He stands outside his subject,
and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects.
and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects.
Oscar Wilde - Aphorisms, the Soul of Man
Public
opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual
violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to
the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.
His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at
peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other
people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing.
A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law,
and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be
bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against
society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.
There was a woman who was taken in adultery. We are not told the history
of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said
that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because
her love was so intense and wonderful. Later on, a short time before his
death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly
perfumes on his hair. His friends tried to interfere with her, and said
that it was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume cost
should have been expended on charitable relief of people in want, or
something of that kind. Jesus did not accept that view. He pointed out
that the material needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that
the spiritual needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine
moment, and by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might
make itself perfect. The world worships the woman, even now, as a saint.
Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates
family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property,
marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the
programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the
abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the
full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more
wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He
rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and
community in a very marked form. 'Who is my mother? Who are my
brothers? ' he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him.
When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, 'Let
the dead bury the dead,' was his terrible answer. He would allow no
claim whatsoever to be made on personality.
And so he who would lead a Christ-like like life is he who is perfectly
and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of
science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep
upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about
God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who
throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as
he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation
in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the
present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his
shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.
Father Damien was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers,
because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he
was not more Christ-like than Wagner when he realised his soul in music;
or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type
for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And
while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the
claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a
natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must
give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before
Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such
thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures.
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably
made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and
ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of
democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by
the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was
high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who
exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is
violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by
creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and
Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount
of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully
demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible
pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a
sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that
they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other
people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's
second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. 'He
who would be free,' says a fine thinker, 'must not conform. ' And
authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of
over-fed barbarism amongst us.
With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great gain--a
gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history, not in the
expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the
original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by
the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that
the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised
by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence
of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the
more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly
recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far
as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results
have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime.
When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist,
or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing
form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called
criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is
the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals
are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological
point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.
They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be
if they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished
there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to
exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though
such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more
than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible
severity, if we except the crime of murder, and regard death as worse
than penal servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe,
disagree. But though a crime may not be against property, it may spring
from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of
property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear.
When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is
not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any
interest to him to interfere with anyone else. Jealousy, which is an
extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely
bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and
Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes
jealousy is entirely unknown.
Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to
do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise
labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary
commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to
make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour. I
cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and
talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing
necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is
absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do
anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour
are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To
sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is
blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or
physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy
would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing
dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been,
to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something
tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his
work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our
property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine
which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in
consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become
hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the
machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should
have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more
than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, everyone
would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community.
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that
deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be
done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all
sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets,
and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or
distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper
conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this
is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country
gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or
enjoying cultivated leisure--which, and not labour, is the aim of
man--or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply
contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will he
doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that
civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless
there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong,
insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the
machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no
longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute
bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have
delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things
for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great
storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and
this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to
his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include
Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country
at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it
looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the
realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of
machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things
will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is
the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.
An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with
reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest,
and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the
other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community,
or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he
is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or
degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the
unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact
that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that
other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist
takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand,
he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman,
an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be
considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism
that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real
mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under
certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take
cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the
sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours,
without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and
if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at
all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form
of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it an
authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as
it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always,
and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art
to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd
vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what
they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy
after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are
wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular.
The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide
difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his
experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a
character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the
subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of
people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that
he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought,
provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those
who had never thought in any sphere at all--well, nowadays the man of
science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is
really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected
to brutal popular control, to authority in fact--the authority of
either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed
for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have
to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the
community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the
individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with
the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does
more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the
public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have
been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read
it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult
poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them,
they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in
which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of
popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces
such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form,
such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The
popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It
is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is
too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style,
psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned
are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most
uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such
requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament,
would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the
amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his
individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender
everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are
a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true,
but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the
two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may
be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this
kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one
comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular
control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any
attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to
the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large
measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike
novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of
Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects
his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right
in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a
disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For
what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny
of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art,
the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not
because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never
taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar
them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely,
according to one's own views, this acceptance of the classics does a
great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and
Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the
Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter,
so that I need not dwell upon the point.
But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public
really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they
saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama;
and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of
the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a
country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the
classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the
free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer
why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not
paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of
them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh
mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it
appears they get so angry and bewildered, that they always use two
stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly
unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What
they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is
grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a
beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly
immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing
that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter
to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an
ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single
real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the
British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and
these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France,
is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make
the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England.
Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That
they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be
expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called
Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley's prose
was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use
it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The
true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is
absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of
art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the
public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that
was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously
question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and
consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either
of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.
Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to such
words as 'immoral,' 'unintelligible,' 'exotic,' and 'unhealthy. ' There
is one other word that they use. That word is 'morbid. ' They do not use
it often. The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid of
using it. Still, they use it sometimes, and, now and then, one comes
across it in popular newspapers. It is, of course, a ridiculous word to
apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a
mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid,
because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is
never morbid. He expresses everything.
He stands outside his subject,
and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To
call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his
subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he
wrote 'King Lear. '
On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked.
His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of
course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very
contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or
style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very
vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they
are. They are subjects for study, like everything else. And it is only
fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always
apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in
public.
Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be mentioned,
have been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-abuse that is at
the disposal of the public. One is the word 'unhealthy,' the other is
the word 'exotic. ' The latter merely expresses the rage of the momentary
mushroom against the immortal, entrancing, and exquisitely lovely
orchid. It is a tribute, but a tribute of no importance. The word
'unhealthy,' however, admits of analysis. It is a rather interesting
word. In fact, it is so interesting that the people who use it do not
know what it means.
What does it mean? What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art? All
terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them
rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to
both together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is
one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be
that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses
that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. From the point
of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose
subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes
directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both
perfection and personality. Of course, form and substance cannot be
separated in a work of art; they are always one. But for purposes of
analysis, and setting the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a
moment, we can intellectually so separate them. An unhealthy work of
art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned,
and common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the
artist has any pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public
will pay him for it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls
healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public
call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.
I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment, complaining that
the public and the public press misuse these words. I do not see how,
with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they could possibly use
them in the proper sense. I am merely pointing out the misuse; and as
for the origin of the misuse and the meaning that lies behind it all,
the explanation is very simple. It comes from the barbarous conception
of authority. It comes from the natural inability of a community
corrupted by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism. In a
word, it comes from that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called
Public Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to
control action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control
Thought or Art.
Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical force of
the public than there is in favour of the public's opinion. The former
may be fine. The latter must be foolish. It is often said that force is
no argument. That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove.
Many of the most important problems of the last few centuries, such as
the continuance of personal government in England, or of feudalism in
France, have been solved entirely by means of physical force. The very
violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a
moment. It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is
mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the
brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed
him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly
to be regretted, for both their sakes. Behind the barricade there may be
much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the
leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle? And when
these four are joined together they make a terrible force, and
constitute the new authority.
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an
improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and
demoralising. Somebody--was it Burke? --called journalism the fourth
estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present moment
it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords
Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the
House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by
Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and
Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately in America Journalism
has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a
natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People
are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.
But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated.
In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances,
having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great
factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to
exercise over people's private lives seems to me to be quite
extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity
to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious
of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In
centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the
pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed
their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates
the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the
amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The
harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who
solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the
public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man
who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political
force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise
authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give
their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon
all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in
fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private
lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have
nothing to do with them at all. In Prance they manage these things
better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take
place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or
criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that
the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other
or both of the married parties concerned. In France, in fact, they limit
the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we
allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist.
English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede
and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and
compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or
revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the
world, and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk
of compulsion. There are possibly some journalists who take a real
pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to
scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income. But there
are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation,
who really dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to
do so, and only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their
occupation is carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the
public wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that
supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible.
It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be
placed in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.
However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject,
and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by
which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is
to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which
he is to work. I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best
in England are the arts in which the public have not been interested.
They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain advance has
been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is
important to point out that this advance is entirely due to a few
individual artists refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their
standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter of demand and
supply. With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that has
really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not
over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr
Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted,
could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and
made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his
object was not that. His object was to realise his own perfection as an
artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art. At first
he appealed to the few; now he has educated the many. He has created in
the public both taste and temperament. The public appreciate his
artistic success immensely. I often wonder, however, whether the public
understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not
accept their standard, but realised his own. With their standard the
Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the
popular theatres in London are at present. Whether they understand it or
not the fact however remains, that taste and temperament have, to a
certain extent, been created in the public, and that the public is
capable of developing these qualities. The problem then is, why do not
the public become more civilised? They have the capacity. What stops
them?
The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to
exercise authority over the artist and over works of art. To certain
theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come
in a proper mood. In both of these theatres there have been individual
artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences--and every
theatre in London has its own audience--the temperament to which Art
appeals. And what is that temperament? It is the temperament of
receptivity. That is all.
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority
over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot
receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to
dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of
art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which
the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own
silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what
Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and
appreciate the work of art in question. This is, of course, quite
obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men
and women. But it is equally true of what are called educated people.
For an educated person's ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art
has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has
never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure
it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and
under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only
temperament that can appreciate a work of art. And true as this is in
the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more
true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a
statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession.
In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature
it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is
realised. And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the
play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the
spectator till the third or fourth act is reached. Is the silly fellow
to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists?
No, the honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions
of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose
a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic
temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He
is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to
contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its
contemplation all, the egotism that mars him--the egotism of his
ignorance, or the egotism of his information. This point about the drama
is hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised. I can quite understand that
were 'Macbeth' produced for the first time before a modern London
audience, many of the people present would strongly and vigorously
object to the introduction of the witches in the first act, with their
grotesque phrases and their ridiculous words. But when the play is over
one realises that the laughter of the witches in 'Macbeth' is as
terrible as the laughter of madness in 'Lear,' more terrible than the
daughter of Iago in the tragedy of the Moor. No spectator of art needs a
more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play. The
moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art
and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.
With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the
recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's 'Esmond' is a
beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself. In his
other novels, in 'Pendennis,' in 'Philip,' in 'Vanity Fair' even, at
times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by
appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly
mocking at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.
The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes
through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to
the popular novelist. One incomparable novelist we have now in England,
Mr George Meredith. There are better artists in France, but France has
no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true.
There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of
what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction.
His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them
from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them
and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made
them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own
pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never
cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate
to him or influence him in any way, but has gone on intensifying his own
personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came
to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not
change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He's an
incomparable novelist.
With the decorative arts it is not different. The public clung with
really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions of
the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that were so
appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind
people to live in. Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours
came from the dyer's hand, beautiful patterns from the artist's brain,
and the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set
forth. The public were really very indignant. They lost their temper.
They said silly things. No one minded. No one was a whit the worse. No
one accepted the authority of public opinion. And now it is almost
impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of
good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some
sign of appreciation of beauty. In fact, people's houses are, as a rule,
quite charming nowadays. People have been to a very great extent
civilised. It is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary
success of the revolution in house-decoration and furniture and the like
has not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very
fine taste in such matters. It has been chiefly due to the fact that the
craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was
beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and
vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply
starved the public out. It would be quite impossible at the present
moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago,
without going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from
some third-rate lodging-house. The things are no longer made. However
they may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming in
their surroundings. Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority
in these art-matters came to entire grief.
It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad. People
sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist
to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of
government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that
under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite
so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over,
but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to
be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to
create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being
an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has
none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush
for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw
mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In
fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But
there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all
authority is equally bad.
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises
over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There
is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is
called the Prince. The second is called the Pope The third is called the
People. The Prince may be cultivated.
opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual
violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to
the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.
His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at
peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other
people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing.
A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law,
and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be
bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against
society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.
There was a woman who was taken in adultery. We are not told the history
of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said
that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because
her love was so intense and wonderful. Later on, a short time before his
death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly
perfumes on his hair. His friends tried to interfere with her, and said
that it was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume cost
should have been expended on charitable relief of people in want, or
something of that kind. Jesus did not accept that view. He pointed out
that the material needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that
the spiritual needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine
moment, and by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might
make itself perfect. The world worships the woman, even now, as a saint.
Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates
family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property,
marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the
programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the
abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the
full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more
wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He
rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and
community in a very marked form. 'Who is my mother? Who are my
brothers? ' he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him.
When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, 'Let
the dead bury the dead,' was his terrible answer. He would allow no
claim whatsoever to be made on personality.
And so he who would lead a Christ-like like life is he who is perfectly
and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of
science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep
upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about
God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who
throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as
he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation
in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the
present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his
shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.
Father Damien was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers,
because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he
was not more Christ-like than Wagner when he realised his soul in music;
or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type
for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And
while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the
claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a
natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must
give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before
Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such
thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures.
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably
made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and
ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of
democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by
the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was
high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who
exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is
violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by
creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and
Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount
of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully
demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible
pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a
sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that
they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other
people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's
second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. 'He
who would be free,' says a fine thinker, 'must not conform. ' And
authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of
over-fed barbarism amongst us.
With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great gain--a
gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history, not in the
expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the
original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by
the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that
the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised
by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence
of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the
more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly
recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far
as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results
have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime.
When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist,
or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing
form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called
criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is
the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals
are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological
point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.
They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be
if they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished
there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to
exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though
such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more
than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible
severity, if we except the crime of murder, and regard death as worse
than penal servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe,
disagree. But though a crime may not be against property, it may spring
from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of
property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear.
When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is
not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any
interest to him to interfere with anyone else. Jealousy, which is an
extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely
bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and
Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes
jealousy is entirely unknown.
Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to
do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise
labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary
commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to
make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour. I
cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and
talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing
necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is
absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do
anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour
are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To
sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is
blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or
physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy
would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing
dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been,
to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something
tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his
work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our
property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine
which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in
consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become
hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the
machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should
have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more
than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, everyone
would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community.
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that
deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be
done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all
sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets,
and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or
distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper
conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this
is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country
gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or
enjoying cultivated leisure--which, and not labour, is the aim of
man--or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply
contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will he
doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that
civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless
there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong,
insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the
machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no
longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute
bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have
delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things
for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great
storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and
this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to
his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include
Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country
at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it
looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the
realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of
machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things
will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is
the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.
An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with
reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest,
and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the
other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community,
or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he
is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or
degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the
unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact
that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that
other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist
takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand,
he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman,
an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be
considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism
that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real
mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under
certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take
cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the
sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours,
without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and
if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at
all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form
of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it an
authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as
it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always,
and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art
to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd
vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what
they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy
after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are
wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular.
The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide
difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his
experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a
character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the
subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of
people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that
he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought,
provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those
who had never thought in any sphere at all--well, nowadays the man of
science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is
really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected
to brutal popular control, to authority in fact--the authority of
either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed
for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have
to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the
community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the
individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with
the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does
more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the
public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have
been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read
it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult
poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them,
they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in
which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of
popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces
such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form,
such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The
popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It
is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is
too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style,
psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned
are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most
uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such
requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament,
would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the
amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his
individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender
everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are
a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true,
but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the
two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may
be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this
kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one
comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular
control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any
attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to
the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large
measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike
novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of
Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects
his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right
in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a
disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For
what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny
of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art,
the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not
because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never
taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar
them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely,
according to one's own views, this acceptance of the classics does a
great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and
Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the
Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter,
so that I need not dwell upon the point.
But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public
really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they
saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama;
and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of
the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a
country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the
classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the
free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer
why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not
paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of
them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh
mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it
appears they get so angry and bewildered, that they always use two
stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly
unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What
they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is
grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a
beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly
immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing
that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter
to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an
ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single
real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the
British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and
these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France,
is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make
the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England.
Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That
they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be
expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called
Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley's prose
was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use
it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The
true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is
absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of
art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the
public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that
was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously
question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and
consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either
of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.
Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to such
words as 'immoral,' 'unintelligible,' 'exotic,' and 'unhealthy. ' There
is one other word that they use. That word is 'morbid. ' They do not use
it often. The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid of
using it. Still, they use it sometimes, and, now and then, one comes
across it in popular newspapers. It is, of course, a ridiculous word to
apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a
mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid,
because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is
never morbid. He expresses everything.
He stands outside his subject,
and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To
call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his
subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he
wrote 'King Lear. '
On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked.
His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of
course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very
contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or
style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very
vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they
are. They are subjects for study, like everything else. And it is only
fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always
apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in
public.
Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be mentioned,
have been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-abuse that is at
the disposal of the public. One is the word 'unhealthy,' the other is
the word 'exotic. ' The latter merely expresses the rage of the momentary
mushroom against the immortal, entrancing, and exquisitely lovely
orchid. It is a tribute, but a tribute of no importance. The word
'unhealthy,' however, admits of analysis. It is a rather interesting
word. In fact, it is so interesting that the people who use it do not
know what it means.
What does it mean? What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art? All
terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them
rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to
both together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is
one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be
that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses
that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. From the point
of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose
subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes
directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both
perfection and personality. Of course, form and substance cannot be
separated in a work of art; they are always one. But for purposes of
analysis, and setting the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a
moment, we can intellectually so separate them. An unhealthy work of
art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned,
and common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the
artist has any pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public
will pay him for it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls
healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public
call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.
I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment, complaining that
the public and the public press misuse these words. I do not see how,
with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they could possibly use
them in the proper sense. I am merely pointing out the misuse; and as
for the origin of the misuse and the meaning that lies behind it all,
the explanation is very simple. It comes from the barbarous conception
of authority. It comes from the natural inability of a community
corrupted by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism. In a
word, it comes from that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called
Public Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to
control action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control
Thought or Art.
Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical force of
the public than there is in favour of the public's opinion. The former
may be fine. The latter must be foolish. It is often said that force is
no argument. That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove.
Many of the most important problems of the last few centuries, such as
the continuance of personal government in England, or of feudalism in
France, have been solved entirely by means of physical force. The very
violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a
moment. It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is
mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the
brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed
him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly
to be regretted, for both their sakes. Behind the barricade there may be
much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the
leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle? And when
these four are joined together they make a terrible force, and
constitute the new authority.
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an
improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and
demoralising. Somebody--was it Burke? --called journalism the fourth
estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present moment
it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords
Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the
House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by
Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and
Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately in America Journalism
has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a
natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People
are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.
But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated.
In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances,
having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great
factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to
exercise over people's private lives seems to me to be quite
extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity
to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious
of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In
centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the
pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed
their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates
the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the
amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The
harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who
solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the
public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man
who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political
force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise
authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give
their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon
all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in
fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private
lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have
nothing to do with them at all. In Prance they manage these things
better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take
place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or
criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that
the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other
or both of the married parties concerned. In France, in fact, they limit
the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we
allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist.
English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede
and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and
compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or
revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the
world, and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk
of compulsion. There are possibly some journalists who take a real
pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to
scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income. But there
are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation,
who really dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to
do so, and only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their
occupation is carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the
public wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that
supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible.
It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be
placed in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.
However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject,
and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by
which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is
to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which
he is to work. I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best
in England are the arts in which the public have not been interested.
They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain advance has
been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is
important to point out that this advance is entirely due to a few
individual artists refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their
standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter of demand and
supply. With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that has
really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not
over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr
Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted,
could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and
made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his
object was not that. His object was to realise his own perfection as an
artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art. At first
he appealed to the few; now he has educated the many. He has created in
the public both taste and temperament. The public appreciate his
artistic success immensely. I often wonder, however, whether the public
understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not
accept their standard, but realised his own. With their standard the
Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the
popular theatres in London are at present. Whether they understand it or
not the fact however remains, that taste and temperament have, to a
certain extent, been created in the public, and that the public is
capable of developing these qualities. The problem then is, why do not
the public become more civilised? They have the capacity. What stops
them?
The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to
exercise authority over the artist and over works of art. To certain
theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come
in a proper mood. In both of these theatres there have been individual
artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences--and every
theatre in London has its own audience--the temperament to which Art
appeals. And what is that temperament? It is the temperament of
receptivity. That is all.
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority
over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot
receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to
dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of
art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which
the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own
silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what
Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and
appreciate the work of art in question. This is, of course, quite
obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men
and women. But it is equally true of what are called educated people.
For an educated person's ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art
has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has
never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure
it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and
under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only
temperament that can appreciate a work of art. And true as this is in
the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more
true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a
statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession.
In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature
it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is
realised. And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the
play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the
spectator till the third or fourth act is reached. Is the silly fellow
to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists?
No, the honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions
of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose
a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic
temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He
is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to
contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its
contemplation all, the egotism that mars him--the egotism of his
ignorance, or the egotism of his information. This point about the drama
is hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised. I can quite understand that
were 'Macbeth' produced for the first time before a modern London
audience, many of the people present would strongly and vigorously
object to the introduction of the witches in the first act, with their
grotesque phrases and their ridiculous words. But when the play is over
one realises that the laughter of the witches in 'Macbeth' is as
terrible as the laughter of madness in 'Lear,' more terrible than the
daughter of Iago in the tragedy of the Moor. No spectator of art needs a
more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play. The
moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art
and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.
With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the
recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's 'Esmond' is a
beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself. In his
other novels, in 'Pendennis,' in 'Philip,' in 'Vanity Fair' even, at
times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by
appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly
mocking at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.
The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes
through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to
the popular novelist. One incomparable novelist we have now in England,
Mr George Meredith. There are better artists in France, but France has
no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true.
There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of
what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction.
His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them
from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them
and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made
them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own
pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never
cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate
to him or influence him in any way, but has gone on intensifying his own
personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came
to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not
change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He's an
incomparable novelist.
With the decorative arts it is not different. The public clung with
really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions of
the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that were so
appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind
people to live in. Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours
came from the dyer's hand, beautiful patterns from the artist's brain,
and the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set
forth. The public were really very indignant. They lost their temper.
They said silly things. No one minded. No one was a whit the worse. No
one accepted the authority of public opinion. And now it is almost
impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of
good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some
sign of appreciation of beauty. In fact, people's houses are, as a rule,
quite charming nowadays. People have been to a very great extent
civilised. It is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary
success of the revolution in house-decoration and furniture and the like
has not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very
fine taste in such matters. It has been chiefly due to the fact that the
craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was
beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and
vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply
starved the public out. It would be quite impossible at the present
moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago,
without going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from
some third-rate lodging-house. The things are no longer made. However
they may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming in
their surroundings. Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority
in these art-matters came to entire grief.
It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad. People
sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist
to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of
government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that
under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite
so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over,
but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to
be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to
create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being
an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has
none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush
for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw
mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In
fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But
there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all
authority is equally bad.
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises
over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There
is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is
called the Prince. The second is called the Pope The third is called the
People. The Prince may be cultivated.
