FullReads

Such is my present mood; fickle, contradictory, unworthy, slightly apostatising and blasphemous to my own deeper convictions, to my own written ideas, you say; you, my friend, the poet, who insist upon people being steadfast, unchangeable in all their feelings, because you poets keep your own moods quite steady, as photographers keep their victims, until you have taken the concentrated likeness, and can shift your souls into another equally steadfast, unchangeable pose. Such is my present mood, and you may call me what names you please for having it. All that concerns me is that most certainly this present mood of mine happens to be the one, of all others, in which I am least likely to be able to muster up those two or three remarks upon art with which I ought to conclude, and finally despatch into the limbo of things printed this collection of studies. The things must be said. If I carry my papers home, sit down at my table, fix my eyes upon the patterned wall-paper, I shall, in all probability, get back within five minutes all that the usual ideas, the usual feelings about art, in the contemplation of that patterned blankness; all that phantasmagoria of art appreciation for which we carry all the necessary mechanism, self-manufactured (yet very neat) out of fragments of culture and philosophy, in a sort of little travelling case appended to our soul. A fact this, which is suggestive; for does not our modern, imaginative appreciation of art, do not all those wondrous beautiful and horrible dreams and nightmares, suggested to us by a quite plain and unsuggestive picture, statue, or piece of music, depend a little upon our contemplation of the methodical, zig-zag and twirligig patterned vacuity of modern life? For I suspect that, in former days (I confess I do not know exactly when), art may have been perceived pretty much in the same manner in which we perceive nature: that the enjoyed perception of a beautiful statue, of a picture, of a grand song, may have come interrupting, with pleasant interludes of quiet self-unconscious pleasure, the matter-of-fact, but not monotonous business of life; even as my work now, my conscientious, deliberate, attempted work, is for ever being interrupted by the flicker of the lime-leaf shadows, light and clear, on my paper, by the breeze which sweeps the branches and carries away the drying manuscript on the grass.

Now it seems to me quite evident that art cannot be any such thing, as long as its enjoyment or supposed enjoyment is a sort of deliberate mental gymnastics, which our desire for well-balanced activity, or our wish to display a certain unnecessary gracefulness of intellectual motions, impose upon us; setting aside a certain portion of our time for counteracting, in the artistic gymnasiums (rows of soaped poles, and hurdles, and ladders, and expanses of padded floor, quite as unlike as may be from the climbable trees and jumpable brooks which we ought to meet in our walks), called galleries, concerts, etc., the direful slackening of our muscles and stiffening of our joints, almost inevitable in our cramped intellectual shop life of to-day. We writhe, clinging with arms and legs, up the soaped poles of aesthetic feeling, slipping and rising again, straining and twisting, to plop down at last on to the padding and the sawdust; we dangle, with constrained grace, high in aesthetic contemplation, flying, with a clutching swing, from idea to idea: distant, oscillating in mid air, like so many trapeze acrobats; and then we think that an hour or so, every now and then, of such exercise is all (except brutal slumber) that can be required as repose in our intellectual life. For we are all of us getting more and more into the habit of enjoying, not so much art, as the feelings and thoughts, the theories and passions, for which we make it the excuse. “Nay,” you will say “you yourself have written, are printing, correcting, and publishing a whole volume of whims and ideas about art, you yourself are for ever theorising and becoming angry on the subject–what right have you to object thereto in others?”