Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (171 page)

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.  š‘›Ÿ£ ‘›š™’™‘”—£ or š‘›Ÿ£ §‘¡œ™”—£ 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 Dvorák.  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 º±¸±Áù 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 º±¸±Áù 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.