Intentions

Cyril (coming in through the open window from the terrace).  My dear Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library.  It is a perfectly lovely afternoon.  The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum.  Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.

Vivian.  Enjoy Nature!  I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.  What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.  When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art at all.  Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth.  It is not to be found in Nature herself.  It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.

It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.  As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation.  To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many exceptions to this rule.  Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell. Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the humourists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their country; and Charles Lamb’s friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.

A DIALOGUE.  Part I.  Persons: Gilbert and Ernest.  Scene: the library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.

Gilbert (at the Piano).  My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

Ernest (looking up).  At a capital story that I have just come across in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.

Gilbert.  What is the book?  Ah! I see.  I have not read it yet.  Is it good?

Ernest.  Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

Ernest.  Stop a moment.  It seems to me that in everything that you have said there is something radically immoral.

Gilbert.  All art is immoral.

Ernest.  All art?

Gilbert.  Yes.  For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organisation of life that we call society. Society, which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists simply for the concentration of human energy, 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.  Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas ‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another. They mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk.  Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious. But some one should teach them that while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.

Ernest.  You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert.  You have told me that it is more difficult to 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 told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a 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 one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Ernest.  His punishment?

Gilbert.  And his reward.  But, see, it is dawn already.  Draw back the curtains and open the windows wide.  How cool the morning air is!  Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple.  It is too late to sleep.  Let us go down to Covent Garden and look at the roses.  Come!  I am tired of thought.