No More Learning

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 the drama. For a picture and a
statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession.
In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature
it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is
realised. 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. Is the silly fellow
to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists?
No, the honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions
of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose
a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic
temperament.
He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He
is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to
contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its
contemplation all, the egotism that mars him--the egotism of his
ignorance, or the egotism of his information. This point about the drama
is hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised. I can quite understand that
were 'Macbeth' 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. But when the play is over
one realises that the laughter of the witches in 'Macbeth' is as
terrible as the laughter of madness in 'Lear,' more terrible than the
daughter of Iago in the tragedy of the Moor. No spectator of art needs a
more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play. The
moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art
and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.

With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the
recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's 'Esmond' is a
beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself. In his
other novels, in 'Pendennis,' in 'Philip,' in 'Vanity Fair' 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. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.
The public are to him non-existent.