No More Learning

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. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes
through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to
the popular novelist. One incomparable novelist we have now in England,
Mr George Meredith. There are better artists in France, but France has
no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true.
There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of
what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction.
His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them
from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them
and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic.