THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS

The appeal of all Art is simply to the artistic temperament.  Art does not address herself to the specialist.  Her claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one.  Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of other people’s work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his own.  That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation.  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 . . . Wordsworth saw in Endymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth’s message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him.  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.  It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others.  It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it.—The Critic as Artist.

WANTED A NEW BACKGROUND

He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings.  The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling.  As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.  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.  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.  As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough.  We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all.  In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.  Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it is possible that a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it seeks to supply fresh material.  I myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed.  It springs from too primitive, too natural an impulse.  However this may be, it is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily.  There are always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view.  The duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances.  There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now.  It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.—The Critic as Artist.

WITHOUT FRONTIERS

Goethe—you will not misunderstand what I say—was a German of the Germans.  He loved his country—no man more so.  Its people were dear to him; and he led them.  Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent.  ‘How can one write songs of hatred without hating?’ he said to Eckermann, ‘and how could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?’  This note, sounded in the modern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the cosmopolitanism of the future.  Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms.  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.  Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist.  It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.—The Critic as Artist.