It is a strange thing,this transference of emotion.We sicken with the same maladies as the poets,and the singer lends us his pain.Dead lips have their message for us,and hearts that have fallen to dust can communicate their joy.We run to kiss the bleeding mouth of Fantine,and we follow Manon Lescaut over the whole world.Ours is the love-madness of the Tyrian,and the terror of Orestes is ours also.There is no passion that we cannot feel,no pleasure that we may not gratify,and we can choose the time of our initiation and the time of our freedom also.Life!
Life!Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience.It is a thing narrowed by circumstances,incoherent in its utterance,and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.It makes us pay too high a price for its wares,and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
ERNEST.Must we go,then,to Art for everything?
GILBERT.For everything.Because Art does not hurt us.The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken.We weep,but we are not wounded.We grieve,but our grief is not bitter.In the actual life of man,sorrow,as Spinoza says somewhere,is a passage to a lesser perfection.But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates,if I may quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks.It is through Art,and through Art only,that we can realise our perfection;through Art,and through Art only,that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.This results not merely from the fact that nothing that one can imagine is worth doing,and that one can imagine everything,but from the subtle law that emotional forces,like the forces of the physical sphere,are limited in extent and energy.
One can feel so much,and no more.And how can it matter with what pleasure life tries to tempt one,or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one's soul,if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have never existed one has found the true secret of joy,and wept away one's tears over their deaths who,like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio,can never die?
ERNEST.Stop a moment.It seems to me that in everything that you have said there is something radically immoral.
GILBERT.All art is immoral.
ERNEST.All art?
GILBERT.Yes.For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art,and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life,and of that practical organisation of life that we call society.Society,which is the beginning and basis of morals,exists simply for the concentration of human energy,and in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy stability it demands,and no doubt rightly demands,of each of its citizens that he should contribute some form of productive labour to the common weal,and toil and travail that the day's work may be done.Society often forgives the criminal;it never forgives the dreamer.The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes,and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public,and saying in a loud stentorian voice,'What are you doing?'whereas 'What are you thinking?'is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.They mean well,no doubt,these honest beaming folk.
Perhaps that is the reason why they are so excessively tedious.
But some one should teach them that while,in the opinion of society,Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty,in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.
ERNEST.Contemplation?
GILBERT.Contemplation.I said to you some time ago that it was far more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.Let me say to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world,the most difficult and the most intellectual.To Plato,with his passion for wisdom,this was the noblest form of energy.
To Aristotle,with his passion for knowledge,this was the noblest form of energy also.It was to this that the passion for holiness led the saint and the mystic of mediaeval days.
ERNEST.We exist,then,to do nothing?
GILBERT.It is to do nothing that the elect exist.Action is limited and relative.Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches,who walks in loneliness and dreams.
But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too critical,too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite pleasures,to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself.To us the CITTE DIVINA is colourless,and the FRUITIO DEI without meaning.Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments,and religious ecstasy is out of date.
The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes 'the spectator of all time and of all existence'is not really an ideal world,but simply a world of abstract ideas.When we enter it,we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought.The courts of the city of God are not open to us now.Its gates are guarded by Ignorance,and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our nature is most divine.It is enough that our fathers believed.
