Art is out of the reach of morals,for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.However,let these mouthing Puritans pass;they have their comic side.Who can help laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?Some limitation might well,and will soon,I hope,be placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers.For they give us the bald,sordid,disgusting facts of life.They chronicle,with degrading avidity,the sins of the second-rate,and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.But the artist,who accepts the facts of life,and yet transforms them into shapes of beauty,and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe,and shows their colour-element,and their wonder,and their true ethical import also,and builds out of them a world more real than reality itself,and of loftier and more noble import -who shall set limits to him?Not the apostles of that new Journalism which is but the old vulgarity 'writ large.'Not the apostles of that new Puritanism,which is but the whine of the hypocrite,and is both writ and spoken badly.The mere suggestion is ridiculous.Let us leave these wicked people,and proceed to the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary for the true critic.
ERNEST.And what are they?Tell me yourself.
GILBERT.Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty,and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.Under what conditions,and by what means,this temperament is engendered in race or individual,we will not discuss at present.It is sufficient to note that it exists,and that there is in us a beauty-sense,separate from the other senses and above them,separate from the reason and of nobler import,separate from the soul and of equal value -a sense that leads some to create,and others,the finer spirits as I think,to contemplate merely.But to be purified and made perfect,this sense requires some form of exquisite environment.Without this it starves,or is dulled.You remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated,and with what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surroundings,telling us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds,so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual.Insensibly,and without knowing the reason why,he is to develop that real love of beauty which,as Plato is never weary of reminding us,is the true aim of education.By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to the bad,and,rejecting what is vulgar and discordant,to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveliness.Ultimately,in its due course,this taste is to become critical and self-conscious,but at first it is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct,and 'he who has received this true culture of the inner man will with clear and certain vision perceive the omissions and faults in art or nature,and with a taste that cannot err,while he praises,and finds his pleasure in what is good,and receives it into his soul,and so becomes good and noble,he will rightly blame and hate the bad,now in the days of his youth,even before he is able to know the reason why':and so,when,later on,the critical and self-conscious spirit develops in him,he 'will recognise and salute it as a friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.'I need hardly say,Ernest,how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal,and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of beauty,and that the methods by which education should work were the development of temperament,the cultivation of taste,and the creation of the critical spirit.
Yet,even for us,there is left some loveliness of environment,and the dulness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen,and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel,or lie in the green meadow,among the strange snake-spotted fritillaries,and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes,or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans,or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St.John.Nor is it merely at Oxford,or Cambridge,that the sense of beauty can be formed and trained and perfected.All over England there is a Renaissance of the decorative Arts.Ugliness has had its day.Even in the houses of the rich there is taste,and the houses of those who are not rich have been made gracious and comely and sweet to live in.
