Books: Intentions
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Oscar Wilde >> Intentions
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ERNEST. You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of
the creative spirit, and I now fully accept your theory. But what
of criticism outside creation? I have a foolish habit of reading
periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is
perfectly valueless.
GILBERT. So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrity
weighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its
brother--that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of
England affords us from time to time. And yet, I feel I am a
little unfair in this matter. As a rule, the critics--I speak, of
course, of the higher class, of those in fact who write for the
sixpenny papers--are far more cultured than the people whose work
they are called upon to review. This is, indeed, only what one
would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation
than creation does.
ERNEST. Really?
GILBERT. Certainly. Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It
merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the
difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style a
standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently
reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, the
chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art. It is
sometimes said of them that they do not read all through the works
they are called upon to criticise. They do not. Or at least they
should not. If they did so, they would become confirmed
misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase from one of the pretty
Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the rest of their
lives. Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and quality of a
wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy
in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth
nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the
instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One
tastes it, and that is quite enough--more than enough, I should
imagine. I am aware that there are many honest workers in painting
as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. They
are quite right. Their work stands in no intellectual relation to
their age. It brings us no new element of pleasure. It suggests
no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty. It should
not be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion that it
deserves.
ERNEST. But, my dear fellow--excuse me for interrupting you--you
seem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a
great deal too far. For, after all, even you must admit that it is
much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.
GILBERT. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not
at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more
difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of
actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history.
Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form
of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is
only by language that we rise above them, or above each other--by
language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its
most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be
that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have
nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don't talk about action. It
is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an
impulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing
incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and
ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim.
Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource of
those who know not how to dream.
ERNEST. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball.
You hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy.
You do nothing but re-write history.
GILBERT. The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it. That
is not the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit.
When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life,
we shall realise that the one person who has more illusions than
the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the
origin of his deeds nor their results. From the field in which he
thought that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our vintage, and
the fig-tree that he planted for our pleasure is as barren as the
thistle, and more bitter. It is because Humanity has never known
where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
ERNEST. You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious
aim is a delusion?
GILBERT. It is worse than a delusion. If we lived long enough to
see the results of our actions it may be that those who call
themselves good would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those
whom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each little
thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may
grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform
our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and
more splendid than any that has gone before. But men are the
slaves of words. They rage against Materialism, as they call it,
forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has not
spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if any,
spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties in
barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling
creeds. What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress.
Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become
colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the
race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves
us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions
about morality, it is one with the higher ethics. And as for the
virtues! What are the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares
little about chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of the
Magdalen, and not to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern
life owe their freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose
religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge,
creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience,
that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so
ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must
be merged in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply
a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a
survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship
of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world,
and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars
in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you.
Not I. Not any one. It is well for our vanity that we slay the
criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we
had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint
goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his
harvest.
ERNEST. Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note. Let us go back to
the more gracious fields of literature. What was it you said?
That it was more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it?
GILBERT (after a pause). Yes: I believe I ventured upon that
simple truth. Surely you see now that I am right? When man acts
he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet. The whole secret
lies in that. It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy
Ilion to send the notched arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl
against the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ash-handled
spear. It was easy for the adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian
carpets for her lord, and then, as he lay couched in the marble
bath, to throw over his head the purple net, and call to her
smooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the heart that
should have broken at Aulis. For Antigone even, with Death waiting
for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass through the tainted
air at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the
wretched naked corse that had no tomb. But what of those who wrote
about these things? What of those who gave them reality, and made
them live for ever? Are they not greater than the men and women
they sing of? 'Hector that sweet knight is dead,' and Lucian tells
us how in the dim under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of
Helen, and marvelled that it was for so grim a favour that all
those horned ships were launched, those beautiful mailed men laid
low, those towered cities brought to dust. Yet, every day the
swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the battlements, and looks
down at the tide of war. The greybeards wonder at her loveliness,
and she stands by the side of the king. In his chamber of stained
ivory lies her leman. He is polishing his dainty armour, and
combing the scarlet plume. With squire and page, her husband
passes from tent to tent. She can see his bright hair, and hears,
or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice. In the courtyard
below, the son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass. The
white arms of Andromache are around his neck. He sets his helmet
on the ground, lest their babe should be frightened. Behind the
embroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles, in perfumed
raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his soul
arrays himself to go forth to the fight. From a curiously carven
chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lord
of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that the lip of man
had never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and with fresh
water cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black wine
its burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon the
ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophets
worshipped, and prays to Him, and knows not that he prays in vain,
and that by the hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous' son,
Euphorbus, whose love-locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid,
the lion-hearted, Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his
doom. Phantoms, are they? Heroes of mist and mountain? Shadows
in a song? No: they are real. Action! What is action? It dies
at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The
world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
ERNEST. While you talk it seems to me to be so.
GILBERT. It is so in truth. On the mouldering citadel of Troy
lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze. The owl has built
her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the empty plain wander
shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-
surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as
Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the
great galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the
lonely tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing
corks of his net. Yet, every morning the doors of the city are
thrown open, and on foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors
go forth to battle, and mock their enemies from behind their iron
masks. All day long the fight rages, and when night comes the
torches gleam by the tents, and the cresset burns in the hall.
Those who live in marble or on painted panel, know of life but a
single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its beauty, but limited
to one note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet
makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage
and despair, of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go
in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the
years pass by before them. They have their youth and their
manhood, they are children, and they grow old. It is always dawn
for St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the window. Through the
still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God's pain.
The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from her
brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the
lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon,
of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim
naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear
glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the
chords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot
set free among the silver poplars of France. In eternal twilight
they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white
feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on. But
those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the
labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night
from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting
can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them,
as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that Green-
tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for
their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of
perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no
spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of
death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of
life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence
of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the
future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame.
Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised
by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in
its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.
ERNEST. Yes; I see now what you mean. But, surely, the higher you
place the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.
GILBERT. Why so?
ERNEST. Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo
of rich music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form. It may,
indeed, be that life is chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its
martyrdoms are mean and its heroisms ignoble; and that it is the
function of Literature to create, from the rough material of actual
existence, a new world that will be more marvellous, more enduring,
and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, and
through which common natures seek to realise their perfection. But
surely, if this new world has been made by the spirit and touch of
a great artist, it will be a thing so complete and perfect that
there will be nothing left for the critic to do. I quite
understand now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far more
difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. But it seems to me
that this sound and sensible maxim, which is really extremely
soothing to one's feelings, and should be adopted as its motto by
every Academy of Literature all over the world, applies only to the
relations that exist between Art and Life, and not to any relations
that there may be between Art and Criticism.
GILBERT. But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. And just as
artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and,
indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is
really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in
fact, both creative and independent.
ERNEST. Independent?
GILBERT. Yes; independent. Criticism is no more to be judged by
any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of
poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the
work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible
world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of
thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art
the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose. And just
as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a
small country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l'Abbaye,
near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make
a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or of no
importance, such as the pictures in this year's Royal Academy, or
in any year's Royal Academy for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris's
poems, M. Ohnet's novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones,
the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste
his faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in
beauty and instinct with intellectual subtlety. Why not? Dulness
is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity
is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave.
To an artist so creative as the critic, what does subject-matter
signify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist and the
painter. Like them, he can find his motives everywhere. Treatment
is the test. There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or
challenge.
ERNEST. But is Criticism really a creative art?
GILBERT. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts
them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can
one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation
within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and
AEschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to
life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and
legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that
others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative
form and colour have been already added. Nay, more, I would say
that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal
impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has
least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in
fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it,
in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never
trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble
considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the
tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever.
One may appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the soul there is
no appeal.
ERNEST. From the soul?
GILBERT. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism
really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating
than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more
delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not
abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of
autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the
thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed
or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative
passions of the mind. I am always amused by the silly vanity of
those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the
primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-
rate work. The best that one can say of most modern creative art
is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the
critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of
delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or
through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos
and clamour of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and
the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own
impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books
written, and marble hewn into form.
ERNEST. I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.
GILBERT. Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we
all revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from
her Sicilian fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in
vain, the Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to
see the object as in itself it really is. But this is a very
serious error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism's most perfect
form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to
reveal its own secret and not the secret of another. For the
highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as
impressive purely.
ERNEST. But is that really so?
GILBERT. Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on
Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and
majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble
eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and
certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at
least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that
bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery;
greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because
its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller
variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced
lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and
emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought,
with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always
think, even as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares
whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something
that Lionardo never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely
the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I
pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand
before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirque
of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,' I murmur to
myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the
vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of
the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their
fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern
merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as
St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as
the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with
which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the
eyelids and the hands.' And I say to my friend, 'The presence that
thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in
the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire'; and he
answers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world
are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.'
And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is,
and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing,
and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was
that flute-player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda
those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo
would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the
thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein
that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the
outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the
reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplated
none of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious colour-
harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that
the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.
It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new
creation. It does not confine itself--let us at least suppose so
for the moment--to discovering the real intention of the artist and
accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning
of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of
him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it
is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad
meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new
relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our
lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having
prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The longer I study,
Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts
is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may
be marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual
intention on the part of the artist. For when the work is finished
it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver
a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say.
Sometimes, when I listen to the overture to Tannhauser, I seem
indeed to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-
strewn grass, and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from
the caverned hill. But at other times it speaks to me of a
thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life,
or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of
loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions
that man has not known, and so has sought for. To-night it may
fill one with that ??OS ?O? ??????O?, that Amour de l'Impossible,
which falls like a madness on many who think they live securely and
out of reach of harm, so that they sicken suddenly with the poison
of unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of what they may
not obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. To-morrow, like the
music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music
of the Greek, it may perform the office of a physician, and give us
an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and
'bring the soul into harmony with all right things.' And what is
true about music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as many
meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols.
Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it
shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.
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