Themes
Criticism as creation
Gilbert's central claim is that criticism is 'both creative and independent'. The critic stands to a work of art as the artist stands to life, using it as raw material for something new. His model is Pater's description of the Mona Lisa, which reads into the picture meanings Leonardo never intended and is praised for exactly that. The highest criticism therefore aims 'to see the object as in itself it really is not', and becomes 'the record of one's own soul', 'the only civilised form of autobiography'.
Contemplation against action
Throughout the night Gilbert inverts the ordinary value placed on doing things. It is 'more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it', and 'to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world'. Action is blind and forgotten, while Homer's Troy lives for ever. In the second part this becomes a full ideal, the contemplative life, drawn from Plato and Aristotle: the critic who 'contemplates life' from 'the high tower of Thought' is safe from its wounds. Society, Gilbert admits, 'never forgives the dreamer'.
Art and morality
When Ernest calls his views immoral, Gilbert answers that 'all art is immoral', because its aim is emotion for its own sake, and he insists that the spheres of Art and Ethics are 'absolutely distinct and separate'. He mocks the 'mouthing Puritans' of journalism who would limit the artist's subjects, and he ends with the claim that 'Æsthetics are higher than ethics', comparing them to sexual selection, which makes life 'lovely and wonderful'. His final paradox is that 'there is no sin except stupidity'.
Personality and the mask
For Gilbert, interpretation depends on personality. Rubinstein playing Beethoven gives us Beethoven and himself, and a great actor's Hamlet is his own, since 'there are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies'. Even the apparently objective creations of Shakespeare are the poet himself in disguise. The dialogue form itself proves the point: by speaking 'through lips different from one's own', a thinker discovers what he believes. Hence the most quoted line: 'Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.'
Criticism and the future
The closing pages turn the argument outward. Creation, Gilbert says, is exhausting its subjects, while criticism's grow daily, and 'it is to criticism that the future belongs'. Criticism makes culture possible by concentration, recovers lost ages through philology, and will make Europe cosmopolitan: Goethe could not hate France because he owed it so much of his culture. Gilbert names Darwin and Renan as the two critics who made the century, and concludes that 'the Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one'.