1914] on A Criticism on Critics 141 



uot at useful bufc emotional targets, presupposes that selection which 

 is the basis of criticism. The critic, in so far as he is worthy of the 

 name, must be steeped to the bottom of his soul in the art he loves : 

 it is his to discern the subtleties of its beauty, the poignancy of its 

 pathos. A perfect understanding of the art, saner and more cool 

 than the hot imagination of the artist, must be his ; he must be 

 able to see the beauty of intention through the mist of its imperfect 

 rendering ; he must divine the fire that maybe smoulders beneath 

 ash, and by his exposition make it visible to others. He must be 

 endlessly patient, even as is the seeker for gold in alluvial deposits, 

 washing the minute grains from the mud, treasuring them, testing 

 them with the corrosive acid of his trained judgment, rejecting the 

 worthless, nor caring to speak of it, but firstly and lastly and 

 supremely storing the gold. 



Nor does his task end here : he is the interpreter of beauty as 

 well as its gatherer, and thus he may become the creator of a new 

 beauty. For it is the pianist who plays in a Beethoven sonata, the 

 conductor who takes us into the mind of Wagner, the actor who 

 shows us the blood-stained infirmity of Macbeth, who are the critics 

 of the masterpieces they interpret for us. They give us their 

 impressions of beautiful things ; and, rightly, we call them artists 

 as well. 



Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his essay on " The Function of Criticism 

 at the Present Time," demands all this and something more debatable 

 from the critic when he says that his aim is to make the best 

 itleas prevail. But, since art deals entirely with questions of taste, 

 it is an assumption to suppose there is a definite test, though we 

 must be allowed to suppose that some, critically considered, are good, 

 and many bad. Even then large allowances, and how large nobody 

 can say, must be made for acute differences of opinion in all such 

 matters. At the present time, for instance, while the old-fashioned 

 among us happen to prefer portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds to those 

 by the post-impressionists, and the landscapes of Turner to those 

 of the futurists, others think differently, and we have no right to 

 assert that their ideas belong to the class of bad ideas, though we 

 may think them lunatics on all matters connected with painting. 

 Similarly, we must allow the same latitude to the appreciators of 

 cubism, and permit them to believe that they find beauty, or some 

 equivalent for it, in what appear to us to be insane or at least 

 insanitary canvases, regarding them as representing the best ideas, 

 though to us those ideas seem comically bad. 



Even more debatable is another dictum of the same author that 

 critics must see the object as in itself it really is. This, applied, as 

 he does apply it to the arts, passes comprehension, for if we take it 

 literally, there is nothing more to be said about a statue than that it 

 is a piece of Carrara marble, or about a painting than that it is a 

 siiperficies of pigments. Or, if we take it to mean that the critic 



