Don't let us discuss anything solemnly.I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously,and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information.
Education is an admirable thing,but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver.Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.The sky is a hard hollow sapphire.Let us go out into the night.Thought is wonderful,but adventure is more wonderful still.Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia,and hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?
ERNEST.You are horribly wilful.I insist on your discussing this matter with me.You have said that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.What art-criticism have they left us?
GILBERT.My dear Ernest,even if not a single fragment of art-criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days,it would be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics,and that they invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of everything else.For,after all,what is our primary debt to the Greeks?Simply the critical spirit.And,this spirit,which they exercised on questions of religion and science,of ethics and metaphysics,of politics and education,they exercised on questions of art also,and,indeed,of the two supreme and highest arts,they have left us the most flawless system of criticism that the world has ever seen.
ERNEST.But what are the two supreme and highest arts?
GILBERT.Life and Literature,life and the perfect expression of life.The principles of the former,as laid down by the Greeks,we may not realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.
The principles of the latter,as they laid them down,are,in many cases,so subtle that we can hardly understand them.Recognising that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety,they elaborated the criticism of language,considered in the light of the mere material of that art,to a point to which we,with our accentual system of reasonable or emotional emphasis,can barely if at all attain;studying,for instance,the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint,and,I need hardly say,with much keener aesthetic instinct.In this they were right,as they were right in all things.Since the introduction of printing,and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country,there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye,and less and less to the ear which is really the sense which,from the standpoint of pure art,it should seek to please,and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always.Even the work of Mr.
Pater,who is,on the whole,the most perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us,is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music,and seems,here and there,to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.We,in fact,have made writing a definite mode of composition,and have treated it as a form of elaborate design.The Greeks,upon the other hand,regarded writing simply as a method of chronicling.Their test was always the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations.The voice was the medium,and the ear the critic.I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer's blindness might be really an artistic myth,created in critical days,and serving to remind us,not merely that the great poet is always a seer,seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul,but that he is a true singer also,building his song out of music,repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the secret of its melody,chaunting in darkness the words that are winged with light.Certainly,whether this be so or not,it was to his blindness,as an occasion,if not as a cause,that England's great poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later verse.When Milton could no longer write he began to sing.Who would match the measures of COMUS with the measures of SAMSON AGONISTES,or of PARADISE LOST or REGAINED?
When Milton became blind he composed,as every one should compose,with the voice purely,and so the pipe or reed of earlier days became that mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all the stateliness of Homeric verse,if it seeks not to have its swiftness,and is the one imperishable inheritance of English literature sweeping through all the ages,because above them,and abiding with us ever,being immortal in its form.Yes:writing has done much harm to writers.We must return to the voice.That must be our test,and perhaps then we shall be able to appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism.
As it now is,we cannot do so.Sometimes,when I have written a piece of prose that I have been modest enough to consider absolutely free from fault,a dreadful thought comes over me that Imay have been guilty of the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachic movements,a crime for which a learned critic of the Augustan age censures with most just severity the brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias.I grow cold when I think of it,and wonder to myself if the admirable ethical effect of the prose of that charming writer,who once in a spirit of reckless generosity towards the uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed the monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life,will not some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the paeons have been wrongly placed.
ERNEST.Ah!now you are flippant.
