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THE CRITIC S ARTIST

WlTR SOIIK U K A a K S

UPOK THJ IIIPOaTAKCK

01 DODJG MOTHDJG

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A DIALOGUE. Part I

Persons: Gil/Jeri anti Ernest.me : tile li Jrary o f a louse

in Piccadilly, 11erlooleing theGreen Park.

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G ILBERT (at tlzepiano). My dear Ernest, what areyou laughing at ?

rnest (lfJoking up). At a capital story that I havejust come across in this volume of Reminiscences that Ihave found on your table.

Gilbert. What is the book? Ah I see. I have notread it yet. Is it good ?

Ernest. Well, while you have been playing, I havebeen turning over the pages with some amusement,though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs. They aregenerally written by people who have either entirely losttheir memories, or have never done anything worthremembering; which, however, is, no dou.bt the trueexplanation of their popularity, as the English publicalways feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity istalking to it

G bert. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. I t

fo;.gives everything except genius. But I must confessthat I like all memoirs. I like them for their form, justas much as for their matter. In literature mere egotismis delightful. t is what fascinates us in the letters of

personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubertand Berlioz, Byron and Madame de 8 e v i g n ~Wheneverwe come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather rare,we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it.

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Humanity w ll always love Rousseau for having confessedhis sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchantnymphs that Cellini wrought n bronze for the castle ofKing Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, that inthe open Loggil at Florence shows the moon the deadterror that once turned life to stone, have not given itmore pleasure than bas that autobiography in which thesupreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story

of his splendour and his shame. The opinions, thecharacter, the achievements of the man, matter very little._ He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne,

or a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when be tellsus his own secrets he can always charm our ears tolistening and our lips to silence. The mode of thoughtthat Cardinal Newman represented if that can be c lled

a mode of thought which seeb t solve intellectual prob-lems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect maynot, cannot, I think, survive. But the world will neverweary of watching that troubled soul in its progress fromdarkness t darkness. The lonely church at Littlemore,where the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippersare few, w ll always be dear to it, and whenever men seethe yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinitythey w ll think of that gracious undergraduate who saw inthe flower's sure recurrence a prophecy that he wouldabide for ever with the Benign Mother of his d a y s aprophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered'

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notto

be fulfilled. Yes ; autobiography is irresistible.Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has chatteredhis way into .the circle of the Immortals, and, consciousthat indiscretion is the better part of valour, bustles aboutamong them in that shaggy purple gown with goldbuttons and looped lace which he is so fond of describ-ing to us, perfectly at his ease, and prattling, to his ownand our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue petticoat that

he bought for his wife of the good hog's harslet, andthe pleasant French fricassee of veal that he loved toeat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his gaddingafter beauties, and his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday,and his playing of the viol on week days, and otherwicked or trivial things. Even in actual life egotism isnot without its attractions. When people talk to us aboutothers they are usually dull. When they talk to usabout themselves they are nearly always interesting, andi one could shut them up, when they become wearisome,as easily as one can shut up a book of which one hasgrown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.

Ern u l There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstonewould say. But do you seriously propose that every manshould become his own Boswell? What would become

of ourn ~ u s t r o u s

compilers of Lives and Recollectionsin that case ?Gilbert What h s become of them ? They are the

pest of the age, nothing more and nothing less. Every

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round and talk to me. Talk to m t i l l the white-homedday comes into the room. There is something in yourvoice that is wonderful.

-Gilhrl rising fr 111 the pianq , I am not in a moodfor talking to-night. How horrid of you to smile ? I.really am not. Where are the cigarettes ? Thanks.How exquisite these single daffodils are I They seem tobe made of amber and cool ivory. They are like Greek

· things of the best period. What was the story in theconfessions of the remorseful Academician that made youlaugh ? Tell it to me. After playing Chopin, I feel as i

I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed,and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.Music always seems to me to produce that effect. t

creates for. one a past of which one has been ignorant,· and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have beenhidden.from one s tears. I can fancy a man who had Jed· a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some· curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that hissoul, without his being conscious of it, had passed throughterrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wildromantic loves, or great renunciations. And so, tell mthis story, Ernest. I want to be amused.

Enust. OhI

I don t know that it is of any importance.But I thought it a really admirable illustration of the truevalue of ordinary art<riticism. t seems that a lady once

· gravely asked the remorseful Academician, as you call

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him i his celebrated picture of A Spring-Day a t

Whiteley's, o r Waiting for the Last Oninibus, or somesubject of that kind, was all painted by hand ?

Gi/6ert And was it l

Ernest You are quite incorrigible. But, seriouslyspeaking, what is the use of art-criticism ? Why cannptthe artist be left alone, to create a new world i he wishesit, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which we alreadyknow, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be •wearied i Art, with her fine spirit of choice and delicateinstinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us,and give to it a momentary perfection. I t seems to methat the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitudearound it, and works best in . silence and in isolatiC?n·Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamourof criticism Why should those who cannot create take

upon themselves to estimate the value of creative workl I

What can they know about it? f a man's work is easy : .to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . • .

Gil6ert And i his work is incomprehensible, an.explanation is wicked .

Ernest I did not say that.Gil6ert Ah but you should have. Nowadays, we

have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford · to

part with one of them. The members of the BrowningSociety, like the theologians of the Broad Church Party,or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott 's Great Writers' Series,

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seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain their, divinity away. Where one had hoped that Browning was

a mystic, they have sought to show that be was simplyinarticulate. Where one had fancied that he had some-thing to conceal, they have proved that. he had but little

. to reveal. But I speak merely of his incoherent work.Taken as a whole, the man was great. He did not belongto the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the

Titan. He did not survey, and it was but rarely that hecould sing. His work is marred by struggle, violenceand effort, and he passed not from emotion to form, but

from thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has beencalled a thinker, and was certainly a man who was alwaysthinking, and always thinking aloud ; but it was notthought that fascinated him, but rather the processes bywhich thought moves. I t was the machine he loved, notwhat the machine makes. The method by which the foolarrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimatewisdom of the wise. S much, indeed, did the subtlemechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised lan-guage, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument ofexpression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in theMuse s hollow hill creates and answers its own. voice;rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes notmerely a material element of metrical beauty, but aspiritual element of thought and passion also, wakinga new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas,

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or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of soundsome golden door at which the Imagination itself hadknocked in vain ; rhyme, which can turn man s utteranceto the speech of gods ; rhyme, the one chord we haveadded to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning shands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times madehim masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ridePegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. There

are moments when be wounds us by monstrous music.Nay, i he can only get his music by breaking the stringsof his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, andno Athenian tetti.x, making melody from tremulous wings,lights on the ivory hom to make the movement perfect,or the interval less harsh. Yet, he was great : andthough he turned language into ignoble clay, be madefrom it men and women that live. He is the most Shakes

pearian creature since Shakespeare. f Shakespearecould sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammerthrough a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, and speaking not against him but for him, thereglides · through the room the pageant of his persons.There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some girl s hot kiss. There, stands dread Saulwith the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellowwith hatred, and mougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishopof St. Praxed s. The spawn of Setebos gibbers in the

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comer, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks onOttima s haggard face, and loathes her and his own sin,and himself. Pale as the white satin of his doublet, themelancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyestoo loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andreashudders as he hears the cousins whistle in the garden,and bids his perfect wife go down. Yes, Browning wasgreat. And as what will he be remembered ? As a poet?Ah not as a poet I He will be remembered as a writerof fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be,that we have ever bad. His sense o dramatic situationwas unrivalled, and, i he could not answer his own problems, be could at least put problems fort:h and what moreshould an artist do ? Considered from the point of viewof a creator of character be ranks next to him who madeHamlet. Had he be n articulate, be might have sat

besidehim. The

only man who can touch the hem of hisgarment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a mediumfor writing in prose •. Ernest There is something in what you say, but there

is not everything in what you say. In many points youare unjust.

Gi/6ert I t 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.

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I N T N T I O N S. .

Gilhr l I seem to have beard that observation before,

Ernest. I t has all the vitality of error and all thetediousness of an old friend.

Ernest I t is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing ·your head in that petulant manner. I t is quite true. In . ·the best days of rt there were no art-critics. The sculptorhewed from the marble block the great white-limbedHermes 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. H e pouredthe glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the riverof red metal cooled into noble curves and took theimpress of the body of a god. With enamel or polishedjewels 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 whopassed by, f l ~ / J a f ~ W r e s8ca Nl.p.TpMAT au o18lpoto becameconscious of 1l new influence that had come across theirlives, and dreamily, or with a sense .of strange andquickening joy, went to their homes or daily labour, or

wandered, i t may be, through the city gates . to that

nymph-haunted meadow where young Phredrus bathed hisfeet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tall

wind-whispering planes and flowering p u s ctJSius beganto think of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent withunaccustomed awe. In those days the artist was free.

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.

From the river valley he took the fine clay in his fingers,and with a little tool of wood or bone, fashioned it intoforms so exquisite that the people gave them to the deadas their playthings, and we find them still in the dustytombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faintgold and the fading crimson still lingering about hair andlips and raiment. On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with

. bright sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron, he picturedone who trod with tired feet the purple white-starred fieldsof asphodel, one in whose eyelids lay the whole of the

, Trojan War, Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or figuredOdysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords tothe mast-step; that he might listen without hurt to thesinging of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear river ofAcheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebblybed ; or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying

before the Greek at Marathon, or the galleys clashingtheir beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay. Hedrew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment andprepared cedar. Upon ivory and rose-coloured terra-cottahe painted with wax making the wax fluid with juice ofolives, and with heated irons making it firm. Panel andmarble and linen canvas became wonderful as his brushswept across them ; and life seeing her own image, wasstill, and dared not speak. ll life, indeed, was his, fromthe merchants seated in the market-place to the cloakedshepherd lying on the hill ; from the nymph hidden in

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the l u r e l s ~ n dthe faun that pipes at noon, to the .king

whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore uponoil-bright shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans. Menand women, with pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passedbefore him. He watched them, and their secret becamehis. Through form and colour he recreated a world.

All subtle arts belonged to him also. He held the gemagainst the revolving disk and the amethyst became thepurple couch for Adonis, and across the veined sardonyxsped Artemis with her hounds. He beat out the goldinto 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 thesilver mirror he graved Thetis home by her Nereids, or

love-sick Phedra with her nurse, or Persephone, weary

of memory, putting poppies in her hair. The potter sat nhis shed, and, flower-like from the silent wheel, the vase .rose up beneath his hands . He decorated the base andstem and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliatedacanthus, or curved and crested wave. Then in black or

red he painted lads wrestling, or in the race : knights infull armour, with strange heraldic shields and curiollSvisors, leaning from shell-shaped chariot over rearingsteeds : the gods seated at the feast or working theirmiracles : the heroes in their victory or in their pain.Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon ·a

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ground of white the languid bridegroom and his bride,with Eros hovering round t h e m an Eros like one o

_ Donatello s angels, a little laughing thing with gilded orwith azure wings. On the curved side he would write thename of his friend. KAA.Ol AA.KIBIAAHl or KAA.OlXAPMIAHl tells us the story of his days. Again, on therim of the wide fiat cup he would draw the stag browsing,or the lion at rest, as his fancy willed it From the tiny

perfume-bottle laughed Aphroditeat

her toilet, and, withbare-limbed Mtenads in his train, Dionysus danced roundthe wine-jar on naked must-stained feet, while, satyrlike, the old i l e n ~sprawled upon the bloated skins, orshook th;lt magic spear which was tipped with a frettedfir-cone, and wreathed ·with dark ivy And no ·one cameto tzouble the artist at his work. No irresponsible chatterdisturbed him He was not worried by opinions. By

the ·Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was noHigginbotham. By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, therewere no silly art-congresses, bringing provincialism to theprovinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. Bythe Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, inwhich · he industrious prattle of what they do not understand. On the reed-grown banks of that little streamstrutted no ridiculous journalism monopolising the seatof judgment when it should be apologising in the dock.

·The Greeks had no art-critics.Gi/6erl Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your

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views are terribly unsound. I am afraid that you have . ..been listening to the conversation of someone olderthan yourself . That is always a dangerous tf ing to do, , .

and i you allow it to degenerate into a habit, you will '

find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development .As for modem journalism, it is not my business to defendit. I t 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 d i f f e r ~ n ebetween literature (

and journalism ?Gilbert Oh I journalism is unreadable, and literature

is not read. That is all . But with regard to your s t a t e _

ment that the Greeks had no art-critics, I assure you that. is quite absurd. I t would be more just to say that theGreeks were a nation of art-critics. / .· Emtst Really? C'

Gil6erl Yes, a nation of ~ c r i t i c s .But I don't Wishto destroy the delightfully unreal ·picture that you havedrawn of the relation of the Hellenic artist to . theintellectual spirit of his age. To give an accuratedescription of what has never occurred is not merely theproper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable

· privilegeo

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 thementally unemployed. And, as for what is ·calied ·

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iq1proving conversation, that is merely the foolish methodby 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 Dvorik.The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, andthe heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in

sleep. Don t let us discuss anything solemnly. I am buttoo conscious o the fact that we are born in an age when

only the dull are treated seriously, andI

live in terror ofnot being misunderstood. Don t degrade me into theposition of giving you useful information . Education is anadmirable thing, but it is well to ~ e m e m e rfrom time totime that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.Through the parted curtains of the window I see themoon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded beesthe stars cluster round her. The sky is a .hard hollow

sapphire. . Let us go out into the night. Thought is·wondedol, but adventure is more wondedul still. Whoknows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, andhear the fair -cuban tell us that she is not what sheseems?

Enust You are horribly wilful. I insist on your discussing this matter with me · You have said , that theGreeks were a nation of art-critics. What arto(:riticismhave they _left us ?

Gi/6ert My dear Ernest, even i nota single fragmentof ·ar.t-criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or

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Hellenistic days, it would be none the less true thatGreeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they inventedthe 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 andscience, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and educa- -tion, they exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed,

of the two supreme and highest arts, they have left us themost flawless system of criticism that the world has everseen.

Ernest. But .what are the two supreme and highestarts?

Gilbert. Life · and Literature, life and the perfectexpression of life. The principles of the former, as laiddown 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 ~ s ... so·-.· , .subtle that we can hardly understand them. Recognising· ·that the most perfect art is that ~ h i hmost fully mirrorSman in all his infinite variety, they elaborated the criticismof language, consideted in the light of the mere materialof that art, to a point to which we with our accentual sys-tem of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if a t

all attain ; studying, for instance, the metrical movementsof a prose as scientifically as a modem musician studiesharmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say, with

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, much keener resthetic instinct. In this they were right,s they were right in all things. Since the introduction

of printing, and the fatal develop.ment of the babi,t oreading amongst the middle and lower classes of thiscountry, there b s been a tendency in literature to appealmore and more to the eye, and less and less to the earwhich is really the sense which, from the standpoint ofpure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons

of pleasure it should abide always. Even the work ofMr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the -most perfect masterof English prose now creating amongst us, is often far·more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, andseems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical .life ofwords and the fine freedom and richness of effect thatsuch rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have madewriting a definite mode of composition, and have treatedi t as a form of elaborate design. The Greeks, upon the·other ·band, regarded writing simply as a method ofchronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in

its musical and metrical relations. The voice was themedium, and the ear the critic. I have sometimesthought that the story of Homer s blindness might bereally an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the great poet is alwaysa seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he doeswith the eyes of the soul, but that he is a true singer also,building his song out of music, repeating each line over

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and over again to himself till he has caught the secret ofits melody, chaunting in darkness the· words that arewinged with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not,it was to his blindness, as an occasion i not· as a cause,that England s great poet owed much of the majesticmovement and sonorous splendour of his later verse.When Milton could no longer write, he began to sing.Who would match the measures of omus with the

measures of SaMSon . A g o n i s ~ sor of Paradise Lost or ·Regained When Milton beCS:me blind he composed, aseveryone should compose,. with ~ voice p 1urely, and sothe pipe or -reed of earlier d,ays became that mighty manystopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all thestateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have itsswiftness, and is the one ~ m p e r i s h a b l einheritance orEnglish literature, sweeping through all the ages, becauseabove 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, andperhaps then we shall be able to appreciate some of the .subtleties of Greek art-criticism.

Ar it now is, we cannot do so. Sometimes, when Ih'ave written a piece of prose that I have been modestenough to consider absolutely free from fault, a dreadfulthought comes over me that I may have been guilty of theimmoral effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachicm o v e ~ e n t sa. crime for which a learned critic o the

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Augustan age censures with most just severity th« brilliant

if sc_>mewbat paradoxical Hegesias. I grow cold when Ithink of it, and wonder to myself if the admirable ethicaleffect of the prose of that charming writer, who once in aspirit of reckless generosity towards the uncultivatedportion of our community prochumed the monstrous doc-trine that co )duct is three-fourths of life, will not someday be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the

-paeans have been wrongly placed .Enust Ab now you are ftippant. .Gii Jert. Who would not be flippant when he is gravely

told that the Greeks had no art-critics ? I can understandit being said that the constructive genius of the Greekslost itself in criticism, but not that the race to whom weowe the critical spirit did not criticise. You will not askme to give you a survey of Greek art criticism from Platoto Plotinus. The night is too lovely for that, and themoon, if she heard us, would put more ashes on her facethan are there already. But think merely of one perfect

· little work of ethet ic criticism, Aristotle's Treatise on

Poetry t is not perfect in form, for it is badly written,consisting perhaps of notes jotted 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 effe t of art, its importance to culture, and itsplace in the formation of character, had been done once. for all y Plato ; but here we have art treated, not fr .om

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the moral, but from the purely a t h e t i c point of view. ,

Plato had, of course, dealt with many definitely artisticsubjects, such as the importance of unity in a work of art,the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic value ofappearances, the relation of the visible arts to the ~ m l

world, and the relation of fiction to fact. He first perhaps ·stirred in the soul of man that desire which we have -notyet satisfied, the desire to know the connection betweenBeauty 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 tliem forth, may seem tomany to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysicalsphere of abstract being in which be places them, but

transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that

they are still vital and full of meaning. I t may be that i t

is as a critic of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and

that by altering the name of the sphere of his speculationwe shall find a new philosophy. But Aristotle, likeGoethe, deals with art primarily in its concrete ltlanifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and investigating thematerial it uses, which is language, ·its subject-matter,which is life, the method by which it works, which isaction, the conditions under which it reveals itself, whichare those of theatti.c presentation, its logical structure,

which is plot, and its final resthetic appeal, which is to thesense of beauty realised through the passions of pity andawe. That purification and spiritualising of the nature

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which he calls «48a.po wis, as Goethe saw, essentially~ t h e t i cand is not moral, as Lessing fancied. Concerning himself primarily with the impression that the workof art produces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that

impression, t investigate its source, to see how it is engendered. s a physiologist and psychologist, he knows

· that the health of a function resides in energy. To havea capacity for a passion and not to realise it, is to make

'Oneself incomplete and limited.The

mimic spectacle oflife that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom of muchperilous stuff, and by presenting high and worthy objects

for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualisesthe man; nay, not merely does it spiritualise him, but itinitiates him also into noble feelings of which he mightelse have known nothing, the word ICOJJo puwhaving, it has

· sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of

initiation, i indeed that be not, as I am occasionallytempted to fancy, its true and only meaning here. Thisis of course a mere outline of the book. But you seewhat a perfect piece of esthetic criticism it is Whoindeed but a Greek could have analysed art so w ll ?After reading it, .one does not wonder any longer thatAlexandria devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and ·that w find the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the

great Academic schools of painting, for instance, such asthe school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve the dignified

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traditions of the antique mode, or the realistic and

impressionist schools, that aimedat

reproducing actuallife, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artisticvalue of . he epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or

the proper subject-matter for the artist. Indeed, I fearthat the inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature and art for theaccusations of plagiarism were endless, and such accusa-

. tions 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 gaina reputation for wealth by crying out that they have beenrobbed. And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that theGreeks chattered about painters quite as much. as peopledo nowadays, and had their private views, and shillingexhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and pre-Rapbaelitemovements, and movements towards realism, and lecturedabout art, and wrote essays on art, and produced theirart-historians, and their arclueologists, and all the rest o ·it. Why even the theatrical managers of travellingcompanies brought their dramatic critics with them when ·they went on tour, and paid them very handsome salariesfor writing laudatory notices. Whatever, in fact, is mod-em in our l ~ we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an

anachronism is due to medizvalism. I t is the Greekswho have given us the whole system of art-criticism, andbow fine their critital instinct was, may be seen from the

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fact that the material they criticised with most care was,as I have already said, language. For the material thatpainter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparison withthat of words. Words have not merely music as sweet asthat of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any thatmakes lovely for us the canvas o the Venetian or theSpaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain thanthat which reveals itself in marble or n bronze, but

thought and passion ands p i r i ~ l i t y

are theirs also, ar etheirs indeed alone. If the qreeks bad criticised nothingbut language, they would still have been the great artcritics of the world. To know the principles of thehighest art, is to know the principles of all the arts.

But I see that the moon is biding behind a sulphurcoloured cloud. Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleamslike 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 ,...bo in theantique world wrote or ~ t u r e dupon art-matters. Shen ~ not be afraid. I am tired of my expedition into the

. dim, dull abyss of facts. There is nothing left for menow but tbe divine 'l} ml of another ~ i g r -

ette. Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving oneunsatisfied.

Enust Try one of mine. They are rather good. Iget them direct from Cairo. The only use o our ll cllls

is that they supply their friends with excellent . obacco.

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And as. the moon has hidden herself, let us talk a·little

longer. I am quite ready to admit that I was wrong inwhat 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 c r ~ a t i v efaculty ishigher than the critical. There is really no c o m p a r i s o n

between .them.Gi/Ht 1. The antithesis between them is entirely

arbitrary. Without the critical faculty, there is no artisticcreation at all, worthy of the name. You spoke a Uttlewhile ago of that fine spirit of choice and delicate i n ~ t i n c t

of selection by which the artist realises life for us, andgives to it a momentary perfection. e i ~th t spirit ofchoice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the criticalfaculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and ·noone who does not possess this critical ·faculty can create

anything at alln

art. Arnold's definition of literature asa criticism of life, was not very felicitous in form, but itshowed how keenly he recognised the importance of thecritical element in all creative work.

Ernest I should. have said that great artists workedunconsciously, that they were wiser than they knew,as, I think, Emerson remarks somewhere.

Gi/6erl I t is really not so, Ernest. All fine imagina

tive work is self-conscious and deliberate. o poet singsbecause he must sing. At least, no great poet does. - A.

great poet sings because be chooses to sing. It is . so

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now and t 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 oursand that the world which the early poets looked at and

. through which they walked / bad a kind of poetical qualityof its own and almost without changing could pass into

· song. _ The snow lies thick now upon . Olympus and itssteep scarped sides are bleak and barren but once we.

fancy the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew fromthe anemones in the morning and at evening came Apol loto sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we aremerely lending to other ages what we deaire or thiQ k wed ~ e for our own . Our historical sense is at fault.Every century that produces poetry is so far an artificialcentury and the work that seems to us to be the mostnatural and simple product of its time is always tbe result

of the most self-conscious effort . Believe me Ernest ·~ r is no fine art without self-consciousness and selfconsciousness and the critical spirit are one.

u s t 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 ofthe imagination of individuals ?

Gilhrt Not when they beCam e poetry. Not when. they received a beautiful form . For there is no art where

there is no atyJe and no style where there is no unity

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' \

and unity is of the individull N-; doubt Homer ~ ~ 1 ~

ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare bad ·',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 110 not built at all,And therefore built for ever.

The longer one studies life and literature, the more - Istrongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderfulstands th .e individual, and that it is not the moment that Imakes the man, but f.lle man who r ~ t s the age : ~

Indeed, I am inc1ined to think that c:acb myth and legend 'that 5eems to us to spring out of the wonder, or terror, orfancy of·tribe and nation, was in its origin the invention

of one single inind. The curiously limited number of themyths seems to me to point to this conclusion. But wemust not go off into questions of comparative mythology.We must keep to criticism. And what I want to pointout is this. An age that bas no criticism is either an agein which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to thereproduction of formal types, or an age that possessesno art at all. There have been critical ages that havenot been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word, agesin which the spirit of man bas sought to set in order thetreasures of his treasure-bouse, to separate the gold from

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the silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over thejewels, and to give names to the pearls. But there hasnever 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 thecritical instinct that we owe each new school that springsup, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.There is really not a single form that ar t now uses that

does not come to us from the critical spirit o Alexandria,where these forms were either stereotfped, or invented, ormade perfect. I say Alexandria, not merely b e c ~itwas there that the Greek spin t became most self-conscious,

- and indeed »ltimately expired in scepticism and theology,_ ?ut because it was to that city, and not to Athens, thatRome turned for her models, and it was, through thesurvival, such as it was, of the Latin languli.ge that culturelived at alL When, at the Renaissance, Greek literaturedawned upon Europe, the son had been in some measureprepared for it. But, to get rid of the details of history,which are always wearisome and usually inaccurate, let ussay generally, that the forms of art have been due to theGreek 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, thenovel 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.

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would expect for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does.

Enusl Really?Gilbert Certainly. Anybody can write a three-volumed

novel. I t merely requires a complete ignorance of bothlife and literature. The difficulty that I should fancy thereviewer 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 thereporters of the police-court of literature the chroniclersof the doings of the habitual criminals of art. t is sometimes said of them that they do not read all through theworks they are called upon to criticise. They do noLOr at least they should not. f they did so they wouldbecome confirmed misanthropes or if I may borrow aphrase from one of the pretty Newnbam graduates con

firmed womanthropes for the rest of their lives. Nor is itnecessary. To know the vintage and quality of a wine oneneed not drink the whole cask. I t must be perfectly easyin half an hour to say whether a book is worth anythingor worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient i onehas the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through adull volume? One tastes it and that is quite enough-more than enough I should imagine. I am aware thatthere are many honest workers in painting as well as inliterature who object to criticism entirely. They are quiteright. Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their

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age. I t brings us no new element of pleasure. It sug-gests no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty. ~

I t should not be spoken of. I t should be left to the : . _ I·oblivion that it deserves .

Ernesl But, my dear fellow-excuse me for inter- ·. rupting you-you seem to me to be allowing your passionfor criticism to lead you a great deal too far. For, afterall, 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 ~ a gross popular error. t is verymuch more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. o ~

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it: ·There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that wedo not share with the lower animals. I t is only by ·lan : .

guage that we rise above them, or above each other-bylanguage, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to usin its most aggravated, because most continuous fomt, . ·which I take to be that of real industry, becomes simplythe refuge of p ~ o p lwho have nothing whatsoever to do. ··

No, Ernest, don t talk about action . It is a blind thing .

• J

•

dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse .1- of w ~ s nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incom- . •

plete in its essence, because limited by accident, ana . ,ignorant _of its direction, being always at v r i n c ~with · · · · ,

~

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its aim. I ts basis is the lack of imagination. I t is the last

', ; resOurce of those who know not bow 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 rewrite history.Gi/6erl The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite

it. That is not the least of the tasks in store for the. critical spirit. When we have fully discovered the scien tific laws that govern life, we shall realise that the one

person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the

mao of action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin ofhis deeds nor their .results. From the field in which heth lmght that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our

. · vintage, and the fig-tree that he planted for our pleasureis ·as barren as the thistle, and more bitter. t is becauseHumanity ha8 never known where it was going that i t has

•been

ableto

find its way.Ernest You think, then, that in the sphere of actiona onscious aim is a delusion?

Gil6erl t is worse than a delusion. f we livedJ ong enough to see the results of our actions it may be

. hat those who call themselves good would be sickenedwith 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

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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, i any, spiritual awakeningsthat 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 ·

· e c o m ~ colourless. By its curiosity, Sin increa.Ses tlieexperience of the race. Through its intensified assertionef individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In

its rejection of the current notions about moralitY, it isone with the higher ethics. And as for the . virtues I

.Wbat are the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, careslittle about chastity, and it may be that it is to the sb1DD6

of the Magdalen, and not to their own purity, t ha t theLucretias of modern life owe their freedom from stain.Charity, as even those of .whose religion it makes a formalpart have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a mul- .titude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, thatfaculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and areso ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect deve Qpment. t must be merged in instinct before we becd efine. Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests ·his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilationof the s a v ~ epart of that ·old worship of pain which-is so ·

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terrible a factor in the history of the world and whicheven now makes its victims day by day and has its altars

.. in the land. Virtues I Who knows what the virtues are ?· Not you. Not I Not anyone. t is well for our vanity

that we slay the criminal for i we suffered him to live hemight show us what we had gained by his crime. I t iswell for his peace that thf saint goes to his martyrdom.He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.

•ENUSI

GUbert you sound too harsh a note . Let usgo back to the more gracious fields of literature. What ·'was it ydu said ? That it was more difficult to talk abouta thing than to do it ?

Gz1 Jerl after a pause). Yes : I believe I ventured uP >n

- that simple truth. Surely you see now that I am right?When · man acts he is a puppet. . When he describes hei ~ a poet. ·The whole secret lies in that. I t was easy

enough on the sandy plains by windy Ilion to sendthe notched arrow from the painted bow or to hurlagainst the shield of hide and flame-like brass the long

s h ~ h n d l e d s p e r t was easy for the adulterous queen·to spre-ad the Tyrlan carpets for her lord and then ashe lay couched in the marble bath to throw over hisbead the purple net and call to her smooth-faced loverto stab through the meshes at the heart that should havebroken at Aulis. For Antigone even with Death wa itingfur her as her bridegroom it was easy to. pass . throughthe tainted air at noon and climb the hill and strew with

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kindly e rth the wretched naked corse that had no tomb .

But what of those who wrote about these things ? Whatof those who gave them reality and made them live for· .ever? Are they not greater than the men and . womeD ·they sing of ? Hector that sweet knight is dead . and

Lucian tells us how in the dim unde:rworld Menippus sawthe bleaching skull of Helen and marvelled that it wasfor so grim a favour that all those homed ships werelaunched those beautiful mailed men laid low thosetowered 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 wonderat her loveliness and she stands by the side of the king. ·In his chamber of stained ivory lies her Ieman. He ispolishing his dainty armour and combing the scarletplume. With squire and page her husband passes froiD

tent to tenL She can see his bright hair and hears orfancies that she hears that clear cold voice . In thecourtyard below the son of Priam is buckling on hisbrazen cuirass. The white arms of Andromache arearound his neck. He sets his helmet on the ground lesttheir babe should be frightened. Behind the embroideredcurtains of his pavilion sits Achilles in perfumed raimentwhile in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his soularrays himself to go forth to the fight. From a curiouslycarven chest that his mother Thetis had brought to hisship-side the Lord of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic

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chaliee that the lip of man bad never touched, and·cleanses it with brimstone, and with fresh water cools it,and, having washed his bands, fills with black ·wine itsburnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood uponthe ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona barefootedprophets worshipped, and prays to Him, and knows notthat be prays in vain, and that by the hands of two knightsfrom Troy, Panthous son, Euphorbus, whose lovelocks

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 Whati s action ? t dies at the moment of its energy. t is abase concession to fact. The world is made by the singerfor the dreamer. ·· Enull While you talk it seems to me to be so.

Gil/Jeri I t is so in truth. On the mouldering citadelof Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze . The

owl bas built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over theempty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with theirflocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced, oily sea, oL.-o• ....6rros as Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streakedwith vermilion, the great galleys of the Danaoi came intheir gleaming crescent, the lonely tunny-fisher sits in hislittle boat and watches the bobbing corks of his net. Yet,every morning the doors of the city are thrown open, andon foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors go forth

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to battle, and mock their enemies from behind their iron

masks. All day long the fight rages, and when nightcomes the torches ·gleam by the tents, and the cressetbums in the hall. Those who live in marble or Qn paintedpanel, know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternalindeed in its beauty, but limited to one note of passion or

one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes live havetheir myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage· and

despair, of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons comeand go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or ·leaden feet the years pass by before them.· They havetheir youth and their manhood, they are children, and

they grow old. t is always dawn for St. Helena, asVeronese saw ~ r a t the window. Through the stillmorning air the angels bring her the symbol of God spain. The coql breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads

from her brow . Onthat

little .hill by the city or Florence,where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it ·is always thesolstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer

· suns that hardly can the slim n k ~ dgirl dip into themarble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the longfingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the chords. t istwilight ·always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot setfree among the silver poplars of France. In eternal

twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whosetremulous white feet seem not to touch the de' V-drenchedgrass·they tread on. But those who walk inepos, drama,

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or romance, see through the labouring months the youngmoons w x and wane, and watch the night from eveningunto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting cannote the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. Forthem, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and theEarth that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her,alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection. J he imagestained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element ofgrowth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is ·

· because they know little of life, for the secrets of life anddeath belong to those, and those only, whom the sequenceof time aftects, and who possess not merely the present

. but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory orof shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts,can be truly realised by Literature alone. t s Literature

that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in itsunrest.

Ernest · Yes ; I see now ~ h tyou mea,n. But, surely,the higher you place the creative artist, the lower must thecritic rank.

Gii Jerl. Why so ?Ernest Because the best that he can give us will

be but an echo of rich music, a dini shadow o ~ c l ~ r -

· outlined form; t may, indeed, be that life is chaos, asyou tell me that it is ; that its martyrdoms are mean and ·its heroisms ignoble ; and that it is the function of Litera-

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. ture 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 lookupon, and through which common natures seek to realise.their perfection. But surely, if this new w o r ~has l >een

made by the spirit and touch of a great artist, it will · athing so complete and perfect · that there will be nothingleft for the critic to do. I qutle understand now, andindeed admit most readily, that it is far more difficult totalk about a thing than to do it. But it seems to me thatthis souad and sensible maxim, which is really extremelysoothing to one s feelings, and should be adopted as itsmotto by every Academy of Literature all over the world,applies only to the relations that exist between Art andLife, and not to any relations that there may be betweenArt and Criticism. ·

·Gii Jerl.

But, surely, Criticism is itself an. art. Andjust as artistic creation implies the working of the criticalfaculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist atall, so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense afthe word. Cdticism is in fact, both creative and inde-pendent.

Ernest Independent?Gilbert Yes ; independent. Criticism is no more to

be ju(Jged by any low standard of imitation or resemblancethan is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies .the same relation to .the work of art that he criticises as the

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-·- . artist doos .to . the visible world of form and colour or· the unseen world of passion and of thought . He does

fi t even require for the perfection of his art the finestmaterials. · Anything will serve his purpose. And justas out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the sillywife of a small country doctor in the squalid village ofYonville-l Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert wasable to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style,

so, from subjects of little or of no importance, such as thepictures in this year s Royal Academy, or in any year sRoyal Academy for that matter, Mr . Lewis Morris s

. poems, M Ohnet s novels, or the plays of Mr. HenryArthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be his pleasure soto direct or · waste his faculty of contemplation , producework .that will be flawless in beauty and instinct withintellectual subtlety. Why not? Dulness is always an

irres istible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is thepermanent Beslia 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 canfind his motives everywhere. Treatment is the test. Thereis 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

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call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as thegreat artists, from Homer and &schylus, down toShakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for ~ h e i

subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend andancient tale, so the critic deals with ~ a t e r i a l sthat 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 morecreative than creation, as ·it has least reference to anystandard external to ·itself, and is, fn fact, its o ~ reasonfor existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, andto itself, an end. Certainly,· it is n e v ~ rtrammelled byany s ~ k l e sof verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations'of probability, that cowardly concession to the tediousrepetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever. On,

may appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the . soul ··there-is no appeal.

Enust · From the soul?Gilbert Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest

criticism really . is, the record of one's own s o ~ l I t ismore fascinating than history, as it is concerned simplywith oneself. I t is more delightful than philosophy, asits subject

isconcrete and not abstract, real and not

vague. I t is the ~ n l y~ v i l i s e dform of autobiography, lSit deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's

. . life; not with lif • physical accidents of deed or circum-

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stance, but with 'the spiritual moods and imaginative ..passions of the ~ n d I am alW&JS 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 t

: • chatter about their second-rate work. The best that onecan say of most modern creative art is that it is just alittle less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with hisfine sense of distinction and .ure instinct of delicate

refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror orthrough the woven veil, and will tum his eyes away fromthe chaos and clamour of actual existence, though the mir-ror be tarnished ana the veil be tom. His sole aim is tochronicle his own impressions. It is for him .that picturesare painted, books written, and marble hewn into .form.

Ernest I seem to have heard another theory ofCriticism.

Gil6erl Yes: it has been said by one whose graciousmemory we all revere, and the music of whose pipe oncelured. Pro.serpina from her Sicilian , fields, and made tliosewhite feet stir, and not in vain, the Cumnor cowslips, thatthe proper aim of Criticism is t see the object as in itselfit really is. But this is a very serious_error, and takes nocognisance of Criticism's most perfect form, which is inits essence ·purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its O' Jl

~ e t and not the secret of another. For the highest: Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impres

·:, sive _purely.'•I '

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Enust · But is that really soGii Jert. Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr.·

Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What doesit matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, sofervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so richin its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, atits best, in subtle choice o word and epithet, is at least asgreat a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets ,that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in Eng- 1

land's Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think attimes, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring,but on account of the fuller variety o its appeal, soulspeaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not throughform and colour alone, though through t h e ~ indeed,completely and without loss, but with intellectual andemotional utterance, with lofty pa8sion and with loftier

thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic . aim igreater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater ·art.· ·Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put intothe portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardonever dreamed of? The painter may have been merelythe .slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, butwhenever pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of theLouvre, and stand before that strange figure set in itsmarble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in somefaint light under sea, I murmur to myself, She is o l ~ r

than the rocks among which she sits; like ~ vampire, ·

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she has been dead many times, and learned the secr ets ofthe grave; and bas been a diver in deep seas, and keepstheir fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webswith Eastern merchants ; and, as Leda, was the mother ofHelen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary;and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres andflutes, ami liYes 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

presencethat thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressiveof what in the ways of a thousand years man had come todesire; and he answers me, Hers is the head uponwhich all • the ends of the world are' conie,' and the eye-lids .are a little weary.

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us thanit really ·is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it

· · knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is assweet in our ears as was that flute-player's music that lent

· to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonouscurves . Do you ask me what Lionardo would have saidhad anyone told him of this picture that all the thoughtsand experience of the world had e ~ h e dand mouldedthere in that which they had of pow t to refine and makeexpressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece,the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its$piritutl ambition and ·imaginative loves, the return o

the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias1 He would •

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probably have answered that he h d contemplated none ·

·of these things, but bad concerned himself simply withcertain arrangements of lines and masses, a11 d 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. t t r e ~thework. of art simply as a starting-point for a new aeation.I t does not .confine i tself let us at least suppose so f rthe. moment to discovering the real intention of theartist 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 inhis soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholderwho lends to the beautiful thing its myriad m e a n ~andmakes it marvellous for us, and sets it in . some newrelation to the .age, so that it ~ m e sa vital portion of

our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or.e r ~ p s

of what, having prayed for, e fear that we may receive .

.The longer I study, Ernest, j:he more clearly I see that the ·beauty of the visib1e arts is, as . the b e a u t y ~of .music, ..

impressive primarily, aod that it may be marred, aod . -indeed often is so, by any excess .of in_tellectual i n t e n t i ~ n

on the part of the artist. For when the'work is finished · ' • .....

it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and maydeliver a message far other than that which 'Ras put intoits lips to say. · Sometimes, when I listen to' ·tbe overture · ·to TannlziJuser I seem indeed to see th&t comely l m i g h ~

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treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass and to hearthe voice o(Venus calling to him from the cavemed hill.

· . But at other times it speaks to me of a thousand differentthings, of myself, it may be, and my own life, or of thelives of others whom one has loved and grown weary ofloving, or of the passions that man has known, or of thepassions that man has not ~ o w nand so has sought for.To-night it may fillone with that EPO:S TON MYNA TON,

thatA U r de I

Iflipos Wie,which falls like a madness onmany who think \)ley live securely and out of reach· ofharm, so that they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of what theymay not obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. Tomorrow, like the m ~ s iof which Aristotle and Plato tellus, the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it may per-

. . form the office of a physician, and give us· an anodyne

agai'nst pain, and heal the spirit that. is wounded, and. bring the s ul 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·. he symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything,

·because it exJ}resses nothing. When it shows us itself, itshows us the whole fiery<aloured world.

Ertust._ But is such work as you have talked aboutre lly criticism · .

Gil/Jeri. I t is the highest CritiCism, for it criticises notmerely the individual work of' art, but Beauty itself, and

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fills with wonder a form which the a Wt m y have left

:void or not understood, or understOod incompletely.Enusl The highest Criticism, then, is more creative

than creation , and the primary aim of the critic is to seethe object as in itself it really is not; that is yow:. theory_.I believe?

G.ii Jert. Yes, that is my t ~ x To the critic thework of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of hisown, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resem-blance to the thing it criticises. The one ·characteristic •of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whateverone · wishes, and ~ in it whatever one chooses to see;and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal andresthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his tum,and whispers of a thousand different things which werenot present in the mind of him who carved the statue or

painted the panel or graved the gem.t is sometimes said by those who understand neitherthe nature of the highest Criticism nor the charm .of thehighest Art, that the pictures that the critic loves mostto write about are those that belong to the anecdotage ofpainting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literatureor history . But this is not so. Indeed, pictures o t iskind are far too intelligible. As a class, they rank with

illustrations, and even considered from this point of vieware failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set

· definite bounds to it. For the domain o the painter is,'\:

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I suggested before widely different from that of thepoet. To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute

/ entirety ; not mereli) the beauty that men look at but thebeauty that men listen to also; not merely the momentarygrace of form or the transient gladness of colour but thewhole sphere of feeling the perfect cycle of thought.The painter is so far limited that it is only through themask of the body that he can show us the. mystery of

the soul; only -through conventional images that he canhandle ideas; only through its physical equivalents thathe can deal with psychology. And. how inadequatelydoes he do it then asking us to accept the tom turban ofthe Moor for the noble rage of Othello or a dotard in astorm for the wild madness of Lear I Yet it seems as i

nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly Englishpainters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poachingupon the domain of. the poets marring their motives byclumsy treatment and striving to render by visible formor colour the marvel of what is invisible the splendourof what is not seen. Their pictures are as a natural consequence insufferably tedious. They have degraded thevisible arts into the obvious arts and the one thing notworth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet

and painter may not treato

the same subject. Theyhave always done so and will always do so . But whilethe poet can be pictorial or not as he chooses the paintermust be pictorial always. For a painter is limited not to

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what he sees in nature, but to what upon canvas may beseen.

And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will notreally fascinate the critic. He will turn from them to suchworks as make him brood and dream and fancy, to worksthat possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem totell one that even from them there is an escape into awider world. t is sometimes said that the tragedy of an

artist s life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But thetrue tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is thatthey realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when theideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery,and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal thatis other than itself. This is the reason why music is theperfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimatesecret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of lim

itations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitativecolour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form,because y such renunciations they are able to avoid toodefinite a presentation of the e a ~which would be mereimitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, whichwould be too purely intellectual. I t is through its veryincompleteness that Art becomes complete in beauty, andso addresses itself, not t the faculty of recognition nor to

the faculty of reason, but to the e the t i c sense alone,which, while accepting both reason and recognition asstages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure

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synthetic impression of the work o art as a whole, and,taking whatever alien emotional elements the work maypossess, uses their very complexity as a means by whicha richer unity may be added to the ultimate impressionitself. You see, then, how it is that the esthetic criticrejects those obvious modes o art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb andsterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reverie

and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make llinterpretations true and no interpretation final. SomeresemblanCe, no doubt, the creative work o the critic willhave to the work that has stirred him to creation, but itwill be such resemblance as exists, not between ·Natureand the mirror that the painter of landscape or figure maybe supposed to hold up to her, but between Nature andthe work of the decorative artist. Just as on the flower-less carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed andare lovely to look on, though they are not reproduced invisible shape or line ; just as the pearl and purple of thesea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at Venice ;just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel ofRavenna is made gorgeous by the gold and green andsapphire of the peacock s tail, though the birds of Juno fly

not across it ; so the critic reproduces the work that hecriticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part ofwhose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows us in this way not merely the meaning .

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but also the mystery of Beaut;y and, by transforming eachart into literature, solves once for all the problem of Art sunity.

But I see it is time for supper. After we have discussedsome Cbambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on tothe question of the critic considered in the light of theinterpreter.

Ernest h I you admit, then, that the critic may

occasionally be allowed to see the object as in itself itreally is.Gi/lJerl I am not quite sure. Perhaps I may admit

it after supper. There is a subtle influence in supper.

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WI T H SOME U I I A B K S

UPON T H E IIIPOB TANCE O F

DISCUSSING EVBB YTHING

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A DIALOGUE Parl I I

FerstHU llu sawu Salle

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E RNEST The ortolans were delightful, and theChambertin perfect. And now Jet us return to

the point at issue. ,.GUIJert. Ah I don t Jet us do that. Conversation

should touch everything, but should concentrate itself onnothing. Let us tallr: about Moral Iflliiplalilm l l CauseaNI C11re

a subject on which I thinkof

writing :o t

aboutrAe t ~ r v i f l a lof Tllersilu; as shown by the English comicpapers; o r abOut any topic that may turn up.

Enui t No: I want to discuss the critic and criticiam.You have told pie that the highest criticism deals with art, not

,as x p r e s s i ~ ebut as impressive purely, and is consequently ·.both creative and independent, is in fad: an art by itself,occupying the same relation to creative work that creative

work · does to the visible world of form and colour, or the~ s nworld of passi >n and of thought. Well, now tellme, .will not the critic be sometimes a real interpreter ?

Gi/6erl. Yes ; the critic will be an interpreter, i he.chooses. He can pass from his synthetic ·impression oftrie worlt of art as a whole, to an analysis or exposition

1 of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I hold it to.be, there are many delightful things to be said and done •

. .Yet his object :will not always J e to explain the work ofart. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raiseround . it, and ·round its maker, that mist of wonder which

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is dear to both ·gods and worshipperS alike. OrdinarYpeople are terribly at ease · in Zion. T h ~ ypropose towalk arm in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorantway of saying Why Should we read what is written aboutShakespeare and Milton l We car read the plays and thepoems. That is enough. Blit an appreciation of Miltonis, as the late Rector of Lincoln reQlarked once, thereward of consummate acholarship. And he who desiresto understand . Shakespeare trul7 must understand · therelations in which Shakespeare stood to. the RenaisSanceand the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age ofJames ; be must be familiar with the history of t)le strugglefor supremacy between the old classical forms and the newspirit of romance, between the school of Sidne}r, and ~ n i e l -

and Jonson, and the school of Mtrlowe and Marlowe'sgreater son ; be must know the materials that were at

Shakespeare's disposal, and the method in which he used· them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in thesixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations andtheir opportunities for freedom, and the literary cridcismof Shakespeare's day, its aims and modes and canons; hemust study the English language in .its p'rogress, and blankor rhymed verse in its various developments ; he muststudy th Greek drama, and the connection between . heart ·of the creator of the Agamemnon and the r t of thecreator o f. Macbeth ; in a word, he must be able to bindElizabethan o ~ d o nto the Athens of Pericles, and to

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learn· Shakespeare's t u ~position in the history of European drama and the drama of the ' 'orld. The critic willcertainly be an ~ t e r p r e t e r .but he will not treat Art as ariddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed andrevealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knowsnot his name. · Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddesswhose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whosemajestr his p r i v i l ~ eto make more marvellous in the eyes

. of men. . _ - .· And here, Emtst this strange thing happens. , Thecritic will indeed be an interpreter, but he will not -be aninterpreter in the. sense of one who simply repeats inanother foim a message that has been put into his lipsto say. For, just as it is only by contact with the art offoreign nations that the art of a country gains thatincllvidual and · separate life that w call nationality, so,by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own ··

personality that the critic can interpret the personalityand work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the int« rpretation the more real the ·interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the moreconvincing, and the more true. __

Enust I would have said that personality would havebeen a disturbing element.

Gil/Jeri No ; it is an element of revelation. f youwish to understand others you must intensify ypur ownindividualism.

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Gil6erl. I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell bestby definite example. t seems to me that, while the•

.literary Critic stands of course first, as having the w i d ~ r

range, and larger vision, and nobler material, each Of the - ,arts has a Critic; as it were assigned to it. The actor isa critic of the drama. He shows the poet s work under ,new conditions, and by a .method special to himself. Hetakes the rritten word, and action, gesture; and voicebecome the. media o revelation. · The aiqger, or ~ ·-

·player on lute and viol, is the critic of muaic. The ·etCherof a picture robs the painting of ita fair coloUB, .but showsus by the use o a new. material ita true colour-quality, itstones and values, and the relations of its m ~ a n ~sois, in his way, a critic of it, for the _critic is . he whoexhibits to us a work of art in a form c:lliferctnt from that

of the work itself, and lhe employment of a new materialis a Critical as well as a creative element. Sculpture, too.has ita critic, who may be either the carver o a gem, as ·he was in Greek days, .or some painter like Mantegna,who sought to reproduce on ~ v sthe beauty of plastic · ·line and the Sylnphonie dignity of processional ~ r e l ~ e f:And in the case of ·all these creative critics of art it is·· •evident that personality is an absolute essential for Uly . . ·real interpretation. When Rnbinstein plaY to _us the ·Sona/a.Appassillllata of Beethoven, he gives us riot merely. Beethoven, but also ·himS.elf and ·so gives us ~ t h o v e n·

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.• absolutely_:. Beethoven reinterpreted through a rich artis- _tic nature, and made vivid and wondeiful to us by a new

.and intense personality. When a great actor playsShakespeare we have the same experience. His ownindividuality becomes a vital part .of the interpretation.

, People sometimes say that actors give us their ownHat;nlets, and not Shakespeare s ; and this fallacy- forit is a fa l lacy- is, I regret to say, repeated by that

charming and graceful writer who has lately deserted theturmoil of literature for the peace of the House ofCommons, I mean the author of 0/Jiter Dida In pointof fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare s Hamlet.If. ~ a m l e thas something of the definiteness of a work of

, ~ t he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life.· . There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.

Emest As many Hamlets as there are melancholies ?

• Gii Jerl. Yes: and as r t springs from personality, soit is only to personality that it can be revealed, and from

· the meeting of the two comes right interpretative criticism.Ernest The critic, then, considered as the interpreter,

· will give no less than he receives, and lend as much ashe borrows?· Gil/Jeri He will be always showing us the work of rt

ln some new relation to ·our age. He will always bereminding us that great ~ r sof r t are living th ings -

are, in fact, the only things that live. So much, indeed,will he feel this, that I am certain that, as civilisation

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progresses and we become more highly ·organised,. the ·

elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, ·will grow less and less interested in actual life, and w

seele to gain tluir • tnJres-IUJIUa/11UJStmtirely rt1111 wllat r l

lias touelutl · For Life is terribly deficient in form. Its

catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrongpeople. There is a grotesque honor about its comedies, . . ..

and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One isalways wounded wbeo one approaches iL Things lasteither too long, or not long .enough. . ;

Ernest Poorlifel Poor l1uman llfel Are :.you ·not

even touched by the tears that the Roman poet tells us . ·.

are part of its essence?Gii Jert. Too quickly touched by them, I fear. For

when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in itsemotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments

of ecstasy or of joy, it aU seems to be a dream and anillusion. What are the unreal things, but the passionsthat once burned one like fire? What are the incrediblethings, but the things that one bas faithfully believed?What are the improbable things? The things that onehas done oneself. No Ernest; life cheats us with shadows like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure . I t

gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in itstrain. We come across some noble grief that we thinkwill lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but itpasses ;1way from us, and things less noble take its place,

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. and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silenceand of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous

. wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the' tress of gold-fleckedhair that we had once so wildly womhipped and so madlykissed • .

·Emesl Life then is a failure ?Gil6erl From the artistic point of view, certainly.

And the ' chief thing that makes life a failure from this. artistic point of vi( w is the thing that lends to life its

sordid security, the fact that one can never repeat euctlythe same emotion. . How different it is in the world of. rt I On a shelf of the bookcase behind you stands the·Difline Cowutly and know that, if · open it at a certainplace, shall be filled with a fierce hatred of some onewho has never wronged me, or stirred by a great love forsome one whom shall never see. There is no mood or

passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who havediscovered her secret can settle beforehand what ourexperiences are going to be . We can choose our day andselect our hour. We can say to ourselves, ~ m o r r o w

at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through thevalley of the shadow of death, and lo I the dawn finds usin the obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side.We p&Ss through the gate of the legend fatal to hope, andwith pity or with joy behold the horror of another world.The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces and theircowls of 'gilded lead . Out of the ceaseless winds that

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drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch theheretic rending his flesh, and the glutton lasbed bythe rain. We break the withered branches from the treein the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonoustwig bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud withbitter cries. Out of a hom of fire Odysseus speaks to us,and when from his e p u l h r e ~ £flame the great Ghibellinerises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that bedbecomes ours for a momenL Through the dim purple airfly those who have stained the world with the beauty oftheir sin, and in the pit of loathsome diaease, dropsystricken and swollen of body into the semblance of amonstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of. falsecoin. He bids us listen to his mis ry ; we stop, and with

. dry and gaping lips be tells us how he dreams day andnight of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy

channels gush down the green Casentine hills. Sinon,the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him. He smites himin the face, and they wrangle. We are fascinated by theirshame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us awayto that city turreted by giants where great Nimrod blowshis hom. Terrible things are in store for us, and w got meet them in Dante s raiment and with Dante s heart.We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swimsto the boat through the slimy waves. He calls to us, andwe reject him. When we hear the voice of his agony ware glad, and Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our

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scorn. We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus in

which traitors stick like straws in glass. Our foot strikesagainst the bead of Bocca He will not tell us his name,and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming skull.Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his face that be

may weep a little. We pledge our word to him, and whenhe has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that

we have spoken, and pass from him ; such cruelty beingcourtesy indeed, for who more base than he who has mercyfor the condemned of God In the jaws of Lucifer wesee the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Luciferthe men who slew Caesar. We tremble, and come forthto rebehold the stars.

In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the holymountain rises into the pure light of day. There is peacefor us, and for those who for a season abide in it there is

some peace also, though, pale from the poison of the

Maremma, Madonna Pia passes before us, and Ismene,with the sorrow of earth still lingering about her, is there.Soul after soul makes us share in some repentance or

some joy. He whom the mourni ng of his widow taughtto drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us of Nellapraying in her lonely bed, and we learn from the

mouth of Buonconte bow a single tear may save a dyingsinner from the fiend. Sordello, that noble and disdainfulLombard, eyes us from afar like a couchant lion. Whenhe learns that Virgil is one of Mantua s citizens, be falls

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upon his neck and when be learns that he is the singerof Rome he falls before his feet. In that valley whosegrass and flowers are fairer than cleft emerald and Indianwood and brighter th n scarlet and silver they are singing who in the world were kings; but the lips of Rudolphof Hapsburg do not move to the music of the others andPhilip of France beats his breast and Henry o Englandsits alone. On and on we go climbing the marvellousstair and the stars .become larger than their wont and the

song of the kings grows faint and at length we reach theseven trees of gold and the garden of the Earthly Paradise. In a griffin-drawn chariot appears one whose browsare bound with olive who is veiled in white and mantledin green and robed in a vesture that is coloured like livefire. The ancient flame wakes within us. Our bloodquickens through terrible pulses. We recognise her. t

i s Beatrice the woman we have worshipped. The icecongealed about our heart melts. Wild tears of anguishbreak from us and we bow our forehead to the groundfor we know that we have sinned. When we have donepenance and are purified and have drunk of the fountainof Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe the mistressof our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven. Out ofthat eternal pearl the moon the face of Piccarda Donati

leans to us. Her beauty troubles us for a moment andwhen like a thing that falls through water she passesaway we gaze after her with wistful eyes. The sweet

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planet of Venus is full of lovers. Cunizza, the sister ofEzzelin, the lady of Sordello s heart, is there, and Folco,the passionate singer of Provence, who in sorrow forAzalais forsook the world,. and the Canaanitish harlotwhose soul was the first that Christ redeemed. Joachimof Flora stands in the sun, and, in the sun, Aquinasrecounts the story of St. Francis and Bonaventure thestory of St. Dominic. Through the burning rubies of

Mars, Cacciaguida approaches. He tells us of the arrowthat is shot from the bow of exile, and how salt tastes thebread of another, and how steep are the stairs n thehouse of a stranger. In Saturn the souls sing not, andeven she who guides us dare not smile. On a ladder ofgold the flames ,rise and fall. At last, we see the pageantof the Mystical Rose. Beatrice fixes her eyes upon theface of God to tum them not again. The beatific vision

is granted to us we know the Love that moves the sunand all the stars.

Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred coursesand make ourselves one with the great Florentine, kneelat the same altar with him, and share his rapture and hisscorn. And if we grow tired of n antique time, anddesire to realise our own age in all its weariness and sin,are there not books that can make us live more in onesingle hour than life can make us live in a score ofshameful years ? Close to your hand lies a iittle volumebound in some Nile-green skin that has been powdered

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with gilded nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory. Itis the book that Gautier loved, it is Baudelaire's masterpiece. Open it at that sad madrigal that begins

Que m'importe que t u sols sage ?Sola belle I et soia triste I

and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as you have

never worshipped joy. Pass on to the poem on the manwho tortures himself, let its subtle music steal into yourbrain and colour your thoughts, and you will become fora moment what he was who wrote i t nay, not for amoment only, but for many barren moonlit nights andsunless sterile days will a despair that is not your own

make its dwelling within you, and the misery of anothergnaw your heart away. Read the whole book, suffer itto tell even one of its secrets to Y9Jlt soul, and your soulwill grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and seek to repent of strange crimes o whichit is guiltless, and to make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never known. And then, when you aretired of these flowers of evil, turn to the flowers that growin the garden of Perdita, and in their dew-drenchedchalices cool your fevered brow, and let their lovelinessheal and restore your soul ; or wake from his forgottentomb the sweet Syrian, Meleager, and bid the lover ofHeliodore make you music, for he too has flowers in his

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song, red pomegranate-blossoms, and irises that smell ofmyrrh, ringed daffodils and dark-blue h y a ~ n t h sand marjoram and crinkled ox eyes. Dear to him was the perfume.of the bean-field t evening, and dear to him the odorouseared-spikenard that grew on the Syrian hills, and thefresh green thyme, the wine-cup s charm. The feet of hislove as she walked in the garden were like lilies set upon

· lilies. Softer than sleep-laden poppy petals were her

lips, softer than violets and as scented. The flame-likecrocus sprang from the grass to look at her. For her theslim narcissus stored the cool rain ; and for her theanemones forgot the Sicilian winds that wooed them.And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor narcissus was asfair as she was.

I t is a strange thing, this transference of emotion. Wesicken with the same maladies as the poets, and the singerlends us his pain. Dead lips have their message for us,and hearts that have fallen to dust can communicate theirjoy. We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine, andwe follow Manon Lescaut over the whole world. Ours isthe love-madness of the Tyrian, and the terror of Orestesis ours also. There is no passion that we cannot feel, nopleasure that we may not gratify, and we can choose thetime of our initiation and the time of our freedom also.

ife Life Don t let us go to life for our fulfilment orour experience. t is a thing narrowed by circumstances,incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine corre-

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spondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that .can satisfy. the artistic and critical tem_peraDJent.· I t

makes us pay too high a price for its- wares, and we ·purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that IS monstrousand infinite.

Ernes_t Must we go then, to rt for- everything? _

Gilbert For everything. · Because Art ~ e snot hurtus. The teats that we shed at a play are a type of the

exquisite sterile emotions that it i s the function of Art -to ·awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve;but our ·grief is not bitter. In ~ actual life of man, ·sorrow, ·as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to alesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us·both purifies and initiates, i f I may · quote once ~ o r from·the great art-critic o ~ the Greeks. I t is through Art, .and·- .through Art only, that we can realise our perfection;through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ,ourselves from the o r ~ i perils of actual existence. ·Thisresults not merely from the fact that nothing that one,canimagine is worth doing, and tl lat one can imagine everything, but from the subtle law that emotional forces, likethe forces of the physical sphere, are limited in extentand energy. One can feel so much, and no more. Ancl

how can it matter with what pleasure life tries to temptone, or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one ssoul, if . in the spectacle of the lives of tliose who havenever ,existed one has found ·the ·true secret of joy, and

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· wept away one's tears over t h ~ rdeaths who, like Cordelia·and the daughter of Brabantio, can never die ?

. E .Nst. Stop a o ~ e n t t e m sto me that in every-. · thing that you have said there is something radically

immoral.Gilberl. All r t is immoral.Ernest. All art ?Gil/Jeri Yes. For emotion for the sake of emotion is

the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is theaim of life, and of that practical organisation of life thatwe call society. Society, which is the beginning and basisof morals, exists simply for the concentration of humanenergy, and in order to ensure its own continuance and

··healthy stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands,· ·of each of its citizens that he should contribute some.·form of prOductive labour to · the· common weal, and toil

and travail that the day's work may be done. Societyoften forgives the criminal ; it never forgives the dreamer.

· The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us, arehateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominatedby the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they arealways coming shamelessly up to one at Private Viewsand other places that are open to the general public, and~ y i n gin a loud stentorian voice, What are ·you doing ?whereas What are you thinking? is the only questionthat any single civilised being should ever be allowed towhisper to another. They mean .well, no doubt, theSe

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honest beaming folk. Perhaps that is the reason whythey are so excessively tedious. But some one . shouldteach them that while, in the opinion o society, Contem. .plation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can' beguilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the properoccupation of man.

Enust Contemplation ?Gii Jerl. Contemplation. I said to you some time ago ·

that it was far more difficult to talk about a thing than todo it Let me say to you now that to do nothing at all isthe most difficult thing in the world, the most difficultand the most intellectual. To Plato, with his passion for , .wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy . To Aristotle,with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form · .of energy also. I t was to this that the passion for holiness 'led the saint and the mystic of medimval days.

Ernest We exist, then, to do nothing?Gii Jerl. I t is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action

is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is thevision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks inloneliness and ·dreams . But we who are born at the closeof this wonderful age, are at once too cultured anc l toocritical, too intellectually subtle and too curious .of eXquisite pleuures to accept any speculations about life inexchange for life itself. To us the dtta t l iv iu is colourless, and the fruitio Dei without meaning. ~ p h y ~ i c s

do not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is

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out· of date. The. world through which the Academicphilosopher becomes the spectator of all time and of all

. existence is not really an ideal world, but simply a worldof abstract ideas. When we enter it, we starve amidstthe chill mathematics of thought. The courts of the cityof od are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded byIgnorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all thatin our nature is most di.Yine. I t is enough that our fathen

believed. They have exhausted the faith-faculty o thespecies. Their legacy to us is the scepticism of whichthey were afraid Had they put it into words, it mightnot live within us as thought. No, Ernest, no. We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be learnedfrom the sinner. We cannot go back to the philosopher,and the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater.suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a singlerose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Platorates so high P What to us is the Illumination of Philo,the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of BOhme the monstrousHeaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's blindedeyes ? Such things are less than the yellow trumpet ofone daffodil of the field, far less than the meanest of thevisible arts for, just as Nature is matter struggling intomind, so Art is mind expressing itself under the conditionsof matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike. To theaesthetic temperament the vague is always repellent.

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The Greeks were a nation of artists, because they werespared the sense of the infinite. Like Aristotle, likeGoethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete,and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.

Ernest What then do you propose ?Gilbert I t seems to me that with the development o ~

the critical spirit we shall be able to realise, not merelyour own lives, but the collective life of the race, and so to

make ourselves absolutely modem, in the true meaning ofthe word modernity. For he to whom the present is theonly thing that is present, knows nothing of the age n

which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century, onemust realise every century that has preceded it and thatbas contributed to its making. To know anything aboutoneself, one must know all about others. There must beno mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode

of life that one cannot make alive. Is this impossible ?I think not. y revealing to us the absolute mechanismof all action, and so freeing us from the self-imposed andtrammelling burden of moral responsibility, the scientificprinciple of Heredity has become, as it were, the warrantfor the contemplative life. t has shown us that we arenever less free than when we t y to act. It has hemmedus round with the nets of the hunter, and written uponthe walJ the prophecy of our doom. We may not watchit, for it is within us. We may not see it, save in a mirrorthat mirrors the soul. I t is Nemesis without her mask.

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I t is the last of the Fates and the most terrible. I t is theonly one of the Gods whose real name we know.

And yet while in the sphere of practical and externallife it has robbed energy of its freedom and activity ofits choice in the subjective sphere where the soul is atwork it comes to us this terrible shadow with many giftsin its bands gifts of strange temperaments and subtlesusceptibilities gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of

indifference complex multiform gifts of thoughts that areat variance with each other and passions that war againstthemselves. And so it is not our own life that we livebut the lives of the dead and the soul that dwells withinus is no single spiritual entity making us personal andindividual created for our service and entering into usfor our joy. I t is something that bas dwelt in fearfulplaces and in ancient sepulchres has made its abode. I t

is sick with many maladies and has memories of curioussins. I t is wiser than we are and its wisdom is bitter.

t fills us with impossible desires and makes us followwhat we know we cannot gain. One thing howeverErnest it can do for us. I t can lead us away fromsurroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mistof familiarity or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims

are marring the perfection of our development.I t

canhelp us to leave the age in which we were born and topass into other ages and find ourselves not exiled fromtheir air. t can teach us bow to escape from our

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experience, and to realise the experiences of those whoare greater than we are. The pain of Leopardi cryingout against life becomes our pain. Tbeocritus blows onhis pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph andshepherd. In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we lee beforethe bounds, and in the armour of Lancelot we ride fromthe bower of the Queen. We have whispered the secretof our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in thestained raiment of Villon have put our shame into song.We can see the dawn through Shelley s eyes, and whenwe wander with Endymion the Moon grows amorous ofour youth . Ours is the anguish of Atys, and ours theweak rage and noble sorrows of the Dane. Do youthink that it is the imagination that enables us to live .these countless lives? Yes: it is the imagination; and theimagination is the result of heredity . It is simply

concentrated race-experience.Ernest But where in this is the function of the

critical spirit ?Gi/6ert The culture that this transmission of racial

experiences makes possible can be made perfect by thecritical spirit alone, and indeed may be said to be one withit. For who is the true critic but be who bears wit in

himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriadgenerations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, noemotional impulse obscure? And who the true man ofculture, i not be who by fine scholarship and fastidious

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rejection has made instinct self-conscious and intelligent,and can separate the work that has distinction from thework that has it not, and so by contact and comparisonmakes himself master of the secrets of style and school,and understands their meanings, and listens to theirvoices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiositywhich is the real root, as it is the real flower of the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity, and,

having learned the best thatis

known and thought inthe world, l ives-it is not fanciful to say so-with thosewho are the Immortals.

Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has forits aim not t Qing but being and not being merely, butbeeoming that is what the critical spirit can give us. Thegods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection,as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching

with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragi-comedy ofthe world that they have made. We too, might live likethem, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford. Wemight make ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves fromaction, and become perfect by the rejection of energy. Ithas often seemed to me that Browning felt something ofthis. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into active life, and makeshim realise his mission by effort. Browning might havegiven us a Hamlet who would have realised · his missionby thought. · Incident and event were to him unreal or un-

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meaning. He mad_e the soul the protagonist of lile s trag

edy, and looked on action as the one undramaticl m ~ t

of a play. To us, at any rate, the BIOl SEOPHTIKOl .is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought ·we canlook out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the a:esthetic critic contemplates life, and DO arrow . .drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of hi&

harne JS. He at least is safe. He has discovered how to

live.Is such a mode of life i m m ~ r a lYes: all the art a r e ~

immoral, except those baser forms of sensual or didacticart that seek to excite to action of evil or of good. Foraction of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics.The aim of art is simply . to create a mood. Is such a-

mode of life unpractical? Ab I it is not so easy to beunpractical as the ignorant Phil.istine imagines. t werewell for England if it were so. There is no country in

the world so much in need of unpractical people as thiscountry of ours. With us, Thought is degraded by itsconstant association with · practice. Who that moves in

the stress and turmoil of actual existence, noisy politician,or brawling o ~ i lreformer, or poor narrow-minded priestblinded by the sufferings of that unimportant section ofthe community among whom he has cast his lot, can seri

ously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectualjudgment about any one.thing? Each of the professionsmeans a prejudice. rhe necessity for a career forces · ·

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or crisis arrivea, w shall be powerless because we shall

know nothing. And so, Ernest, let us not be decei Ved.England will never be civilised till she has added Utopiato her cfominions. There is more than one of her coloniesthat she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land.

What w want are unpractical people who see beyond the

moment, and think beyond the day. Those who try to

lead the people can only do so by following the mob. I t

is through ·the voice of one crying in the wilderness that

the ways of the gods must be prepared.But perhaps you think that in beholding for the mere

joy of beholding, and contemplating for · he sake of contemplation, there is something that is egotistic. f youthink so, do not so. t takes a thoroughly selfish age,like our own, to deify self-sacrifice. I t takes a thoroughlygrasping age, such as that in which w live, to set above

the fine intellectual virtues, those shallow and emotionalvirtues that are an immediate practical benefit to itself.They miss their aim, too, these philanthropists and Sentimentalists of our day, who are always chattering to oneabout one s duty to one s neighbour. For the developmento the race depends on the development of the individual,and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, theintellectual standard is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost. f you meet at dinmer a man who has spenthis life in educating h i m s e l f a rare type in our time, Iadmit, but still one occasionally to be met with y o u rise

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r ~ mtable richer, and conscious that a high ideal has fora moment touched and sanctified your days. But obI mydear Ernest, to sit next a man who has spent his life intrying to educate others I What a dreadful experience

• that is I How appalling is that ignorance which is theinevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions IHow limited in range the creature s mind proves to be IHow it wearies us, and must weary himself, with its end·

less repetitions and sickly reiteration I How l ckingi t

isin any element of intellectual growth I In what a viciouscircle. it always moves I

Ernest You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert. Haveyou had this dreadful experience, as you call it, lately ?

Gilllert Few of us escape it. People say that theschoolmaster is abroad. I wish to goodness he were.But the type of which, after all, he is only one, and certainly

the least important, of the representatives, seems to m tobe really dominating our lives ; and just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so thenuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is sooccupied in trying to educate others, that he has neverhad any time to educate himself. No, Ernest, self-cultureis the true ideal of man. Goethe saw it, and the immediatedebt that w ow to Goethe· is greater than the debt wow to any man since Greek days. The Greeks saw it,and have left us, as their legacy t modem thought, theconception of the contemplative life as w ll as the critical

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method by which alone can that life be truly realised. I t

was the one thing that made the Renaissance great andgave us Humanism. I t is the one thing that could makeour own age ~ also; for the real weakness of Englandlies not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coastsnot in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes or thedrunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts but simply ·in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult ofattainment still less that it is and perhaps will be foryears to come unpopular with the crowd. I t is so easyfor people t have sympathy with suffering. I t is so·difficult for them to have sympathy with thought. Indeed;so little do ordinary people understand what thought reallyis that they seem to imagine that when they have saidthat a theory is dangerous they have pronounced i ts·

condemnation whereas it is only such theories that have·any true intellectual value. An idea that is not ~ g r o u s

is unworthy of being c lled an idea at all.Ernest Gilbert you bewilder me. You have told me

that all art is in its essence immoral. Are you going totell me now that all thought is in its essence dangerous ?

Gilbert Yes in the practical sphere it is so. The

security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinctand the basis of the stability of society as a healthyorganism is the complete absence of any intelligence

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being fully aware of this rank themselves naturallyon the side of that splendid system that elevates themto the dignity of machines and rage so wildly againstthe intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any questionthat concerns life that one is tempted to define man as arational animal who always loses his temper when he iscalled upon to act in accordance with the dictates ofreason. But let us turn from the practical sphere and

say no more about the wicked philanthropists who indeedmay well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage ofthe Yellow River Chuang Tsii the wise who has proved_ hat such well-meaning and offensive busy-bodies havedestroyed the simple and spontaneous virtue that there isin man. They are a wearisome topic and I am anxiousto get back to the sphere in which criticism is free.

Ernest The sphere of the intellect?G11bert Yes. You remember that I spoke of the

critic as being in his own way as creative as the artistwhose work indeed may be merely of value in so f r asit gives to the critic a suggestion for some new moodof thought and feeling which he can realise with equal or

perhaps greater distinction of form and through the useof ·a fresh medium of expression make differently beauti

ful and more perfect. Well you seemed to me tobe

alittle sceptical about the theory. But perhaps I wrongedyou?

Ernest I am not really sceptical about it but I must

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admit that I feel very strongly that such work as youdescribe the critic producing and creative such workmust undoubtedly be admitted to e is, of necessity,purely subjective, whereas the greatest work is objectivealways, o j e ~ v eand impersonal.

Gilkrt The difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form merely. I t is accidental,not essential. All artistic creation is absolutely subjective: .

The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he saidhimself, but a mood of his own mind; and those ~ t

figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to · ·possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the . Ipoets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in theirultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves, · not asthey thought they were, but as they thought they werenot ; and by such thinking came in strange manner,

though but for a moment, really so to be. For out ofourselves we can never pass, nor can there be in creationwhat in the creator was not. Nay, I would say that themore objective a creation appears to be, the more subjec- .tive it· really is. Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantzand Guildenstem in the white streets o London, or seenthe serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at eachother in the open square ; but Hamlet came out of hissoul and Romeo out o his passion. They ·were elements ·of his nature to which he gave visible form, impulses that ,.stirred so stnntgly within him that he had, as it were

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perforce, to suffer them t realise their energy, not on the

lower plane of a c t u ~life, where they would have beentrammelled and constrained and so made imperfect, buton that imaginative plane of art where Love can indeedfind in Death its rich fulfilment, -where one can stab theeavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a new-madegrave, and make a guilty king drink his own hurt, and seeone s father s spirit, beneath the glimpses of the moon,stalking in complete steel ft;am misty wall t wall. Actionbeing limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied andunexpressed; and, just as it is because he did nothing thathe has been able t achieve everything, so it is because henever speaks to ·us of himself in his plays that his playsreveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true natureand temperament far more completely than do thosestrange and exquisite sonnets, even, in which he bares to

crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart. Yes , theobjective form is the most subjective i l matter. Man is

least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him

a mask, and he will tell you the truth.Ernest The ciitic, then, being limited to the subjective

form, will necessarily be less able to fully express himselfthan the artist, who has always at his disposal the formsthat are impersonal and objective.

Gilbert Not necessarily , and certainly not at all if herecognises that each mode of criticism is, in its highest

. e v e l o p m e n tsimply a mood, and .that we r ~ never more

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true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent. . The

aesthetic critic, constan.t only to the principle of beauty inall things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions,winning from the various schools the secret of theircharm bowing, it may be, before f o r ~~ t a r sor smil-ing, i i t be his fancy, at strange new gOds. What otherpeople call one s past has, no doubt, everything to . dowith them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself. ·The man who r ~ shis past . s a man who deserves tohave no future to look forward to. When one has f9undexpression for a mood, one has done with it. You laugh;but believe me it is so. Yeaterday it was Realism thatcharmed one. One gained from it that 11 U11eflll rimmwhich it was its aim to produce. One analped it, explainedit, and weariec:J of it. At sunset came the Lut iniste in

painting, and the · Sy• oliste in poetry, and the spirit of

mediaevalism, that spirit which belongs not to time butto temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia, andstirred us for a moment by the terrible fascination ofpain. To-day the cry is for Romance, and. already the I

leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on the purple hill-tops walks Beauty with • gilded feet. The old modesof creation linger, of course. The artists reproduce eitherthemselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. ButCriticism is always moving on, and the critic is alwaysdeveloping.

·· Nor, again, is the critic l eally limited to the subjective

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form of expression. The method of the drama is his, asweU as the method of the epos. He may use d i l o g u ~

as he did who set Milton talking to Marvel on the nature ofcomedy and tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord Brookediscourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks ; or adopt

· narration, as Mr . Pater is fond of doing, each of whose·. · Imaginary Portraits i s not that the title of the b o o k -

p r e s e n ~to us, under the fanciful guise of fiction, somefine and equisite piece of criticism , one on the painterWatteau, another on the philosophy of Spinoza, a third onthe Pagan elements of the early Renaissance, and the last,and in some respects the most suggestive , on the source

, of that Aufklarung, that enlightening which dawned onGermany in the last century, and to which our ownculture owes so great a debt. Dialogue, certainly, thatwonderful. literary form whiCh, from Plato ~ Lucian,

and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno tothat grand old Pagan · n whom Carlyle took such delight,the creative critics of the world have always employed, cannever lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode ofexpression. y its means he can both reveal and con-ceal himself, and give form to every fancy, _and reality toevery mood. By its means he can exhibit the objectfrom each point of view, and show it to us in the round,as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner all ·the richness and reality of effect that comes from thoseside issues that are suddenly suggested by the central

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idea in its progress, and really illumiae the idea more

completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts thatgive a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yetconvey something of the delicate charm ~ c h a n ~ e .

Ernu l By its means, too, he caa invent an imaginaryantagonist, and convert him when he chooses by someabsurdly sophistical argument.

Gil/Jeri Ah I it is so easy to conYert other . I t is so ,difficult to convert oneself. To arrive at what one reallybelieves, one must speak through lips different from one'sown. To know the truth one must imagine m d s offalsehoods. For what is Truth? In matters of religion,it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters ofscience, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, itis one's last mood. And you see now, Ernest, that thecritic has at his disposal as many objective forms of expres

sionas the

artist has. Ruskinput

his criticism intoimaginative prose, and is superb in his . changes and contradictions; and Browning put his into blank verse, aqdmade painter and poet yield us their secret; and ·M. Renanuses dialogue, and Mr. Pater fiction, and Rossetti translated into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione and thedesign of Ingres, and his own design and colour also,feeling, with the instinct of one who had many modes of

utterance, that the ultimate art is literature. and the finest .and fullest medium that of words.

Ernul Well, now that you have settled that the critjc

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has at his disposal all objective forms, I wish you wouldtell me what are the qualities that should characterise thetrue critic.

Gilbert What would you say they were l

·Ernest Well, I should say that a critic should aboveall things be fair.

Gilbert Ab I not fair. A critic cannot be fair in the.ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things that~

not interest one that one can give a really unbiassed.. opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed. ·opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who

. · sees both sides of a question, is a man who sees absolutely• • · nothing at all. rt is a passion, and, in matters of art,

~ o u h tis inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is ftuid·· rather than fixed, and, depending upon fine moods and

exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed into the rigidity

of a sCientific formula or a theological dogma. It is tothe soul that r t speaks, and the soul may be made the

. prisoner of the mind as well as of the body. One should,of course, have no prejudices; but, as a great Frenchman·remar)ted a hundred years ago, it is one s business in suchmatters to have preferences, and when one has preferencesone ceases to be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can

• equally and impartially admire all schools of Art. Nofairness is not one of the qualities of the true critic. I t

· is not even a condition of criticism. Each form of Art withwhich we come in contact dominates us for the moment

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and by a thousand cillferent ways and will ever be curiousof new sensations and fresh points of view. Throughconstant change, and through constant change alone, hewill find his true unity. He will not consent to .be theslave of his own opinions. For what is mind but motionin the intellectual sphere ? he essence of thought, asthe essence of life, is growth. You must not be frightenedby words, Ernest. What people cai1 insincerity is simply

· . a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

l

Enu rl I am afraid I have not been fortunate in mysuggestions.

Gi/ Nrl. Of the three qualifications you mentioned, two,sincerity and fairness, were, if not actually moral, at least

• on the border-land 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, Chaoshas come again. They are too often confused in Englandnow, and though our modem Puritans cannot destroy abeautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurlenee; they can almost taint beauty for a moment. t ischiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such peoplefind expression. I regret it because there is much to besaid in favor of modem journalism. y giving us theopinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the

• ignorance of the community. By carefully chroniclingthe current events of contemporary life, i t shows us of

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. what very little importance such events really ~ yinvariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, arid what arenot. But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articlesupon modem art. ~ e n it does this it stultifies itself.And yet Tartuffe s articles, and Chadband s notes do thisgood, at least. They serve to show how extremely limitedis the area over which ethics, and ethical considerations, ·can claim to exercise influence. Science is out · of thereach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. ·Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixedupon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.To Ql rals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.However, let these mouthing Puritans pass they havetheir comic side. Who can help laughing when an ordinaryjournalist 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 ournewspapers and newspaper writers. For they give us thebald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, withdegrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with theconscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate andprosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely nointerest whatsoever. But the artist, who accepts the facts \of life, and yet transforms them into shapes of beauty, andmakes them vehicles of pity or o awe, and shows theircolour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical

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import also, and builds out of them a world more real thanreality itself, and of loftier and more noble impor t - whoshall set limits to him? Not the apostles of that new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity writ large. Notthe apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but the whineof the hypocrite, and is both writ and spoken badly. Themere suggestion is ridiculous. Let us leave these wicked

. people, ·and proceed to the discussion o the artistic qualificatiops necepary for the true critic.

E m u l And what are they? Tell me yourself.Gilflettl Temperament is the primary requisite for the

· c r i t i c - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty,<and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

l nder what conditions, and ·by what means, this temperament is engendered in race or individual, we will not

discuss at present. t is sufficient to note that it exists,

and that there is in us a beauty-sense, separate from theother senses and above them, separate from the reasonand of nobler import, separate from the soul and of equalvalue a sense that leads some to create, and others, thefiner spirits as I think, to contemplate merely. But tobe purified and made perfect, this sense requires someform of exquisite environment. Without this it starves,or is dulled. You remember that lovely passage in whichPlato describes how a young Greek should be educated, andwith what insistence he dwells upon the importance ofsurroundings, telling us how the lad is to be brought up

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in the midst of fair sights and sounds, so that the beauty

of material things may prepare his soul for the receptionof the beauty that is spiritual. Insensibly, and withoutknowing the reason why he is to develop that real love ofbeauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, isthe true aim of education. By slow degrees there is to beengendered in him such a temperament as will lead himnaturally and simply to choose the good in preference tothe bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant,to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses graceand charm and loYeliness. Ultimately, in its due course,this t ste is to become critical and self-conscious, but atfirst it is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and hewho has received this true culture of the inner man willwith clear and certain vision perceive the omissions andfaults 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 andnoble, he will rightly blame and hate the bad, now inthe days of his youth, even before he is able to know thereason why: and so, when, later on, the critical andself-conscious spirit develops in him he wil l recogniseand salute it as a friend with whom his education basmade him long familiar. I need hardly say, Ernest, howf r we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and Ican imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossyface of the Philistine i f one ventured to suggest to him

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that the true aim of education was the love of beauty,and that the methods by which education should workwere the development of temperament, the cultivation oftaste, 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 mattersvery little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at

Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing inWayntleete s chapel, or lie in the green meadow, amongthe 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 thevaulted ceiling s shadowy fans or pass through the

sculptured gateway of Laud s building in the College ofSt. John. Nor is it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge, that

the sense of beauty can be formed and trained and per-

fected. All over England there is a Renaissance of thedecorative Arts. Ugliness has had its day. Even inthe houses of the rich there is taste, and the houses ofthose who are not rich have been made gracious andcomely 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 i he mocks no longer, itis because he has been met with mockery, swifter andkeener than his own, and for a moment has been bitterlyschooled into that silence which should seal for ever hisuncouth distorted lips. What has been done up to now,

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has been chiefly in the clearing of the way. It is always

more difficult to destroy than it is to create, and whenwhat one h s to destroy is vulgarity and stupidity, the tasko destruction needs not merely courage but also contempt.Yet it seems to me to have been, in a measure, done. Wehave got rid of what was bad. We have now to makewhat is beautiful. And though the mission of the aestheticmovement is to lure peOple to contemplate, not to leadthem to create, yet, as the creative instinct is strong inthe Celt, and it is the Celt who leads in art, there is noreason why in future years this strange Renaissanceshould not become almost as mighty in its way as wasthat new birth of Art that woke many centuries ago in thecities of Italy .

Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, w musttum to the decorative arts : to the arts that touch us, not

to the arts that teach us. Modem pictures are, no doubt,delightful to look at. t least, some of them are. Butthey are quite impossible to live with ; they are too clever,too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvi-ous, and their method too clearly defined. One exhaustswhat they have to say in a very short time, and then theybecome as tedious as one s relations. I am very fond ofthe work of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris

and London. Subtlety and distinction have not yet leftthe school. Some of their arrangements and harmoniesserve to remind one of the unapproachable beauty of

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spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt

of nature which i l the best and only modest thing aboutthem. One tires at the end of the work o individualswhose individuality is always noisy and generally unin-

teresting. There is far more to be said in favour of

that newer school at Paris the A.nlulidtles as they callthemselves who, refusing to leave the artist entirely a t

the mercy of the weather do not find the ideal of ar t

in mere atmospheric effect but seek rather for theimaginative beauty of design and the lovelioess of faircolour and rejecting the tedious realism of those whomerely paint what they see try to see something worthseeing and to see it not merely with actual and physicalvision but with that nobler vision o the soul which is as

far w i d ~ rin spiritual scope as it is far more splendid inartistic purpose. They at any rate work under those

decorative conditions that each art requires for its perfection and have sufficient ~ e t h e t i cinstinct to regret thosesordid and stupid limitations of absolute modernity ofform which have proved the ruin of so many of theImpressionists. Still the art that is frankly decorative is

the art to live with. t is of all our visible arts the oneart that creates in us both mood and temperament. Merecolour unspoiled by meaning and unallied with definiteform can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.The harmony that resides in the delicate proportio .ns oflines and masses becomes mirrored in the mind. The

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repetitions of pattern giYe us rest. The marvels of designstir the imagination. In the mere loveliness of the materials employed there are latent elements of culture. Noris this all. By its deliberate rejection of Nature as theideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method ofthe ordinary painter, decorative art not merely prepares thesoul for the reception of true imaginative work but developsin it that sense of form which is the basis of creative no

less than of critical achievement. For the real artist ishe who proceeds, not from feeling to form but from formto thought and passion. He does not first conceive anidea, and then say to himself, I will put my idea into acomplex metre of fourteen lines, but, realising the beautyof the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of musicand methods of rhyme , and the mere form suggests whatis to ill it and make it intellectually and emotionally

complete. From time to time the world cries out againstsome charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyedand silly phrase, he has nothing to say. But i he hadsomething to say, he would probably say it, and the resultwopld be tedious. I t is just because he has no newmessage, that he can do beautiful work. He gains hisinspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artistshould . A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. AU bad poetry springsfrom genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious,and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

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Ernest I wonder do you really believe wh t yousay.

Gilberl Why should you wonder? I t is not. merelyin art that the body is the soul . In every sphere o lifeForm is the beginning of things. The rhythmic harmoni-ous gestures of dancing convey, Plato tells us, both rhythmand harmony into the mind. Forms are the food of faitb,

, cried Newman in one of those great moments of sinceritythat made us admire and know the man. He was right,though he may not have known how terribly r i g ~he was.The Creems are believed, not because they are rational,but because they are repeated. Yes Form is everything.I t is the secret of life . Find expression for a sorrow, and

it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy,and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish to love? Use

Love s Litany, and the words will create the yearning

from which the world fancies that they spring. Haveyou a grief that corrodes your heart? Steep yourself inthe language of grief, learn its utterance from Prince

Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that

mere expression is a mode of consolation, ·and that Form,which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.And so, to return to the sphere of Art, i t is Form that

creates not merely the critical temperament, but also the

aesthetic instinct, that unerring i n s t i n ~ tthat reveals to one

all things under their conditions of beauty. Start withthe worship of form, and there is · no secret in art tha t

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will not be revealed to you and remember that in criticismas in creation temperament is everything and that it isnot by the time of their production but by the temperaments to which they appeal that the schools of art shouldbe historically grouped.

Erne /. Your theory of education is delightful. Butwhat infiuenoe will your critic brought up in theseexquisite surroundings possess ? Do you really think

th t any artist is ever affected by criticism ?Gii Jerl. The influence of the critic will be the mere

f ct of his own existence. He will represent the flawlesstype. In him the culture of the century will see itselfrealised You must not ask of him to have any aim otherthan the perfecting of himself. The demand of theintellect as h s been well said is simply to feel itselfalive. The critic may indeed desire to exercise infiuenoe ; but if so be will concern himself not with theindividual but with the age which he will seek to wakeinto consciousness and t make responsive creating in itnew desires and appetites and lending it his larger visionand his nobler moods. The actual art of to-day willoccupy him less than the art of to-morrow far less thanthe art of yesterday and as for this or tbat person at

present toiling away what do the industrious matter?They do their best no doubt and consequently w get theworst from them. It is always with the best intentionsthat tbe worst work is done. And besides my dear Ernest

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when a man reaches the age o forty, or becomes a Royal .Academician, or is elected a member of the AthenaeumClub, or is recognised as a popular novelist, whose booksare in great demand at surburban railway stations, onemay have the amusement of exposing him, but one cannothave the pleasure of reforming him. Aod this is, I daresay, very fortunate for him; for I have no doubt thatreformation is a much more painful process than punish-

ment, is indeed punishment in its most aggravated an4moral f o r m - a fact which accounts for our entire failure .as a community to reclaim that interesting phenomenonwho is called the confirmed criminal.

Ernest But may it not be that the poet is the .best .judge of poetry, and the painter of painting? Each artmust appeal primarily to the artist who works in it. His ,judgment will surely be the most valuable ?

Gil/Jeri The appeal of all art is simply to the artistictemperament. Art does not address herself to thespecialist. Her claim is that she is universal, and tliat in .all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so far from itsbeing true that the artist is the best judge of art, a reallygreat artist can never judge of other people s work at all;and can hardly, in fact, judge of his own. That veryconcentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limitsby its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation.The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his owngoal The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud

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around him.The

gods are hidden from each other.They can recognise their worshippers. That is all.E,.nest. You say that a great artist cannot recognise

the beauty of work different from his own.Gii Jerl. It is impossible for him to do so. Words-

worth saw in Eflli 1111ilm merely a pretty piece of Paganism,and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was deaf toWordsworth s message, being repelled by its form, and

Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature,could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poetof the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden fromhim. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles.Those droppings of warm tears bad no music for him.Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not under-

stand the method of Shakespeare, any more than could SirJoshua the method of Gainsborough. Bad artists alwaysadmire each other s work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artistcannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned,under any conditions other than those that he has selected.Creation employes all its critical faculty within its ownsphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs toothers. It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing

. , that he is the proper judge of it.Emesl. Do you really mean that ?·Gilllerl. Yes , for creation limits, while contemplation

widens, the vision.

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Bnusl But what about technique? Surely each r t

has it separate technique ?Gi/krl Certainly: each art has .its grammar and its

materials. There is no mystery about either, and theincompetent can always be correct. But, while the lawsupon which Art rests may be fixed and certain, to findtheir true realisation they must·be touched by the imagi -nation into such beauty they will seem an exception,

each one of them. Technique is really personality.That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why thepupil ·cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic canunderstand it. To the great poet, there is only onemethod of music his own. To the great painter, thereis only one manner of pain t ing t h ~ twhich he himselfemploys. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone,can appreciate all forma and modes. t is to him that

Art makes her appeal.E n u s l Well, I think I have put all my questions to

you And now I must ad m i tGii Jerl. Ah don t say that you agree with me. Whe o

people agree with me I always f l that I must be ~ o n g ,Enus l 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 ? ·

G i ~ e r l I t is to criticism that the future belongs. Thesubject-matter at the disposal of creation becomes every

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is with us. But there is stlll much to be done in the

sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that fictionis getting too morbid. s far as psychology is concernedit has never been morbid enough. We have merelytouched the surface of the soul that is all. In one singleivory cell of the brain there are stored away things moremarvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamedof who like the author of e Roure et 4 Noir havesought to track the soul into its most secret places and

to make life confess its dearest sins. Still there is a limiteven to the number of untried backgrounds and it ispossible that a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to whichit seeks to supply fresh material. I myself am inclined tothink that creation is doomed. t springs from too primitive too natural an impulse. However this may be it is

certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creationis always diminishing while the subject-matter of criticsinincreases daily. There are always new attitudes for the

mind and new points of view. The duty of imposingform upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances.There was never a time when Criticism was more neededthan it is now. I t is only by its means that Humanitycan become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.

Hours ago Ernest y9u asked me the use of Criticism.You might just as well have asked me the use of thought.I t is Criticism a s · Arnold points out that creates the

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intellectual atmosphere of the age. I t is Criticism as Ihope to point out myself some day that makes the minda tine instrument. We in our educational system haveburdened the memory with a load of unconnected factsand laboriously striven to impart our laboriously-acquiredknowledge. We teach people how to remember we neverteach them how to grow. t has never occurred to us totry and develop in the mind a more subtle quality of

apprehension and discernment. The Greeks did this andwhen we come in contact with the Greek critical intellectwe cannot but be conscious that while our subject-matteris in every respect larger and more varied than theirstheirs is the only method by which this subject-matter canbe interpreted. England has done one thing; it hasinvented and established Public Opinion which is anattempt to organise the ignorance of the community and

to elevate it to the dignity of physical force. But Wisdomh s always been hidden from it. Considered as an instrument of thought the English mind is coarse andundeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is thegrowth of the critical instinct.

t is Criticism again that by concentration makes culture possible. I t takes the cumbersome mass of creativework and distils it into a finer essence. Who that desiresto retain any sense of form could struggle through themonstrous multitudinous books that the world has produced books in which thought stammers or ignorance

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brawls? The thread that is to guide us across the wearisome

labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism. Nay more wherethere is no record and history is either lost or w s neverwritten Criticism can recreate the past for us from thevery smallest fragment of language or art just as surelyas the man of science can from some tiny bone or themere impress of a foot upon a rock recreate for usthe winged dragon or Titan lizard that once made thee rth shake beneath its tread can call Behemoth out o

his cave and make Leviathan swim once more across thestartled sea Prehistoric history belongs to the philological and arclueological critic. It is to him that the originsof things are revealed. The self-conscious deposits of anage are nearly always misleading. Through philologicalcriticism alone we know more o the centuries o whichno actaal record has been preserved than ~ do o the

centuries that have left us their scrolls. I t can do for uswhat can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics. I tcan give us the exact science o mind in the process o

becoming. I t can do for us what History cannot do. I tcan tell us what man thought before be learned how to

write You have asked me about the in1luence of Critiicism. I think I have answered that question already;but there is this also to be said. I t is Criticism that makes

us cosmopolitan. .The Manchester school tried to makemen realise the brotherhood o humanity by pointing outthe commercial advantages of peace. I t sought to degrade

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the wonderful world into a eommon market-place for the

buyer aDd the seller. I t addressed itself to the lowestinstincts, and it failed. ar followed upon war, and thetradesman s creed did not prevent France and Genaanyfrom clashing together in blood-Btained battle. There areothers of our own day who seek to appeal to mereemotional sympathies, 0 1 to tbe shallow dogmas o somevague system of abstract ethics. They :baye their PeaceSocieties, so dear to the sentimentalists, and their proposals for unarmed International Arbitration, so popularamong those who have never read history. But mereemotional sympathy will not do. I t is too variable, andtoo closely connected with the passions; and a board ofarbitrators who, for the general welfare o the race, are t

be deprived of the powel 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 ber· sword iu her hand. When Right is not Might, it is Evll.No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any

aore than the greed f « gain could do so. t is only bythe cultivation o tbe habit of intellectual criticism thatwe thall be able to rise superior t race prejudices.G o e th e JOG will not misunderstand what I s y was aGerman o 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 o Napoleon trampled upon vine

yard and comfield, his lips were silent. •How can one

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write songs of hatred without hating? " he said to Ecker

man, and how could I,t

whom culture and barbarismare alone of importance, hate a nation which is among themost cultivated of the earth, and to which I owe so greata part of my own cuitivation ? This note, sounded inthe modem world by Goethe first, will become, I think,the starting point for the cosmopolitanism of the future.Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting uponthe unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms .

f we are tempted to make war upon another nation, weshall remember that we are seeking to destroy an elementof our own culture, and possibly its most importantelement. s long as war is regarded as wicked, it willalways have its fascination. When it is looked upon as .vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change will , ofcourse, 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. n t e l l ~ t u a l

criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer thanthose that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. ItYiJ.l give us the peace that springs from understanding.

Nor is this all. It is Criticism that, recognising noposition as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow

shibboleths of any sect or school, creates that serene-phiiosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake,and loves it not t le less because it knows it to be unat -

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tainable. How little we have of this temper in England;

and bow much we need it The English mind is alwaysin a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in thesordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians orthird-rate theologians. It was reserved for a man ofscience to show us the supreme example of that sweetreasonableness of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and,alas to so little effect. The author · of the Origino Spe Us had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. f

one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platformsof England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian, orthe inditference of Montaigne. We are dominated by thefanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity. Anythingapproaching to the free play o the mind is practicallyunknown 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 h what an antinomian you areGilhrl The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an

antinomian always. To be good, according to the vulgarstandard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merelyrequires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lackof imaginative thought, and a certain low passion formiddle-class respectability. )Esthetics are higher than

ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. Todiscern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to whichwe can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in

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the development ·of the ibdiviclual, than a aense of right

and wrong. lEathetics, in fact, are to Ethics in thesphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere ofthe external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics,like natural selection, make existence .possible. Esthetics 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 ouraim, we attain t that perfection of which the saints h;tve .dreamed, the pedect ion of those to whom sin is impossible, ·not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, butbecause they can do everything they wish without hurtto the s o u ~and can -wish for nothing that can do the soulharm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able totransform into elements of a richer experience, or a finersusceptibility , or a newer mode of h o u h ~acts or passionsthat

with the common wouldbe

commonplace,or

withthe

uneducated ·ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is tliis ·d n g e r o u s ~Yes ; it is dangerous all ideas, as I toldyou, are so. But the night wearies, and the light flicker8in the lamp. One more thing cannot help saying toyou. You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterilething. The nineteenth century is a turning point inhistory simply on account of the work of two men, ·

Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book ofNature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not torecognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most

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· 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 W odd-Spirit are one.• Enrest And he who is in possession of this spirit orwho01 this spirit possesses, will I suppose, do . nothing

Gii Jert. Like the Persephone of whom Landor tellsus the sweet pensive Persephone around whose whitefeet the asphodel and amaranth are blooming, he will sit

contented .. in that deep , motionless, quiet -which mortalspity, and which t ~gods enjoy. He will look out uponthe world and know its secret. By contact with divinethings, he will become divine. His will be the r f e tlife,and his only. .

Enut t You have told me many strange things tonight, Gilbert. You h-.ve told me that it is more difficultto 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 toldme that all Art is immoral, and all thought dangerous ;

, · that criticism is more creative than creation, and that thehighest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Artwhat the artist had not put there ; that it is exactly becausea 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 onewho can only find his way by mOQnlight and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before ~ rest of the world.

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Enusl His punishment?·Gii Jerl. And his reward . But see it is dawn already.

Draw back the curtains and open the windows wide.How cool the morning air is I Piccadilly lies at our feetlike a long riband of silver. A fdnt purple mist bangsover the Park and the shadows of the white houses arepurple. I t is too late t sleep. Let us go down to CoventGarden and look at the roses. Come I I am tired of

thought.

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Intentions (1891)