Quotes & Notes

But the voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself boldly above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is necessity, neediness, that prevails, and lends a degraded humanity under its iron yoke. Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient. In this great balance on utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed in proportion as the limits of science are enlarged.

Thus, when arrived at maturity, he recovers his childhood by an artificial process, he founds a state of nature in his ideas, not given him by any experience, but established by the necessary laws and conditions of his reason, and he attributes to this ideal condition an object, an aim, of which he was not cognizant in the actual reality of nature. He gives himself a choice of which he was not capable before, and sets to work just as if he were beginning anew, and were exchanging his original state of bondage for one of complete independence, doing this with complete insight and of his free decision. He is justified in regarding this work of political thraldom as non-existing, though a wild and arbitrary caprice may have founded its work very artfully; though it may strive to maintain it with great arrogance and encompass it with a halo of veneration. For the work of blind powers possesses no authority before which freedom need bow, and all must be made to adapt itself to the highest end which reason has set up in his personality. It is in this wise that a people in a state of manhood is justified in exchanging a condition of thraldom for one of moral freedom.

Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.

So much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain that, as civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched. For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it.

Gilbert.  It seems to me that with the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity.  For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.  To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making.  To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.  There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive.  Is this impossible?  I think not.  By revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the self-imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the scientific principle of Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative life.  It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to act.  It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom.  We may not watch it, for it is within us.  We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.  It is Nemesis without her mask.  It is the last of the Fates, and the most terrible.  It is the only one of the Gods whose real name we know. And yet, while in the sphere of practical and external life it has robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the subjective sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow, with many gifts in its hands, gifts of strange temperaments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other, and passions that war against themselves.  And so, it is not our own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service, and entering into us for our joy.  It is something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has made its abode.  It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins.  It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter.  It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain.  One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us.  It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our development.  It can help us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air.  It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are.  The pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain.  Theocritus blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd.  In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen.  We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame into song.  We can see the dawn through Shelley’s eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows amorous of our youth.  Ours is the anguish of Atys, and ours the weak rage and noble sorrows of the Dane.  Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us to live these countless lives?  Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity.  It is simply concentrated race-experience.