Books: Intentions
O >>
Oscar Wilde >> Intentions
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13
ERNEST. There is something in what you say, but there is not
everything in what you say. In many points you are unjust.
GILBERT. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. But
let us return to the particular point at issue. What was it that
you said?
ERNEST. Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no
art-critics.
GILBERT. I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest. It
has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old
friend.
ERNEST. It is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing your head
in that petulant manner. It is quite true. In the best days of
art there were no art-critics. The sculptor hewed from the marble
block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within it. The
waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to the statue,
and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb. He poured
the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the river of red
metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body of
a god. With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the
sightless eyes. The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his
graver. And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit
portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who
passed by, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], became
conscious of a new influence that had come across their lives, and
dreamily, or with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went to
their homes or daily labour, or wandered, it may be, through the
city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young Phaedrus bathed
his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tall
wind--whispering planes and flowering agnus castus, began to think
of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe. In
those days the artist was free. From the river valley he took the
fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone,
fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to
the dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty
tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and
the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.
On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed
with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with tired feet the
purple white-starred fields of asphodel, one 'in whose eyelids lay
the whole of the Trojan War,' Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or
figured Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords to the
mast-step, that he might listen without hurt to the singing of the
Sirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron, where the
ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persian
in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the
galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay.
He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared
cedar. Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted with
wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated
irons making it firm. Panel and marble and linen canvas became
wonderful as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her own
image, was still, and dared not speak. All life, indeed, was his,
from the merchants seated in the market-place to the cloaked
shepherd lying on the hill; from the nymph hidden in the laurels
and the faun that pipes at noon, to the king whom, in long green-
curtained litter, slaves bore upon oil-bright shoulders, and fanned
with peacock fans. Men and women, with pleasure or sorrow in their
faces, passed before him. He watched them, and their secret became
his. Through form and colour he re-created a world.
All subtle arts belonged to him also. He held the gem against the
revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for
Adonis, and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her
hounds. He beat out the gold into roses, and strung them together
for necklace or armlet. He beat out the gold into wreaths for the
conqueror's helmet, or into palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into
masks for the royal dead. On the back of the silver mirror he
graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or love-sick Phaedra with her
nurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting poppies in her hair.
The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from the silent wheel,
the vase rose up beneath his hands. He decorated the base and stem
and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated acanthus,
or curved and crested wave. Then in black or red he painted lads
wrestling, or in the race: knights in full armour, with strange
heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped
chariot over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or
working their miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their
pain. Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a
ground of white the languid bridegroom and his bride, with Eros
hovering round them--an Eros like one of Donatello's angels, a
little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings. On the
curved side he would write the name of his friend. [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced] or [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] tells us the story of his days. Again, on the rim of
the wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at
rest, as his fancy willed it. From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed
Aphrodite at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Maenads in his
train, Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained
feet, while, satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated
skins, or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted
fir-cone, and wreathed with dark ivy. And no one came to trouble
the artist at his work. No irresponsible chatter disturbed him.
He was not worried by opinions. By the Ilyssus, says Arnold
somewhere, there was no Higginbotham. By the Ilyssus, my dear
Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing provincialism
to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By the
Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the
industrious prattle of what they do not understand. On the reed-
grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism
monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in
the dock. The Greeks had no art-critics.
GILBERT. Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are
terribly unsound. I am afraid that you have been listening to the
conversation of some one older than yourself. That is always a
dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a
habit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual
development. As for modern journalism, it is not my business to
defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian
principle of the survival of the vulgarest. I have merely to do
with literature.
ERNEST. But what is the difference between literature and
journalism?
GILBERT. Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
That is all. But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had
no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It would be
more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.
ERNEST. Really?
GILBERT. Yes, a nation of art-critics. But I don't wish to
destroy the delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the
relation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his
age. To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is
not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the
inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. Still less
do I desire to talk learnedly. Learned conversation is either the
affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally
unemployed. And, as for what is called improving conversation,
that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish
philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the
criminal classes. No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing
by Dvorak. The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us,
and the heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.
Don't let us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious of
the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated
seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't
degrade me into the position of giving you useful information.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from
time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a
clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round
her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the
night. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and
hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?
ERNEST. You are horribly wilful. I insist on your discussing this
matter with me. You have said that the Greeks were a nation of
art-critics. What art-criticism have they left us?
GILBERT. My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-
criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it
would be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-
critics, and that they invented the criticism of art just as they
invented the criticism of everything else. For, after all, what is
our primary debt to the Greeks? Simply the critical spirit. And,
this spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion and
science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education, they
exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme
and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless system of
criticism that the world has ever seen.
ERNEST. But what are the two supreme and highest arts?
GILBERT. Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of
life. The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we
may not realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.
The principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many
cases, so subtle that we can hardly understand them. Recognising
that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in
all his infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism of
language, considered in the light of the mere material of that art,
to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or
emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for
instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a
modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need
hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were
right, as they were right in all things. Since the introduction of
printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst
the middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a
tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less
and less to the ear which is really the sense which, from the
standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose
canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even the work of Mr.
Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English
prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of
mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack
the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness
of effect that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have
made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as
a form of elaborate design. The Greeks, upon the other hand,
regarded writing simply as a method of chronicling. Their test was
always the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations. The
voice was the medium, and the ear the critic. I have sometimes
thought that the story of Homer's blindness might be really an
artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to remind us,
not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less with
the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but
that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music,
repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has
caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words
that are winged with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not,
it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that
England's great poet owed much of the majestic movement and
sonorous splendour of his later verse. When Milton could no longer
write he began to sing. Who would match the measures of Comus with
the measures of Samson Agonistes, or of Paradise Lost or Regained?
When Milton became blind he composed, as every one should compose,
with the voice purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days
became that mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music
has all the stateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have
its swiftness, and is the one imperishable inheritance of English
literature sweeping through all the ages, because above them, and
abiding with us ever, being immortal in its form. Yes: writing
has done much harm to writers. We must return to the voice. That
must be our test, and perhaps then we shall be able to appreciate
some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism.
As it now is, we cannot do so. Sometimes, when I have written a
piece of prose that I have been modest enough to consider
absolutely free from fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I
may have been guilty of the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic
and tribrachic movements, a crime for which a learned critic of the
Augustan age censures with most just severity the brilliant if
somewhat paradoxical Hegesias. I grow cold when I think of it, and
wonder to myself if the admirable ethical effect of the prose of
that charming writer, who once in a spirit of reckless generosity
towards the uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed the
monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life, will not
some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the paeons
have been wrongly placed.
ERNEST. Ah! now you are flippant.
GILBERT. Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that
the Greeks had no art-critics? I can understand it being said that
the constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but
not that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not
criticise. You will not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art
criticism from Plato to Plotinus. The night is too lovely for
that, and the moon, if she heard us, would put more ashes on her
face than are there already. But think merely of one perfect
little work of aesthetic criticism, Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry.
It is not perfect in form, for it is badly written, consisting
perhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or of isolated
fragments destined for some larger book, but in temper and
treatment it is perfect, absolutely. The ethical effect of art,
its importance to culture, and its place in the formation of
character, had been done once for all by Plato; but here we have
art treated, not from the moral, but from the purely aesthetic
point of view. Plato had, of course, dealt with many definitely
artistic subjects, such as the importance of unity in a work of
art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic value of
appearances, the relation of the visible arts to the external
world, and the relation of fiction to fact. He first perhaps
stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet
satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and
Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order
of the Kosmos. The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets
them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the
metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but
transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they are
still vital and full of meaning. It may be that it is as a critic
of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering the
name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a new
philosophy. But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily
in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and
investigating the material it uses, which is language, its subject-
matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is
action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are
those of theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is
plot, and its final aesthetic appeal, which is to the sense of
beauty realised through the passions of pity and awe. That
purification and spiritualising of the nature which he calls [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced] is, as Goethe saw, essentially
aesthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied. Concerning
himself primarily with the impression that the work of art
produces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, to
investigate its source, to see how it is engendered. As a
physiologist and psychologist, he knows that the health of a
function resides in energy. To have a capacity for a passion and
not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and limited. The
mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom of
much 'perilous stuff,' and by presenting high and worthy objects
for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the
man; nay, not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him
also into noble feelings of which he might else have known nothing,
the word [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] having, it has
sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of
initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to
fancy, its true and only meaning here. This is of course a mere
outline of the book. But you see what a perfect piece of aesthetic
criticism it is. Who indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so
well? After reading it, one does not wonder any longer that
Alexandria devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and that we
find the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every
question of style and manner, discussing the great Academic schools
of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that
sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or
the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing
actual life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the
artistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or
the proper subject-matter for the artist. Indeed, I fear that the
inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in
matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism
were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin
colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those
who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a
reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed.
And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about
painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had their private
views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and
Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and
lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their
art-historians, and their archaeologists, and all the rest of it.
Why, even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought
their dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid
them very handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices.
Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks.
Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism. It is the
Greeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism, and how
fine their critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that
the material they criticised with most care was, as I have already
said, language. For the material that painter or sculptor uses is
meagre in comparison with that of words. Words have not merely
music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid
as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the
Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which
reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and
spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the
Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have
been the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of
the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.
But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud.
Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion's eye. She is
afraid that I will talk to you of Lucian and Longinus, of
Quinctilian and Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of
all those who in the antique world wrote or lectured upon art
matters. She need not be afraid. I am tired of my expedition into
the dim, dull abyss of facts. There is nothing left for me now but
the divine [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of another
cigarette. Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one
unsatisfied.
ERNEST. Try one of mine. They are rather good. I get them direct
from Cairo. The only use of our attaches is that they supply their
friends with excellent tobacco. And as the moon has hidden
herself, let us talk a little longer. I am quite ready to admit
that I was wrong in what I said about the Greeks. They were, as
you have pointed out, a nation of art-critics. I acknowledge it,
and I feel a little sorry for them. For the creative faculty is
higher than the critical. There is really no comparison between
them.
GILBERT. The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary.
Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all,
worthy of the name. You spoke a little while ago of that fine
spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the
artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary
perfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of
omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most
characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical
faculty can create anything at all in art. Arnold's definition of
literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form,
but it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the
critical element in all creative work.
ERNEST. I should have said that great artists work unconsciously,
that they were 'wiser than they knew,' as, I think, Emerson remarks
somewhere.
GILBERT. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work
is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must
sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he
chooses to sing. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are
sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of
poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that
the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they
walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost
without changing could pass into song. The snow lies thick now
upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but
once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from
the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to
the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to
other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our
historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry
is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to
be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the
result of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest,
there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-
consciousness and the critical spirit are one.
ERNEST. I see what you mean, and there is much in it. But surely
you would admit that the great poems of the early world, the
primitive, anonymous collective poems, were the result of the
imagination of races, rather than of the imagination of
individuals?
GILBERT. Not when they became poetry. Not when they received a
beautiful form. For there is no art where there is no style, and
no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.
No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as
Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work,
but they were merely his rough material. He took them, and shaped
them into song. They become his, because he made them lovely.
They were built out of music,
And so not built at all,
And therefore built for ever.
The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one
feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the
individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but
the man who creates the age. Indeed, I am inclined to think that
each myth and legend that seems to us to spring out of the wonder,
or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was in its origin the
invention of one single mind. The curiously limited number of the
myths seems to me to point to this conclusion. But we must not go
off into questions of comparative mythology. We must keep to
criticism. And what I want to point out is this. An age that has
no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic,
and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that
possesses no art at all. There have been critical ages that have
not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in which
the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his
treasure-house, to separate the gold from the silver, and the
silver from the lead, to count over the jewels, and to give names
to the pearls. But there has never been a creative age that has
not been critical also. For it is the critical faculty that
invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself.
It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that
springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand. There
is really not a single form that art now uses that does not come to
us from the critical spirit of Alexandria, where these forms were
either stereotyped or invented or made perfect. I say Alexandria,
not merely because it was there that the Greek spirit became most
self-conscious, and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and
theology, but because it was to that city, and not to Athens, that
Rome turned for her models, and it was through the survival, such
as it was, of the Latin language that culture lived at all. When,
at the Renaissance, Greek literature dawned upon Europe, the soil
had been in some measure prepared for it. But, to get rid of the
details of history, which are always wearisome and usually
inaccurate, let us say generally, that the forms of art have been
due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the
lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including
burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure,
the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which
perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the
wide meaning of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, except
the sonnet, to which, however, some curious parallels of thought-
movement may be traced in the Anthology, American journalism, to
which no parallel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham
Scotch dialect, which one of our most industrious writers has
recently proposed should be made the basis for a final and
unanimous effort on the part of our second-rate poets to make
themselves really romantic. Each new school, as it appears, cries
out against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man
that it owes its origin. The mere creative instinct does not
innovate, but reproduces.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13