Intentions quotes

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 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.

And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch.

Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.

Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind.

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.

Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come;

Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.

Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.

Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated;

Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.

Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.

I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated;

I don’t complain. If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life.

Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one. And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative.

Vivian. Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I.

Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’

Besides, my article is really a most salutary and valuable warning. If it is attended to, there may be a new Renaissance of Art.

Vivian.

Who wants to be consistent?

The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I. Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim.’

They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind!

After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence.

If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians won’t do. Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar.

Vivian. Probably. Besides, you are a little too old.

We don’t admit anybody who is of the usual age.

Cyril. Well, I should fancy you are all a good deal bored with each other.

The Decay Of Lying: A Protest.—One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner. He has his tedious document humain, his miserable little coin de la création, into which he peers with his microscope.

Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says.

Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding.

He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost unbearable. The horses of Mr. William Black’s phaeton do not soar towards the sun.

He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding.

He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective.

As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost unbearable. The horses of Mr. William Black’s phaeton do not soar towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.

Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced.

England is the home of lost ideas.

As for that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.

Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas.

As for that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the only thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.

‘In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as Robert Elsmere has been produced, things are not much better. M.

Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.

Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice.

He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective.

The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.

The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is.

Otherwise the novel is not a work of art. As for M.

In point of fact what is interesting about people in good society—and M. Bourget rarely moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London,—is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.

It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.

In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals:

‘All Balzac’s characters;’ said Baudelaire, ‘are gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.’

A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades.

His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself.

Vivian. Ah! Meredith! Who can define him?

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.

As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate.

We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo.

Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.

Cyril. There is something in what you say, and there is no doubt that whatever amusement we may find in reading a purely model novel, we have rarely any artistic pleasure in re-reading it.

The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subject-matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us.

As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the …

And this is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what is not.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.

But what do you say about the return to Life and Nature? This is the panacea that is always being recommended to us.

Vivian. Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic. What I mean is this. If we take Nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date.

One touch of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of Art.

If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet.

If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet.

He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

He went moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetry gave him ‘Laodamia,’ and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is.

Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance. History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right.

Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.

‘But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end.

A cultured Mahomedan once remarked to us, “You Christians are so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of making an artistic application of the second.” He was perfectly right, and the whole truth of the matter is this:

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.

’

Whatever was his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse.

For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.

He is the very basis of civilised society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand’s farcical comedies.

‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

She is a veil, rather than a mirror.

She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.

‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.

She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses.

She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the “forms more real than living man,” and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies.

‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses.

She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.

Hers are the “forms more real than living man,” and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity.

Vivian. Certainly I do.

Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are always dangerous things—it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.

We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, …

And it has always been so.

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.

Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They brought their types with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with models.

He was invented by Tourgénieff, and completed by Dostoieffski. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the débris of a novel.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempré, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comédie Humaine.

Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People’s Palace rose out of the débris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

Our Luciens de Rubempré, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comédie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.

The humanitarian crowd were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and as soon as the coast was clear he left. As he passed out, the name on the brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye.

It was ‘Jekyll.’ At least it should have been.

Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course accidental. In the following case the imitation was self-conscious.

The boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.

The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgénieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.

Vivian.

My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.

Cyril. Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her effects from him?

They did not exist till Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis.

Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.

And so, let us be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has done so already, indeed.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.

Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs.

Still, Nature irritates one more when she does things of that kind. It seems so stupid, so obvious, so unnecessary.

A false Vautrin might be delightful. A doubtful Cuyp is unbearable.

However, I don’t want to be too hard on Nature.

You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is Nature?

Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation.

It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.

For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence.

It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London.

Cyril.

You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better.

But even admitting this strange imitative instinct in Life and Nature, surely you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and under whose influence it is produced.

Vivian. Certainly not!

Art never expresses anything but itself.

This is the principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts.

She develops purely on her own lines.

She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols.

Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place and people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less it represents to us the spirit of its age.

The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.

In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans.

But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of our own day.

The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth.

Cyril. But modern portraits by English painters, what of them? Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent?

The Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be produced in the nineteenth century.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence?

But this is simply because Holbein compelled life to accept his conditions, to restrain itself within his limitations, to reproduce his type, and to appear as he wished it to appear.

It is style that makes us believe in a thing—nothing but style.

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

It is style that makes us believe in a thing—nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see.

They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Cyril. Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end of your article.

The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance of psychology.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

However, I must read the end of my article:—

But in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but through his capacity for disbelief.

Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle.

Many a worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown;

The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in Art.

Just as those who do not love Plato more than Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.

The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvellous tale, and fantasy, La Chimère, dances round it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice.

‘And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be!

Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land.

The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable.

Besides, it is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date.

Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings. This is the secret of Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature’s weakness.

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

But of this I think I have spoken at sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace, where ‘droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,’ while the evening star ‘washes the dusk with silver.’

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;

Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity.

A mask tells us more than a face.

These disguises intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time he seems to have made his mark. Charles Lamb speaks of ‘kind, light-hearted Wainewright,’ whose prose is ‘capital.’

But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production.

This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something.

He recognised that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work without interest.

In this artistic perception he was perfectly right.

All beautiful things belong to the same age.

And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted figures and the faint ΚΑΛΟΣ finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michael …

Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable. The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim.

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everything connected with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and scene-painting.

This being the least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence.

A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.

Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature. ‘I hold three things in high estimation,’ he says somewhere: ‘to sit lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees while the sun shines around me;

This being the least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence. A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.

Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature.

‘I hold three things in high estimation,’ he says somewhere: ‘to sit lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the consciousness of neighbourhood.

De Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us hope that she was not.

Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.

The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed …

He knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to England he was imperilling his life. Yet he returned. Should one wonder?

It was said that the woman was very beautiful. Besides, she did not love him.

It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. A noise in the street attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment. Some one outside called out, ‘That’s Wainewright, the Bank-forger.’

I have always done so. I do so still. It is the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning’s turn of sweeping it out.

I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!

’ When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’

I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’ When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘

Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.

’

The phrase that he applies to his companions need not surprise us.

Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result of starvation.

There was probably no one on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a psychologically interesting nature.

The development of Mr. Wainewright’s style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive.

One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary London, and made so brilliant a début in life and letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W.

But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought ‘capital’ has no small historic interest. That he had a sincere love of art and nature seems to me quite certain.

There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.

We cannot re-write the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.

This seems to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view.

The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose.

The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.

This seems to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose.

The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.

It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word.

However, Art has not forgotten him. He is the hero of Dickens’s Hunted Down, the Varney of Bulwer’s Lucretia; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison.’

To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.

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

Gilbert. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. But I must confess that I like all memoirs. I like them for their form, just as much as for their matter.

In literature mere egotism is delightful.

It is what fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné.

Gilbert.

Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

But I must confess that I like all memoirs. I like them for their form, just as much as for their matter. In literature mere egotism is delightful.

Gilbert. What has become of them? They are the pest of the age, nothing more and nothing less.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Gilbert. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.

Gilbert. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them.

Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.

Ernest. May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?

to all our second-rate littérateurs. We are overrun by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as mutes. But we won’t talk about them.

They are the mere body-snatchers of literature.

The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach. And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorák? Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorák? He writes passionate, curiously-coloured things.

Gilbert.

And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is wicked.

Ernest. I did not say that.

Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which thought moves.

It was the machine he loved, not what the machine makes.

The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.

Gilbert.

It 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?

Gilbert. I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest.

It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.

Ernest. It is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that petulant manner. It is quite true. In the best days of art there were no art-critics.

That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development. As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it.

It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.

I have merely to do with literature.

Gilbert.

Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

That is all. But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It would be more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.

I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don’t degrade me into the position of giving you useful information.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the night.

Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the night.

Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful still.

Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture. Still less do I desire to talk learnedly.

Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.

And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes. No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by Dvorák.

Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England’s great poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later verse.

When Milton could no longer write he began to sing.

Who would match the measures of Comus with the measures of Samson Agonistes, or of Paradise Lost or Regained?

She need not be afraid. I am tired of my expedition into the dim, dull abyss of facts. There is nothing left for me now but the divine μονόχρονος ηδονή of another cigarette.

Cigarettes have at least the charm of leaving one unsatisfied.

Ernest. Try one of mine. They are rather good. I get them direct from Cairo. The only use of our attachés is that they supply their friends with excellent tobacco. And as the moon has hidden herself, let us talk a little longer.

Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort.

Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one.

Ernest. 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 of the imagination of individuals?

Gilbert. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate.

No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing.

It is so now, and it has always been so.

But there has never 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 the critical instinct that we owe each new school that springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.

Gilbert. So is most modern creative work also.

Mediocrity weighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother—that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us from time to time.

And yet, I feel I am a little unfair in this matter.

Gilbert. Certainly.

Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style a standard must be impossible.

They do not. Or at least they should not. If they did so, they would become confirmed misanthropes, or if I may borrow a phrase from one of the pretty Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the rest of their lives. Nor is it necessary.

To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.

It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume?

Gilbert. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error.

It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.

In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals.

It is a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination.

It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Ernest. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball. You hold it in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy. You do nothing but re-write history.

Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.

From the field in which he thought that he had sown thorns, we have gathered our vintage, and the fig-tree that he planted for our pleasure is as barren as the thistle, and more bitter.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.

Ernest. You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious aim is a delusion?

Gilbert.

The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.

That is not the least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit. When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.

… self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars in the land.

Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you. Not I. Not any one.

It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom.

Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you. Not I. Not any one.

It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime.

It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.

… they call it, forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has not spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world’s faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds.

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress.

Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type.

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.

By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race.

Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics. And as for the virtues! What are the virtues? Nature, M.

Gilbert (after a pause). Yes: I believe I ventured upon that simple truth. Surely you see now that I am right?

When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet.

The whole secret lies in that. It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy Ilion to send the notched arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl against the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ash-handled spear.

Phantoms, are they? Heroes of mist and mountain? Shadows in a song? No: they are real. Action! What is action? It dies at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact.

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

Ernest. While you talk it seems to me to be so.

Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone.

It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.

Ernest. Yes; I see now what you mean. But, surely, the higher you place the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.

Certainly, it is never trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever.

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

Gilbert. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself.

Gilbert. Yes, from the soul.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul.

It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague.

And what is true about music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.

Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.

When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

He will turn from them to such works as make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely.

For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art.

Gilbert. Ah! don’t let us do that.

Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.

Let us talk about Moral Indignation, its Cause and Cure, a subject on which I think of writing: or about The Survival of Thersites, as shown by the English comic papers; or about any topic that may turn up.

Gilbert. No; it is an element of revelation.

If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism.

Ernest. What, then, is the result?

and this fallacy—for it is a fallacy—is, I regret to say, repeated by that charming and graceful writer who has lately deserted the turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of Commons, I mean the author of Obiter Dicta.

In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.

In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life.

There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.

Ernest. As many Hamlets as there are melancholies?

… certain that, as civilisation 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 will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people.

There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long, or not long enough.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it.

Things last either too long, or not long enough.

Ernest. Poor life! Poor human life! Are you not even touched by the tears that the Roman poet tells us are part of its essence.

What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed?

What are the improbable things? The things that one has done oneself.

No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

There is no passion that we cannot feel, no pleasure that we may not gratify, and we can choose the time of our initiation and the time of our freedom also.

Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience.

It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.

Gilbert. For everything. Because Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken.

We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter.

In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks.

… 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 …

Gilbert. Contemplation. I said to you some time ago that it was far more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.

Let me say to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and 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.

Gilbert.

It is to do nothing that the elect exist.

Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.

Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us to live these countless lives? Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity.

It is simply concentrated race-experience.

Ernest. But where in this is the function of the critical spirit?

We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom.

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

Ernest. A charming doctrine, Gilbert.

Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides.

We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom. The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

Well, when the revolution or crisis arrives, we shall be powerless, because we shall know nothing. And so, Ernest, let us not be deceived.

England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions.

There is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land. What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day.

And so, Ernest, let us not be deceived. England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land.

What we 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. It 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 the sake of contemplation, there is something that is egotistic. If you think so, do not say so.

It takes a thoroughly selfish age, like our own, to deify self-sacrifice.

It takes a thoroughly grasping age, such as that in which we live, to set above the fine intellectual virtues, those shallow and emotional virtues that are an immediate practical benefit to itself.

I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment, still less that it is, and perhaps will be for years to come, unpopular with the crowd.

It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.

Indeed, so little do ordinary people understand what thought really is, that they seem to imagine that, when they have said that a theory is dangerous, they have pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such theories that have any true intellectual value.

Indeed, so little do ordinary people understand what thought really is, that they seem to imagine that, when they have said that a theory is dangerous, they have pronounced its condemnation, whereas it is only such theories that have any true intellectual value.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Ernest. Gilbert, you bewilder me. You have told me that all art is, in its essence, immoral. Are you going to tell me now that all thought is, in its essence, dangerous?

Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in 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 critic, then, being limited to the subjective form, will necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the artist, who has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.

… constant only to the principle of beauty in all things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions, winning from the various schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods.

What other people call one’s past has, no doubt, everything to do with them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself.

The man who regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to. When one has found expression for a mood, one has done with it. You laugh; but believe me it is so.

What other people call one’s past has, no doubt, everything to do with them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself.

The man who regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to.

When one has found expression for a mood, one has done with it. You laugh; but believe me it is so. Yesterday it was Realism that charmed one. One gained from it that nouveau frisson which it was its aim to produce.

Gilbert. Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.

To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one’s own.

To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one’s last mood.

Gilbert.

Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.

To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one’s own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived.

A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things that do 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.

Art is a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid 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.

Gilbert. Ah! not fair. A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word.

It is only about things that do 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.

Gilbert. Rational?

There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest. One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally.

For Art, as Plato saw, and not without regret, creates in listener and spectator a form of divine madness. It does not spring from inspiration, but it makes others inspired. Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals.

Reason is not the faculty to which it appeals. If one loves Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things in the world, and against such love, the reason, if one listened to it, would cry out.

There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splendid to be sane.

Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure visionaries.

He will not consent to be the slave of his own opinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth. You must not be frightened by word, Ernest.

What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

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

Gilbert.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped …

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are.

By invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art. When it does this it stultifies itself. And yet Tartuffe’s articles and Chadband’s notes do this good, at least.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined.

One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and then they become as tedious as one’s relations.

I am very fond of the work of many of the Impressionist painters of Paris and London. Subtlety and distinction have not yet left the school.

It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

Ernest. I wonder do you really believe what you say?

Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that make us admire and know the man. He was right, though he may not have known how terribly right he was.

The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.

Yes: Form is everything. It 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?

He was right, though he may not have known how terribly right he was. The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.

Yes: Form is everything. It 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.

He was right, though he may not have known how terribly right he was. The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated. Yes: Form is everything. It 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. Have you a grief that corrodes your heart?

They do their best, no doubt, and consequently we get the worst from them.

It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.

And besides, my dear Ernest, when a man reaches the age of forty, or becomes a Royal Academician, or is elected a member of the Athenæum Club, or is recognised as a popular novelist, whose books are in great demand at suburban railway stations, one …

The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him.

The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise their worshippers. That is all.

Ernest. You say that a great artist cannot recognise the beauty of work different from his own.

The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles. Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough.

Bad artists always admire each other’s work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice.

But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has selected. Creation employs all its critical faculty within its own sphere.

But, while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed and certain, to find their true realisation they must be touched by the imagination into such beauty that they will seem an exception, each one of them.

Technique is really personality.

That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the æsthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music—his own.

Gilbert.

Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

Ernest. 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?

The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one’s eyes. The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.

From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness.

Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness.

He is our first authority on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real works of art.

As for the second condition, we have had Browning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much to be done in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid.

Gilbert. It is to criticism that the future belongs. The subject-matter at the disposal of creation becomes every day more limited in extent and variety.

Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted the obvious.

If creation is to last at all, it can only do so on the condition of becoming far more critical than it is at present. The old roads and dusty highways have been traversed too often.

As for the second condition, we have had Browning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much to be done in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid.

As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough.

We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all.

It is Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that makes the mind a fine instrument. We, in our educational system, have burdened the memory with a load of unconnected facts, and laboriously striven to impart our laboriously-acquired knowledge.

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

It has never occurred to us to try and develop in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and discernment.

Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism.

You might just as well have asked me the use of thought.

It is Criticism, as Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age. It is Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that makes the mind a fine instrument.

… Greeks did this, and when we come in contact with the Greek critical intellect, we cannot but be conscious that, while our subject-matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs, theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can be interpreted.

England has done one thing; it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.

But Wisdom has always been hidden from it. Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped. The only thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.

It is too variable, and too closely connected with the passions; and a board of arbitrators who, for the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived of the power 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 her sword in her hand. When Right is not Might, it is Evil.

No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the greed for gain could do so. It is only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race-prejudices.

If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

The change will of course 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.

We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity. Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown 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. Ah! what an antinomian you are!

How little we have of this temper in England, and how much we need it!

The English mind is always in a rage.

The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. It was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas!

to so little effect. The author of the Origin of Species had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. If one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and platforms of England, one can but feel the contempt of Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne.

We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.

Anything approaching to the free play of the mind is practically unknown 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.

Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most 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 World-Spirit are one.

Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most 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 World-Spirit are one.

Ernest. And he who is in possession of this spirit, or whom this spirit possesses, will, I suppose, do nothing?

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

Æsthetics are higher than ethics.

They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong.

It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability. Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere.

To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive.

Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection.

Gilbert. The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always.

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy.

It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability. Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere.

Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible.

Æsthetics, 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 our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do …

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.

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.

In criticising the importance given to money in La Comédie Humaine, Théophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero in fiction, le héros métallique.

Of Shakespeare it may be said he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.

The burning of the Globe Theatre—an event due, by the way, to the results of the passion for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare’s stage-management—has unfortunately robbed us of many important documents;

… of helmets, lances, painted shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of costumes for Turkish Janissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and goddesses of Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archæological research on the part of the manager of the theatre.

It is true that there is a mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the donnée of the play was after the Fall.

Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare will see that archæology was one of its special characteristics.

… necessity for tedious descriptions, and showing us, by the colour and character of Claudian’s dress, and the dress of his attendants, the whole nature and life of the man, from what school of philosophy he affected, down to what horses he backed on the turf.

And indeed archæology is only really delightful when transfused into some form of art.

I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lemprière’s Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor Max Müller’s treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language.

I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lemprière’s Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor Max Müller’s treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language.

Better Endymion than any theory, however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic among adjectives!

And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi’s book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? Art, and art only, can make archæology beautiful;

I can understand archæology being attacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but to attack it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the mark.

However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as well speak disrespectfully of the equator.

For archæology, being a science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply. Its value depends entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it. We look to the archæologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.

one might just as well speak disrespectfully of the equator. For archæology, being a science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply. Its value depends entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it.

We look to the archæologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama.

and though they may not be familiar with the authorities and archæological data for what is shown to them, still they enjoy whatever loveliness they look at. And this is the important thing.

Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope.

Archæological accuracy is merely a condition of illusionist stage effect; it is not its quality.

The true dramatist aims first at what is characteristic, and no more desires that all his personages should be beautifully attired than he desires that they should all have beautiful natures or speak beautiful English.

The true dramatist, in fact, shows us life under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life.

The Greek dress was the loveliest dress the world has ever seen, and the English dress of the last century one of the most monstrous; yet we cannot costume a play by Sheridan as we would costume a play by Sophokles.

This, of course, can only be done when there is one single mind directing the whole production. The facts of art are diverse, but the essence of artistic effect is unity.

Monarchy, Anarchy, and Republicanism may contend for the government of nations; but a theatre should be in the power of a cultured despot.

There may be division of labour, but there must be no division of mind.

The facts of art are diverse, but the essence of artistic effect is unity. Monarchy, Anarchy, and Republicanism may contend for the government of nations; but a theatre should be in the power of a cultured despot.

There may be division of labour, but there must be no division of mind.

Whoever understands the costume of an age understands of necessity its architecture and its surroundings also, and it is easy to see from the chairs of a century whether it was a century of crinolines or not.

Then, as regards the particular kinds of colours, the stage is often too glaring, partly through the excessive use of hot, violent reds, and partly through the costumes looking too new.

Shabbiness, which in modern life is merely the tendency of the lower orders towards tone, is not without its artistic value, and modern colours are often much improved by being a little faded.

Blue also is too frequently used: it is not merely a dangerous colour to wear by gaslight, but it is really difficult in England to get a thoroughly good blue.

The extravagant use of the arms in the eighteenth century, for instance, was the necessary result of the large hoop, and the solemn dignity of Burleigh owed as much to his ruff as to his reason.

Besides until an actor is at home in his dress, he is not at home in his part.

Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an artistic temperament in the audience, and producing that joy in beauty for beauty’s sake without which the great masterpieces of art can never be understood, I will not here speak;

And if they will not encourage, at least they must not oppose, a movement of which Shakespeare of all dramatists would have most approved, for it has the illusion of truth for its method, and the illusion of beauty for its result.

Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree.

The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in æsthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in æsthetic criticism attitude is everything.

For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of contraries.