GILBERT.Yes:it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all revere,and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her Sicilian fields,and made those white feet stir,and not in vain,the Cumnor cowslips,that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is.But this is a very serious error,and takes no cognisance of Criticism's most perfect form,which is in its essence purely subjective,and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another.For the highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impressive purely.
ERNEST.But is that really so?
GILBERT.Of course it is.Who cares whether Mr.Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not?What does it matter?That mighty and majestic prose of his,so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence,so rich in its elaborate symphonic music,so sure and certain,at its best,in subtle choice of word and epithet,is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery;greater indeed,one is apt to think at times,not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring,but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal,soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines,not through form and colour alone,though through these,indeed,completely and without loss,but with intellectual and emotional utterance,with lofty passion and with loftier thought,with imaginative insight,and with poetic aim;greater,I always think,even as Literature is the greater art.Who,again,cares whether Mr.Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of?The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile,as some have fancied,but whenever Ipass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre,and stand before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks,as in some faint light under sea,'I murmur to myself,'She is older than the rocks among which she sits;like the vampire,she has been dead many times,and learned the secrets of the grave;and has been a diver in deep seas,and keeps their fallen day about her:and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants;and,as Leda,was the mother of Helen of Troy,and,as St.Anne,the mother of Mary;and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments,and tinged the eyelids and the hands.'And I say to my friend,'The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire';and he answers me,'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come,"and the eyelids are a little weary.'
And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is,and reveals to us a secret of which,in truth,it knows nothing,and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves.Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the outward form,the animalism of Greece,the lust of Rome,the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves,the return of the Pagan world,the sins of the Borgias?'He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none of these things,but had concerned himself simply with certain arrangements of lines and masses,and with new and curious colour-harmonies of blue and green.And it is for this very reason that the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.
It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.It does not confine itself -let us at least suppose so for the moment -to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.And in this it is right,for the meaning of any beautiful created thing is,at least,as much in the soul of him who looks at it,as it was in his soul who wrought it.
