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.  Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.—The Critic as Artist.

DANTE THE LIVING GUIDE

There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are going to be.  We can choose our day and select our hour.  We can say to ourselves, ‘To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley of the shadow of death,’ and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side.  We pass through the gate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the horror of another world.  The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces and their cowls of gilded lead.  Out of the ceaseless winds that drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain.  We break the withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries.  Out of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment.  Through the dim purple air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false coin.  He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentine hills.  Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him.  He smites him in the face, and they wrangle.  We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by giants where great Nimrod blows his horn.  Terrible things are in store for us, and we go to meet them in Dante’s raiment and with Dante’s heart.  We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat through the slimy waves.  He calls to us, and we reject him.  When we hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our scorn.  We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, in which traitors stick like straws in glass.  Our foot strikes against the head of Bocca.  He will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming skull.  Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his face that he may weep a little.  We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who more base than he who has mercy for the condemned of God?  In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew Cæsar.  We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the stars.—The Critic as Artist.

THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS

The appeal of all Art is simply to the artistic temperament.  Art does not address herself to the specialist.  Her claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one.  Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of other people’s work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his own.  That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation.  The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his own goal.  The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him.  The gods are hidden from each other.  They can recognise their worshippers.  That is all . . . Wordsworth saw in Endymion merely a pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was deaf to Wordsworth’s message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him.  The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles.  Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him.  Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough.  Bad artists always admire each other’s work.  They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice.  But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has selected.  Creation employs all its critical faculty within its own sphere.  It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others.  It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it.—The Critic as Artist.

WANTED A NEW BACKGROUND

He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings.  The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling.  As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity.  The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one’s eyes.  The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings.  The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us.  From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.  From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.  Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy.  Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness.  He is our first authority on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real works of art.  As for the second condition, we have had Browning, and Meredith is with us.  But there is still much to be done in the sphere of introspection.  People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid.  As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough.  We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all.  In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.  Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it is possible that a further development of the habit of introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it seeks to supply fresh material.  I myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed.  It springs from too primitive, too natural an impulse.  However this may be, it is certain