Intentions
could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a
nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe
so great a part of my own cultivation?’ This note, sounded in the modern
world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the
cosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism will annihilate
race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the
variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation,
we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own
culture, and possibly its most important element. As long as war is
regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is
looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change will of
course be slow, and people will not be conscious of it. They will not
say ‘We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,’ but
because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.
Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than
those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us
the peace that springs from understanding.
Nor is this all. It is Criticism that, recognising no position as final,
and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or
school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its
own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it to be
unattainable. How little we have of this temper in England, and how much
we need it! The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the
race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate
politicians or third-rate theologians. It was reserved for a man of
science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of
which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect. The author
of the _Origin of Species_ had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. If
one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can
but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne. We
are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.
Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown
amongst us. People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful,
but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
ERNEST. Ah! what an antinomian you are!
GILBERT. The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always.
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously
quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a
certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for
middle-class respectability. Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They
belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is
the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more
important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right
and wrong. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious
civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to
natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence
possible. Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and
wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and
change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to
that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those
to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the
ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the
soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being
an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a
richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought,
acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the
uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is this dangerous? Yes;
it is dangerous—all ideas, as I told you, are so. But the night wearies,
and the light flickers in the lamp. One more thing I cannot help saying
to you. You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing. The
nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of
the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of
Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this
is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress
of the world. Creation is always behind the age. It is Criticism that
leads us. The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.
ERNEST. And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this spirit
possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?
GILBERT. Like the Persephone of whom Landor tells us, the sweet pensive
Persephone around whose white feet the asphodel and amaranth are
blooming, he will sit contented ‘in that deep, motionless quiet which
mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy.’ He will look out upon the world
and know its secret. By contact with divine things he will become
divine. His will be the perfect life, and his only.
ERNEST. You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert. You
have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do
it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the
world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought
dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the
highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the
artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do a
thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is
unfair, insincere, and not rational. My friend, you are a dreamer.
GILBERT. Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find
his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before
the rest of the world.
ERNEST. His punishment?
GILBERT. And his reward. But, see, it is dawn already. Draw back the
curtains and open the windows wide. How cool the morning air is!
Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A faint purple
mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple.
It is too late to sleep. Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the
roses. Come! I am tired of thought.
THE TRUTH OF MASKS
A NOTE ON ILLUSION
IN many of the somewhat violent attacks that have recently been made on
that splendour of mounting which now characterises our Shakespearian
revivals in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed by the critics
that Shakespeare himself was more or less indifferent to the costumes of
his actors, and that, could he see Mrs. Langtry’s production of _Antony
and Cleopatra_, he would probably say that the play, and the play only,
is the thing, and that everything else is leather and prunella. While,
as regards any historical accuracy in dress, Lord Lytton, in an article
in the _Nineteenth Century_, has laid it down as a dogma of art that
archæology is entirely out of place in the presentation of any of
Shakespeare’s plays, and the attempt to introduce it one of the stupidest
pedantries of an age of prigs.
Lord Lytton’s position I shall examine later on; but, as regards the
theory that Shakespeare did not busy himself much about the
costume-wardrobe of his theatre, anybody who cares to study Shakespeare’s
method will see that there is absolutely no dramatist of the French,
English, or Athenian stage who relies so much for his illusionist effects
on the dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself.
Knowing how the artistic temperament is always fascinated by beauty of
costume, he constantly introduces into his plays masques and dances,
purely for the sake of the pleasure which they give the eye; and we have
still his stage-directions for the three great processions in _Henry the
Eighth_, directions which are characterised by the most extraordinary
elaborateness of detail down to the collars of S.S. and the pearls in
Anne Boleyn’s hair. Indeed it would be quite easy for a modern manager
to reproduce these pageants absolutely as Shakespeare had them designed;
and so accurate were they that one of the court officials of the time,
writing an account of the last performance of the play at the Globe
Theatre to a friend, actually complains of their realistic character,
notably of the production on the stage of the Knights of the Garter in
the robes and insignia of the order as being calculated to bring ridicule
on the real ceremonies; much in the same spirit in which the French
Government, some time ago, prohibited that delightful actor, M.
Christian, from appearing in uniform, on the plea that it was prejudicial
to the glory of the army that a colonel should be caricatured. And
elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which distinguished the English
stage under Shakespeare’s influence was attacked by the contemporary
critics, not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the democratic
tendencies of realism, but usually on those moral grounds which are
always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.
The point, however, which I wish to emphasise is, not that Shakespeare
appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to
poetry, but that he saw how important costume is as a means of producing
certain dramatic effects. Many of his plays, such as _Measure for
Measure_, _Twelfth Night_, _The Two Gentleman of Verona_, _All’s Well
that Ends Well_, _Cymbeline_, and others, depend for their illusion on
the character of the various dresses worn by the hero or the heroine; the
delightful scene in _Henry the Sixth_, on the modern miracles of healing
by faith, loses all its point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet; and
the _dénoûment_ of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ hinges on the colour of
Anne Page’s gown. As for the uses Shakespeare makes of disguises the
instances are almost numberless. Posthumus hides his passion under a
peasant’s garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot’s rags; Portia wears
the apparel of a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired in ‘all points as a
man’; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen to the Youth Fidele;
Jessica flees from her father’s house in boy’s dress, and Julia ties up
her yellow hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons hose and doublet; Henry
the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim;
Prince Hal and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits, and then
in white aprons and leather jerkins as the waiters in a tavern: and as
for Falstaff, does he not come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as
Herne the Hunter, and as the clothes going to the laundry?
Nor are the examples of the employment of costume as a mode of
intensifying dramatic situation less numerous. After slaughter of
Duncan, Macbeth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from sleep; Timon
ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richard flatters the
London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and, as soon as he
has stepped in blood to the throne, marches through the streets in crown
and George and Garter; the climax of _The Tempest_ is reached when
Prospero, throwing off his enchanter’s robes, sends Ariel for his hat and
rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in
_Hamlet_ changes his mystical apparel to produce different effects; and
as for Juliet, a modern playwright would probably have laid her out in
her shroud, and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but Shakespeare
arrays her in rich and gorgeous raiment, whose loveliness makes the vault
‘a feasting presence full of light,’ turns the tomb into a bridal
chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo’s speech of the triumph
of Beauty over Death.