beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.
It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the anecdotage
7. I.e., designed to create an impression of the senses. 8. The 1845 opera by Richard Wagner, based on the legend of a 14th-century German poet who fell under the spell of Venus and lived with her in a mountain, Horselberg. 9. Love of the impossible, in Greek (in capital letters, perhaps to give the effect of an inscription) and in French.
1. Both Plato (Republic 3) and Aristotle (Politics 8) praise the educational appropriateness of the Dorian mode (Aristotle calls it especially steady and manly), as opposed to eastern music; the Dorians were a people of ancient Greece, the last of the northern invaders (ca. 1100?950 B.C.E.) .
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1 1696 / OSCAR WILDE
of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature or history. But
this is not so. Indeed, pictures of this kind are far too intelligible. As a class,
they rank with illustrations, and even considered from this point of view are
failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to it.
For the domain of the painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from
that of the poet. To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety;
not merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to
also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of
colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought. The
painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the body that he
can show us the mystery of the soul; only through conventional images that
he can handle ideas; only through its physical equivalents that he can deal
with psychology. And how inadequately does he do it then, asking us to
accept the torn turban of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello, or a dotard
in a storm for the wild madness of Lear! Yet it seems as if nothing could
stop him. Most of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and
wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets, marring their
motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by visible form or col-
our, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their
pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have
degraded the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth
looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and painter may not treat
of the same subject. They have always done so, and will always do so. But
while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must be
pictorial always. For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in nature, but
to what upon canvas may be seen.
And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate the
critic. He will turn from them to such works as make him brood and dream
and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem
to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world. It is
sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize
his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they
realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed
of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for
an ideal that is other than itself. This is the reason why music is the perfect
type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the
explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders
imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by
such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the
