create a spirit of revolt.  People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.  But it is no longer the real force it was.  It is not seriously treated.  In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power.  The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary.  The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.  Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.  In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump.  That was quite hideous.  In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole.  That is much worse.  And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers.  The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful.  The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public.  The public have nothing to do with them at all.  In France they manage these things better.  There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public.  All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned.  In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom.  Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist.  English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers.  It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion.  There are possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income.  But there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the public wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible.  It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.

However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject, and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which he is to work.  I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best in England are the arts in which the public have not been interested.  They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain advance has been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is important to point out that this advance is entirely due to a few individual artists refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter of demand and supply.  With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that has really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire.  But his object was not that.  His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art.  At first he appealed to the few: now he has educated the many.  He has created in the public both taste and temperament.  The public appreciate his artistic success immensely.  I often wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their standard, but realised his own.  With their standard the Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the popular theatres in London are at present.  Whether they understand it or not the fact however remains, that taste and temperament have, to a certain extent been created in the public, and that the public is capable of developing these qualities.  The problem then is, why do not the public become more civilised?  They have the capacity.  What stops them?

The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to exercise authority over the artist and over works of art.  To certain theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come in a proper mood.  In both of these theatres there have been individual artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences—and every theatre in London has its own audience—the temperament to which Art appeals.  And what is that temperament?  It is the temperament of receptivity.  That is all.

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all.  The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.  The spectator is to be receptive.  He is to be the violin on which the master is to play.  And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.  This is, of course, quite obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women.  But it is equally true of what are called educated people.  For an educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.  A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.  And true as this is in the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the appreciation of such arts as