The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

Written as a Socratic dialogue between two characters, Gilbert and Ernest, Oscar Wilde's extended philosophical essay unfolds in the library of a house in Piccadilly, London. Gilbert, the dominant voice and Wilde's mouthpiece, advances a series of provocative claims about the nature of criticism, art, and the contemplative life, while Ernest poses objections that Gilbert systematically overturns.

The dialogue begins casually with a discussion of memoirs and autobiography. Ernest dismisses modern memoirs as the work of people who have lost their memories or done nothing worth remembering, but Gilbert argues that literary egotism is delightful, citing figures from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Samuel Pepys. When Ernest asks whether everyone should become his own biographer, Gilbert attacks modern biographers as vulgarizers of great men, declaring that among a great man's disciples, it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Ernest then raises the question that drives the rest of the essay: What is the use of art criticism? He argues that critics have nothing to offer the creative artist. Before addressing the question, Gilbert offers an extended assessment of the poet Robert Browning, praising him as the greatest creator of fictional characters since Shakespeare while faulting him for mishandling language, and predicting Browning will be remembered as a writer of fiction rather than as a poet.

Ernest sharpens his challenge by asserting that in the best days of art there were no art critics. Gilbert counters that the Greeks were in fact "a nation of art-critics" who invented the criticism of everything, including art. He praises their study of language with scientific precision and argues they prioritized the spoken word over the written, speculating that Homer's blindness may be an artistic myth reminding us that great poets are singers. He calls Aristotle's Poetics a perfect piece of aesthetic criticism, explaining its concept of katharsis, the purification of the spectator through pity and awe, as essentially aesthetic rather than moral. He notes that the critical spirit of Alexandria, the Hellenistic center of Greek learning, invented or perfected virtually every literary form.

Ernest concedes the Greeks were art critics but insists the creative faculty ranks higher than the critical. Gilbert rejects this, arguing that the artist's spirit of choice and instinct for selection is itself the critical faculty at work. He dismisses the notion that great artists work unconsciously and advances the key claim that the critical faculty invents fresh forms while the merely creative instinct only reproduces.

Ernest voices the common view that doing a thing is harder than talking about it. Gilbert reverses this, calling it a gross popular error. Anyone can make history, he argues, but only a great person can write it. Action is blind and limited by accident, while literature alone shows "the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest."

Ernest objects that the higher one places the creative artist, the lower the critic must rank. Gilbert counters that criticism is itself a creative art. The highest criticism, as the purest form of personal impression, is more creative than creation itself. He challenges the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold's dictum that criticism should see the object as it really is, insisting the highest criticism is purely subjective. He cites the English critic John Ruskin's prose on the painter J.M.W. Turner as a greater work than Turner's paintings, and the writer Walter Pater's passage on the Mona Lisa as revealing something Leonardo da Vinci never intended. He identifies music as the perfect type of art because it never reveals its ultimate secret.

Part II opens after a supper break. Gilbert insists the critic need not always explain a work of art but may instead deepen its mystery. Interpretation gains authenticity through the intensification of personality, not its suppression. When the pianist Anton Rubinstein plays Beethoven, he gives us both Beethoven and himself, thereby giving us Beethoven more fully. There is no single definitive Hamlet, Gilbert declares; there are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.

Gilbert then argues for the superiority of art over life. Life is terribly deficient in form, its catastrophes happen to the wrong people, and one can never repeat the same emotion, while art offers infinite repeatability. He provides an elaborate tour through Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy to show how art enables one to live countless lives, and extends the argument through Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. One should go to art rather than life for fulfillment, he concludes, because art does not wound us.

Gilbert declares all art immoral because art aims at emotion for emotion's sake, while society demands emotion channeled into action. In the opinion of the highest culture, however, contemplation is the proper occupation of man, and doing nothing is the most difficult and most intellectual thing in the world. He invokes the principle of heredity to argue that imagination grants access to the accumulated experience of the race, and the critical spirit perfects the culture this inheritance makes possible. Gilbert defines the contemplative life as aiming at "not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming." He dismisses the concern that contemplation is egotistic, arguing that self-culture is the true ideal, that the development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and that dangerous ideas are the only ones with intellectual value.

When Ernest proposes fairness, rationality, and sincerity as qualities the true critic should possess, Gilbert rejects all three. Fairness is impossible because one can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one. Rationality is irrelevant because art creates a form of divine madness. Sincerity is fatal in its ordinary sense; the true critic realizes himself through constant change. Gilbert insists that art and ethics are absolutely distinct spheres and identifies temperament, a sensibility exquisitely susceptible to beauty, as the critic's primary requisite. He makes the broader claim that form is the secret of life and that in criticism as in creation, temperament is everything.

Ernest asks whether artists are the best judges of art. Gilbert denies this, noting that William Wordsworth dismissed John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley was deaf to Wordsworth, and John Milton could not understand Shakespeare. Creation limits while contemplation widens the vision. Gilbert declares the future belongs to criticism: Creation's subject matter grows more limited, while criticism's expands endlessly.

In his final arguments, Gilbert outlines criticism's broader civilizational functions. It creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age and makes culture possible by distilling creative work into a finer essence. It fosters cosmopolitanism, citing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's refusal to hate France during the Napoleonic Wars as a model. Gilbert positions aesthetics as higher than ethics: Ethics make existence possible, but aesthetics make life lovely and give it progress and variety. He names Charles Darwin and the French historian Ernest Renan as the two defining figures of the 19th century, "the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God," and declares that the Critical Spirit and the World Spirit, the historical force guiding an age's intellectual development, are one.

Ernest summarizes Gilbert's paradoxical positions, including that talking is harder than doing, that doing nothing is the most difficult activity, that all art is immoral and all thought dangerous, and that the true critic is properly unfair, insincere, and irrational. He calls Gilbert a dreamer. Gilbert accepts the label, defining a dreamer as one who can only find his way by moonlight, whose punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. When Ernest asks whether this is truly a punishment, Gilbert replies that it is also the dreamer's reward. Dawn breaks over Piccadilly. Gilbert draws back the curtains and proposes they go to Covent Garden to look at the roses, declaring himself tired of thought.