Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (178 page)

ERNEST.  The true critic will be rational, at any rate, will he not?

GILBERT.  Rational?  There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest.  One is to dislike it.  The other, to like it rationally.  For Art, as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener and spectator a form of divine madness.  It does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others inspired.  Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals.  If one loves Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and against such love, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out.  There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty.  It is too splendid to be sane.  Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure visionaries.

ERNEST.  Well, at least, the critic will be sincere.

GILBERT.  A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.  The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped mode of looking at things.  He will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view.  Through constant change, and through constant change alone, he will find his true unity.  He will not consent to be the slave of his own opinions.  For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?  The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.  You must not be frightened by word, Ernest.  What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

ERNEST.  I am afraid I have not been fortunate in my suggestions.

GILBERT.  Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two, sincerity and fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least on the borderland of morals, and the first condition of criticism is that the critic should be able to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.  When they are confused, Chaos has come again.  They are too often confused in England now, and though our modern Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment.  It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression.  I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism.  By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.  By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are.  By invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.  But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art.  When it does this it stultifies itself.  And yet Tartuffe’s articles and Chadband’s notes do this good, at least.  They serve to show how extremely limited is the area over which ethics, and ethical considerations, can claim to exercise influence.  Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths.  Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.  To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.  However, let these mouthing Puritans pass; they have their comic side.  Who can help laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?  Some limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers.  For they give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life.  They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.  But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows their colour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical import also, and builds out of them a world more real than reality itself, and of loftier and more noble import — who shall set limits to him?  Not the apostles of that new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity ‘writ large.’  Not the apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whine of the hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly.  The mere suggestion is ridiculous.  Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed to the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the true critic.

ERNEST.  And what are they?  Tell me yourself.

GILBERT.  Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic — a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.  Under what conditions, and by what means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not discuss at present.  It is sufficient to note that it exists, and that there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above them, separate from the reason and of nobler import, separate from the soul and of equal value — a sense that leads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely.  But to be purified and made perfect, this sense requires some form of exquisite environment.  Without this it starves, or is dulled.  You remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings, telling us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds, so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual.  Insensibly, and without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education.  By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveliness.  Ultimately, in its due course, this taste is to become critical and self-conscious, but at first it is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and ‘he who has received this true culture of the inner man will with clear and certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature, and with a taste that cannot err, while he praises, and finds his pleasure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and so becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why’: and so, when, later on, the critical and self-conscious spirit develops in him, he ‘will recognise and salute it as a friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.’  I need hardly say, Ernest, how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete’s chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snake-spotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower’s gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling’s shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud’s building in the College of St. John.  Nor is it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge, that the sense of beauty can be formed and trained and perfected.  All over England there is a Renaissance of the decorative Arts.  Ugliness has had its day.  Even in the houses of the rich there is taste, and the houses of those who are not rich have been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in.  Caliban, poor noisy Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased to make mows at a thing, the thing ceases to exist.  But if he mocks no longer, it is because he has been met with mockery, swifter and keener than his own, and for a moment has been bitterly schooled into that silence which should seal for ever his uncouth distorted lips.  What has been done up to now, has been chiefly in the clearing of the way.  It is always more difficult to destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage but also contempt.  Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure, done.  We have got rid of what was bad.  We have now to make what is beautiful.  And though the mission of the aesthetic movement is to lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to create, yet, as the creative instinct is strong in the Celt, and it is the Celt who leads in art, there is no reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not become almost as mighty in its way as was that new birth of Art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of Italy.

Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we must turn to the decorative arts: to the arts that touch us, not to the arts that teach us.  Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at.  At least, some of them are.  But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual.  Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined.  One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one’s relations.  I am very fond of the work of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London.  Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school.  Some of their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind one of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier’s immortal
Symphonie en Blanc Majeur
, that flawless masterpiece of colour and music which may have suggested the type as well as the titles of many of their best pictures.  For a class that welcomes the incompetent with sympathetic eagerness, and that confuses the bizarre with the beautiful, and vulgarity with truth, they are extremely accomplished.  They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes, and as for their portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them, no one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm which belongs to works of pure fiction.  But even the Impressionists, earnest and industrious as they are, will not do.  I like them.  Their white keynote, with its variations in lilac, was an era in colour.  Though the moment does not make the man, the moment certainly makes the Impressionist, and for the moment in art, and the ‘moment’s monument,’ as Rossetti phrased it, what may not be said?  They are suggestive also.  If they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least given great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may have all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to be ever sensible.  Yet they will insist on treating painting as if it were a mode of autobiography invented for the use of the illiterate, and are always prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and only modest thing about them.  One tires, at the end, of the work of individuals whose individuality is always noisy, and generally uninteresting.  There is far more to be said in favour of that newer school at Paris, the
Archaicistes
, as they call themselves, who, refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather, do not find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour, and rejecting the tedious realism of those who merely paint what they see, try to see something worth seeing, and to see it not merely with actual and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic purpose.  They, at any rate, work under those decorative conditions that each art requires for its perfection, and have sufficient aesthetic instinct to regret those sordid and stupid limitations of absolute modernity of form which have proved the ruin of so many of the Impressionists.  Still, the art that is frankly decorative is the art to live with.  It is, of all our visible arts, the one art that creates in us both mood and temperament.  Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.  The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind.  The repetitions of pattern give us rest.  The marvels of design stir the imagination.  In the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements of culture.  Nor is this all.  By its deliberate rejection of Nature as the ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method of the ordinary painter, decorative art not merely prepares the soul for the reception of true imaginative work, but develops in it that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of critical achievement.  For the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion.  He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, ‘I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,’ but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete.  From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has ‘nothing to say.’  But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious.  It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work.  He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should.  A real passion would ruin him.  Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art.  All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.  To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.