Soul of Man, The

<p>In old days men had the rack.&nbsp; Now they have the press.&nbsp; That is an improvement certainly.&nbsp; But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising.&nbsp; Somebody&mdash;was it Burke?&mdash;called journalism the fourth estate.&nbsp; That was true at the time, no doubt.&nbsp; But at the present moment it really is the only estate.&nbsp; It has eaten up the other three.&nbsp; The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it.&nbsp; We are dominated by Journalism.&nbsp; In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever.&nbsp; Fortunately in America Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme.&nbsp; As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt.&nbsp; People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.&nbsp; But it is no longer the real force it was.&nbsp; It is not seriously treated.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people&rsquo;s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary.&nbsp; The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.&nbsp; Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.&nbsp; In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump.&nbsp; That was quite hideous.&nbsp; In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole.&nbsp; That is much worse.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public.&nbsp; The public have nothing to do with them at all.&nbsp; In France they manage these things better.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom.&nbsp; Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p> <p>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.&nbsp; I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best in England are the arts in which the public have not been interested.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But his object was not that.&nbsp; His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art.&nbsp; At first he appealed to the few: now he has educated the many.&nbsp; He has created in the public both taste and temperament.&nbsp; The public appreciate his artistic success immensely.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The problem then is, why do not the public become more civilised?&nbsp; They have the capacity.&nbsp; What stops them?</p> <p>The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to exercise authority over the artist and over works of art.&nbsp; To certain theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come in a proper mood.&nbsp; In both of these theatres there have been individual artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences&mdash;and every theatre in London has its own audience&mdash;the temperament to which Art appeals.&nbsp; And what is that temperament?&nbsp; It is the temperament of receptivity.&nbsp; That is all.</p> <p>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.&nbsp; The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.&nbsp; The spectator is to be receptive.&nbsp; He is to be the violin on which the master is to play.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; This is, of course, quite obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women.&nbsp; But it is equally true of what are called educated people.&nbsp; For an educated person&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 the drama.&nbsp; For a picture and a statue are not at war with Time.&nbsp; They take no count of its succession.&nbsp; In one moment their unity may be apprehended.&nbsp; In the case of literature it is different.&nbsp; Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is realised.&nbsp; And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourth act is reached.&nbsp; Is the silly fellow to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists?&nbsp; No.&nbsp; The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense.&nbsp; He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper.&nbsp; He is to go to the play to realise an artistic temperament.&nbsp; He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament.&nbsp; He is not the arbiter of the work of art.&nbsp; He is one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation and the egotism that mars him&mdash;the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information.&nbsp; This point about the drama is hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised.&nbsp; I can quite understand that were &lsquo;Macbeth&rsquo; produced for the first time before a modern London audience, many of the people present would strongly and vigorously object to the introduction of the witches in the first act, with their grotesque phrases and their ridiculous words.&nbsp; But when the play is over one realises that the laughter of the witches in &lsquo;Macbeth&rsquo; is as terrible as the laughter of madness in &lsquo;Lear,&rsquo; more terrible than the laughter of Iago in the tragedy of the Moor.&nbsp; No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play.&nbsp; The moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself.&nbsp; Art does not mind.&nbsp; It is he who suffers.</p> <p>With the novel it is the same thing.&nbsp; Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal.&nbsp; Thackeray&rsquo;s &lsquo;Esmond&rsquo; is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself.&nbsp; In his other novels, in &lsquo;Pendennis,&rsquo; in &lsquo;Philip,&rsquo; in &lsquo;Vanity Fair&rsquo; even, at times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly mocking at them.&nbsp; A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.&nbsp; The public are to him non-existent.&nbsp; He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance.&nbsp; He leaves that to the popular novelist.&nbsp; One incomparable novelist we have now in England, Mr George Meredith.&nbsp; There are better artists in France, but France has no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true.&nbsp; There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of what pain in fiction may be.&nbsp; But to him belongs philosophy in fiction.&nbsp; His people not merely live, but they live in thought.&nbsp; One can see them from myriad points of view.&nbsp; They are suggestive.&nbsp; There is soul in them and around them.&nbsp; They are interpretative and symbolic.&nbsp; And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and producing his own individual work.&nbsp; At first none came to him.&nbsp; That did not matter.&nbsp; Then the few came to him.&nbsp; That did not change him.&nbsp; The many have come now.&nbsp; He is still the same.&nbsp; He is an incomparable novelist.&nbsp; With the decorative arts it is not different.&nbsp; The public clung with really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions of the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live in.&nbsp; Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours came from the dyer&rsquo;s hand, beautiful patterns from the artist&rsquo;s brain, and the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set forth.&nbsp; The public were really very indignant.&nbsp; They lost their temper.&nbsp; They said silly things.&nbsp; No one minded.&nbsp; No one was a whit the worse.&nbsp; No one accepted the authority of public opinion.&nbsp; And now it is almost impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty.&nbsp; In fact, people&rsquo;s houses are, as a rule, quite charming nowadays.&nbsp; People have been to a very great extent civilised.&nbsp; It is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary success of the revolution in house-decoration and furniture and the like has not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very fine taste in such matters.&nbsp; It has been chiefly due to the fact that the craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply starved the public out.&nbsp; It would be quite impossible at the present moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago, without going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from some third-rate lodging-house.&nbsp; The things are no longer made.&nbsp; However they may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming in their surroundings.&nbsp; Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority in these art-matters came to entire grief.</p> <p>It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad.&nbsp; People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under.&nbsp; To this question there is only one answer.&nbsp; The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.&nbsp; Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.&nbsp; It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work.&nbsp; This is not quite so.&nbsp; Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create.&nbsp; There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none.&nbsp; One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud.&nbsp; And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor.&nbsp; In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all.&nbsp; But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.</p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />