Books: Intentions
O >>
Oscar Wilde >> Intentions
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 | 10 |
11 |
12 |
13
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 Aufklarung, 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 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 Athenaeum Club, or is recognised as a
popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at 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.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 | 10 |
11 |
12 |
13