GILBERT.The difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form merely.It is accidental,not essential.All artistic creation is absolutely subjective.The very landscape that Corot looked at was,as he said himself,but a mood of his own mind;and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to possess an actual existence of their own,apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned them,are,in their ultimate analysis,simply the poets themselves,not as they thought they were,but as they thought they were not;and by such thinking came in strange manner,though but for a moment,really so to be.For out of ourselves we can never pass,nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not.Nay,I would say that the more objective a creation appears to be,the more subjective it really is.Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London,or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square;but Hamlet came out of his soul,and Romeo out of his passion.They were elements of his nature to which he gave visible form,impulses that stirred so strongly within him that he had,as it were perforce,to suffer them to realise their energy,not on the lower plane of actual life,where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so made imperfect,but on that imaginative plane of art where Love can indeed find in Death its rich fulfilment,where one can stab the eavesdropper behind the arras,and wrestle in a new-made grave,and make a guilty king drink his own hurt,and see one's father's spirit,beneath the glimpses of the moon,stalking in complete steel from misty wall to wall.Action being limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed;and,just as it is because he did nothing that he has been able to achieve everything,so it is because he never speaks to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us absolutely,and show us his true nature and temperament far more completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets,even,in which he bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart.Yes,the objective form is the most subjective in matter.Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.Give him a mask,and he will tell you the truth.
ERNEST.The critic,then,being limited to the subjective form,will necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the artist,who has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective.
GILBERT.Not necessarily,and certainly not at all if he recognises that each mode of criticism is,in its highest development,simply a mood,and that we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.The aesthetic critic,constant only to the principle of beauty in all things,will ever be looking for fresh impressions,winning from the various schools the secret of their charm,bowing,it may be,before foreign altars,or smiling,if it be his fancy,at strange new gods.What other people call one's past has,no doubt,everything to do with them,but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself.The man who regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to.When one has found expression for a mood,one has done with it.You laugh;but believe me it is so.Yesterday it was Realism that charmed one.One gained from it that NOUVEAU FRISSONwhich it was its aim to produce.One analysed it,explained it,and wearied of it.At sunset came the LUMINISTE in painting,and the SYMBOLISTE in poetry,and the spirit of mediaevalism,that spirit which belongs not to time but to temperament,woke suddenly in wounded Russia,and stirred us for a moment by the terrible fascination of pain.To-day the cry is for Romance,and already the leaves are tremulous in the valley,and on the purple hill-tops walks Beauty with slim gilded feet.The old modes of creation linger,of course.The artists reproduce either themselves or each other,with wearisome iteration.But Criticism is always moving on,and the critic is always developing.
Nor,again,is the critic really limited to the subjective form of expression.The method of the drama is his,as well as the method of the epos.He may use dialogue,as he did who set Milton talking to Marvel on the nature of comedy and tragedy,and made Sidney and Lord Brooke discourse on letters beneath the Penshurst oaks;or adopt narration,as Mr.Pater is fond of doing,each of whose Imaginary Portraits -is not that the title of the book?-presents to us,under the fanciful guise of fiction,some fine and exquisite piece of criticism,one on the painter Watteau,another on the philosophy of Spinoza,a third on the Pagan elements of the early Renaissance,and the last,and in some respects the most suggestive,on the source of that Aufklarung,that enlightening which dawned on Germany in the last century,and to which our own culture owes so great a debt.Dialogue,certainly,that wonderful literary form which,from Plato to Lucian,and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno,and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight,the creative critics of the world have always employed,can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself,and give form to every fancy,and reality to every mood.
By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view,and show it to us in the round,as a sculptor shows us things,gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress,and really illumine the idea more completely,or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central scheme,and yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance.
ERNEST.By its means,too,he can invent an imaginary antagonist,and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.
