14(1 Mr. Edward F. Benson [May 1, 



them that has given rise to the class we know of as professional 

 critics. Their profession is to go on talking for ever and ever about 

 anything in the world of which the efficiency is a matter of taste. 



' It has l)een supposed that the art of printing and the dissemina- 

 tion of cheaply-multiplied literature was responsible for the creation 

 of these professional critics, and that, whereas Art existed, as far as 

 we can judge, from the earliest days of civilization, the critic-class 

 was of comparatively modern date. But we have only got to look 

 at the pages of Greek literature to see that, in those ancient days 

 of supreme art, critics must have been fully as prolific as they are 

 now. lnnumeral)le are the references in the Greek anthology to 

 the statues, the paintings, the plays of the period ; indeed, it is not 

 too much to say that the bulk of Greek epigrams is concerned 

 entirely with two subjects, love and art. We read that the 

 technique of bronze set forth Myron's genius better than that of 

 marble : that the academic correctness of Polycleitus was likely to 

 please artists more than the general pul)lic : or the critic in front 

 of the Zeus at Olympia tells us that Pheidias must have seen a 

 vision of God himself descending from heaven, for so majestic was 

 his conception that the frail mind of man could not have fashioned 

 forth so supreme an embodiment of the Godhead. Or, standing in 

 the Painted Porch at Athens, the epigrammatist says that in the 

 eyelids of Helen lay the whole Trojan war ; or, looking at the 

 Aphrodite of Praxiteles, says that the goddess herself asked where 

 the sculptor saw her unclad, and wonders who breathed into the 

 raarl>le the desire and the soul that is in it. Indeed, the whole 

 nature and blood of the Athenian was that of the critic, ever 

 longing to hear some new thing, to have some fresh work submitted 

 to him in order to exercise his trained judgment upon it. x\gain, 

 in Roman days, we find prevailing the same curiosity, the same 

 appreciation. Pliny tells us that Zeuxis painted not the body but 

 the soul of his sitters, and intersperses his history with stores of the 

 most trenchant art-criticism. So, too, does Strabo : and Ausonius, 

 in somewhat exaggerated admiration of realism, beseeches the neat- 

 herd to pasture his bulls farther away from the bronze cow of 

 Myron, lest she be agitated. As for Pausanias' tour in Greece, one 

 is tempted to believe that he got a Baedeker of the period, inter- 

 leaved it, and covered the pages with art-criticism. 



There is no need to multiply instances to show the antiquity of 

 the art of criticism. It is an old and noble art, coeval with that 

 of creation, and it is only the ignorant who bewail the halcyon days 

 which never had any existence in fact, when the artist was left to 

 dream and do, unhampered by carping cries and vulture beaks. 

 For the truth is tDat creative art is so bound up with critical art 

 tliat it is impossil)le to conceive of the one without the other. Art 

 itself exists only by the critical spirit; the very fact that its 

 efficiency is a matter of taste, that its object is beauty, that it aims 



