Nay,it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings,and makes it marvellous for us,and sets it in some new relation to the age,so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives,and a symbol of what we pray for,or perhaps of what,having prayed for,we fear that we may receive.The longer Istudy,Ernest,the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts is,as the beauty of music,impressive primarily,and that it may be marred,and indeed often is so,by any excess of intellectual intention on the part of the artist.For when the work is finished it has,as it were,an independent life of its own,and may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say.Sometimes,when I listen to the overture to TANNHAUSER,I seem indeed to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass,and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from the caverned hill.But at other times it speaks to me of a thousand different things,of myself,it may be,and my own life,or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of loving,or of the passions that man has known,or of the passions that man has not known,and so has sought for.To-night it may fill one with that [Greek text which cannot be reproduced],that AMOUR DE L'IMPOSSIBLE,which falls like a madness on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm,so that they sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire,and,in the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain,grow faint and swoon or stumble.To-morrow,like the music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us,the noble Dorian music of the Greek,it may perform the office of a physician,and give us an anodyne against pain,and heal the spirit that is wounded,and 'bring the soul 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 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.
ERNEST.But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?
GILBERT.It is the highest Criticism,for it criticises not merely the individual work of art,but Beauty itself,and fills with wonder a form which the artist may have left void,or not understood,or understood incompletely.
ERNEST.The highest Criticism,then,is more creative than creation,and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not;that is your theory,I believe?
GILBERT.Yes,that is my theory.To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own,that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes,and see in it whatever one chooses to see;and the Beauty,that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element,makes the critic a creator in his turn,and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.
It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art,that the pictures that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the anecdotage of painting,and that deal with scenes taken out of literature or history.But this is not so.Indeed,pictures of this kind are far too intelligible.As a class,they rank with illustrations,and,even considered from this point of view are failures,as they do not stir the imagination,but set definite bounds to it.For the domain of the painter is,as Isuggested before,widely different from that of the poet.To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety;not merely the beauty that men look at,but the beauty that men listen to also;not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of colour,but the whole sphere of feeling,the perfect cycle of thought.The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the soul;only through conventional images that he can handle ideas;only through its physical equivalents that he can deal with psychology.And how inadequately does he do it then,asking us to accept the torn turban of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello,or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of Lear!Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him.Most of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets,marring their motives by clumsy treatment,and striving to render,by visible form or colour,the marvel of what is invisible,the splendour of what is not seen.Their pictures are,as a natural consequence,insufferably tedious.They have degraded the invisible arts into the obvious arts,and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious.I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of the same subject.They have always done so and will always do so.But while the poet can be pictorial or not,as he chooses,the painter must be pictorial always.For a painter is limited,not to what he sees in nature,but to what upon canvas may be seen.
And so,my dear Ernest,pictures of this kind will not really fascinate the critic.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.
