ERNEST.You speak with strange feeling,Gilbert.Have you had this dreadful experience,as you call it,lately?
GILBERT.Few of us escape it.People say that the schoolmaster is abroad.I wish to goodness he were.But the type of which,after all,he is only one,and certainly the least important,of the representatives,seems to me to be really dominating our lives;and just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere,so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others,that he has never had any time to educate himself.No,Ernest,self-culture is the true ideal of man.Goethe saw it,and the immediate debt that we owe to Goethe is greater than the debt we owe to any man since Greek days.
The Greeks saw it,and have left us,as their legacy to modern thought,the conception of the contemplative life as well as the critical method by which alone can that life be truly realised.It was the one thing that made the Renaissance great,and gave us Humanism.It is the one thing that could make our own age great also;for the real weakness of England lies,not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts,not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes,or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts,but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.
I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is difficult of attainment,still less that it is,and perhaps will be for years to come,unpopular with the crowd.It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering.It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.Indeed,so little do ordinary people understand what thought really is,that they seem to imagine that,when they have said that a theory is dangerous,they have pronounced its condemnation,whereas it is only such theories that have any true intellectual value.An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
ERNEST.Gilbert,you bewilder me.You have told me that all art is,in its essence,immoral.Are you going to tell me now that all thought is,in its essence,dangerous?
GILBERT.Yes,in the practical sphere it is so.The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct,and the basis of the stability of society,as a healthy organism,is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.The great majority of people being fully aware of this,rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines,and rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life,that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.But let us turn from the practical sphere,and say no more about the wicked philanthropists,who,indeed,may well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of the Yellow River Chuang Tsu the wise,who has proved that such well-meaning and offensive busybodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous virtue that there is in man.They are a wearisome topic,and I am anxious to get back to the sphere in which criticism is free.
ERNEST.The sphere of the intellect?
GILBERT.Yes.You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in his own way as creative as the artist,whose work,indeed,may be merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal,or perhaps greater,distinction of form,and,through the use of a fresh medium of expression,make differently beautiful and more perfect.Well,you seemed to be a little sceptical about the theory.But perhaps I wronged you?
ERNEST.I am not really sceptical about it,but I must admit that I feel very strongly that such work as you describe the critic producing -and creative such work must undoubtedly be admitted to be -is,of necessity,purely subjective,whereas the greatest work is objective always,objective and impersonal.
