Books: Intentions
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Oscar Wilde >> Intentions
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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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic 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
archaeological 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 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. Aesthetics 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. Aesthetics, 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.
Aesthetics, 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
archaeology 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
denoument 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.
Even small details of dress, such as the colour of a major-domo's
stockings, the pattern on a wife's handkerchief, the sleeve of a
young soldier, and a fashionable woman's bonnets, become in
Shakespeare's hands points of actual dramatic importance, and by
some of them the action of the play in question is conditioned
absolutely. Many other dramatists have availed themselves of
costume as a method of expressing directly to the audience the
character of a person on his entrance, though hardly so brilliantly
as Shakespeare has done in the case of the dandy Parolles, whose
dress, by the way, only an archaeologist can understand; the fun of
a master and servant exchanging coats in presence of the audience,
of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over the division of a lot of
fine clothes, and of a tinker dressed up like a duke while he is in
his cups, may be regarded as part of that great career which
costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes
down to Mr. Gilbert; but nobody from the mere details of apparel
and adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast, such immediate
and tragic effect, such pity and such pathos, as Shakespeare
himself. Armed cap-a-pie, the dead King stalks on the battlements
of Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark; Shylock's Jewish
gaberdine is part of the stigma under which that wounded and
embittered nature writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of
no better plea than the handkerchief he had given Hubert -
Have you the heart? when your head did but ache,
I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
(The best I had, a princess wrought it me)
And I did never ask it you again;
and Orlando's blood-stained napkin strikes the first sombre note in
that exquisite woodland idyll, and shows us the depth of feeling
that underlies Rosalind's fanciful wit and wilful jesting.
Last night 'twas on my arm; I kissed it;
I hope it be not gone to tell my lord
That I kiss aught but he,
says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet which was already
on its way to Rome to rob her of her husband's faith; the little
Prince passing to the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle's
girdle; Duncan sends a ring to Lady Macbeth on the night of his own
murder, and the ring of Portia turns the tragedy of the merchant
into a wife's comedy. The great rebel York dies with a paper crown
on his head; Hamlet's black suit is a kind of colour-motive in the
piece, like the mourning of the Chimene in the Cid; and the climax
of Antony's speech is the production of Caesar's cloak:-
I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on.
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent,
The day he overcame the Nervii:-
Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . .
Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
Our Caesar's vesture wounded?
The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in her madness are as
pathetic as the violets that blossom on a grave; the effect of
Lear's wandering on the heath is intensified beyond words by his
fantastic attire; and when Cloten, stung by the taunt of that
simile which his sister draws from her husband's raiment, arrays
himself in that husband's very garb to work upon her the deed of
shame, we feel that there is nothing in the whole of modern French
realism, nothing even in Therese Raquin, that masterpiece of
horror, which for terrible and tragic significance can compare with
this strange scene in Cymbeline.
In the actual dialogue also some of the most vivid passages are
those suggested by costume. Rosalind's
Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a
doublet and hose in my disposition?
Constance's
Grief fills the place of my absent child,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth -
Ah! cut my lace asunder! -
are only a few of the many examples one might quote. One of the
finest effects I have ever seen on the stage was Salvini, in the
last act of Lear, tearing the plume from Kent's cap and applying it
to Cordelia's lips when he came to the line,
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