
say, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that reformation is a
much more painful process than punishment, is indeed punishment in its
most aggravated and moral form—a fact which accounts for our entire
failure as a community to reclaim that interesting phenomenon who is
called the confirmed criminal.
ERNEST. But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry, and
the painter of painting? Each art must appeal primarily to the artist
who works in it. His judgment will surely be the most valuable?
GILBERT. The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic temperament.
Art does not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is
universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so far
from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really
great artist can never judge of other people’s work at all, and can
hardly, in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration of vision
that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of
fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his
own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around
him. The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise their
worshippers. That is all.
ERNEST. You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty of work
different from his own.
GILBERT. It is impossible for him to do so. Wordsworth saw in
_Endymion_ merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his
dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth’s message, being repelled by
its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature,
could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake,
and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him. The realism of Euripides
was hateful to Sophokles. Those droppings of warm tears had no music for
him. Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not understand the
method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of
Gainsborough. Bad artists always admire each other’s work. They call it
being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist
cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any
conditions other than those that he has selected. Creation employs all
its critical faculty within its own sphere. It may not use it in the
sphere that belongs to others. It is exactly because a man cannot do a
thing that he is the proper judge of it.
ERNEST. Do you really mean that?
GILBERT. Yes, for creation limits, while contemplation widens, the
vision.
ERNEST. But what about technique? Surely each art has its separate
technique?
GILBERT. Certainly: each art has its grammar and its materials. There
is no mystery about either, and the incompetent can always be correct.
But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and certain, to
find their true realisation they must be touched by the imagination into
such beauty that they will seem an exception, each one of them.
Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist
cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the æsthetic
critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of
music—his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of
painting—that which he himself employs. The æsthetic critic, and the
æsthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and modes. It is to him
that Art makes her appeal.
ERNEST. Well, I think I have put all my questions to you. And now I
must admit—
GILBERT. Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with
me I always feel that I must be wrong.
ERNEST. In that case I certainly won’t tell you whether I agree with you
or not. But I will put another question. You have explained to me that
criticism is a creative art. What future has it?
GILBERT. It is to criticism that the future belongs. The subject-matter
at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and
variety. Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted the obvious.
If creation is to last at all, it can only do so on the condition of
becoming far more critical than it is at present. The old roads and
dusty highways have been traversed too often. Their charm has been worn
away by plodding feet, and they have lost that element of novelty or
surprise which is so essential for romance. He who would stir us now by
fiction must either give us an entirely new background, or reveal to us
the soul of man in its innermost workings. The first is for the moment
being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. As one turns over the pages of
his _Plain Tales from the Hills_, one feels as if one were seated under a
palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright
colours of the bazaars dazzle one’s eyes. The jaded, second-rate
Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The
mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism
to what he tells us. From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is
a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is
a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its essence
and its seriousness. He is our first authority on the second-rate, and
has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real
works of art. As for the second condition, we have had Browning, and
Meredith is with us. But there is still much to be done in the sphere of
introspection. People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid.
As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We
have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single
ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and
more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of _Le
Rouge et le Noir_, have sought to track the soul into its most secret
places, and to make life confess its dearest sins. Still, there is a
limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it is possible that
a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal to
that creative faculty to which it seeks to supply fresh material. I
myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed. It springs from too
primitive, too natural an impulse. However this may be, it is certain
that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always
diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily.
There are always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view. The
duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world
advances. There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it
is now. It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of
the point at which it has arrived.
Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism. You might just as
well have asked me the use of thought. It is Criticism, as Arnold points
out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age. It is
Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that makes the mind a
fine instrument. We, in our educational system, have burdened the memory
with a load of unconnected facts, and laboriously striven to impart our
laboriously-acquired knowledge. We teach people how to remember, we
never teach them how to grow. It has never occurred to us to try and
develop in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and
discernment. The Greeks did this, and when we come in contact with the
Greek critical intellect, we cannot but be conscious that, while our
subject-matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs,
theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can be
interpreted. England has done one thing; it has invented and established
Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the
community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force. But
Wisdom has always been hidden from it. Considered as an instrument of
thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped. The only thing that
can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.
It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture possible.
It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a
finer essence. Who that desires to retain any sense of form could
struggle through the monstrous multitudinous books that the world has
produced, books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls? The
thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands
of Criticism. Nay more, where there is no record, and history is either
lost, or was never written, Criticism can re-create the past for us from
the very smallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as the man
of science can from some tiny bone, or the mere impress of a foot upon a
rock, re-create for us the winged dragon or Titan lizard that once made
the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth out of his cave, and
make Leviathan swim once more across the startled sea. Prehistoric
history belongs to the philological and archæological critic. It is to
him that the origins of things are revealed. The self-conscious deposits
of an age are nearly always misleading. Through philological criticism
alone we know more of the centuries of which no actual record has been
preserved, than we do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls.
It can do for us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics. It
can give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming. It can
do for us what History cannot do. It can tell us what man thought before
he learned how to write. You have asked me about the influence of
Criticism. I think I have answered that question already; but there is
this also to be said. It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan. The
Manchester school tried to make men realise the brotherhood of humanity,
by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace. It sought to degrade
the wonderful world into a common market-place for the buyer and the
seller. It addressed itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed. War
followed upon war, and the tradesman’s creed did not prevent France and
Germany from clashing together in blood-stained battle. There are others
of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or to the
shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics. They have their
Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and their proposals for
unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among those who have never
read history. But mere emotional sympathy will not do. It is too
variable, and too closely connected with the passions; and a board of
arbitrators who, for the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived
of the power of putting their decisions into execution, will not be of
much avail. There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and that is
Justice without her sword in her hand. When Right is not Might, it is
Evil.
No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the greed
for gain could do so. It is only by the cultivation of the habit of
intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to
race-prejudices. Goethe—you will not misunderstand what I say—was a
German of the Germans. He loved his country—no man more so. Its people
were dear to him; and he led them. Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon
trampled upon vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent. ‘How can one
write songs of hatred without hating?’ he said to Eckermann, ‘and how