142 Mr. Edward F. Benson [May 1, 



luust judge of a work of art by its truth and fidelity to the object it 

 represents, we are again fearfully at sea. For to demand this is to 

 demand a slavish realism which cuts away the very ground on which 

 art is founded. For all art is built on convention : it is always 

 symbolic in that it is selective. To ask for the other is to turn 

 romance into a chronicle, and to demand of a picture that it should 

 by its verisimilitude deceive the beholder into imagining that it is 

 real. That a work of art should to some extent be like what it 

 represents, and thus conform to some broad creed of realism, may 

 perhaps be expected of the artist, though the latest exponents of 

 pictorial art have apparently rejected this as an apostasy. But most 

 of us still want to be able to see, without having to consult a 

 catalogue, whether a picture represents Christopher Columbus or 

 Waterloo I^ridge ; to ask of a statue that means to be a man, that it 

 should have a head of some kind and the usual number of arms and 

 legs ; of fiction and poetry that they should tell us about persons who 

 might conceivably belong to the human race, unless it is definitely 

 stated that they do not, and that they live in a world which we may 

 l)e excused for supposing is our own, unless the scene is laid in Heaven, 

 or Mars, or Hell. But to demand a complete realism is to do away 

 witli that on which art is based. Besides, if art is merely to 

 reproduce life, its object is more than sufficiently realized by life 

 itself, and it can have no excuse for its existence at all. And to ask 

 of the critic that he should judge by such standards as these is to 

 take from him his appreciation of imaginative vision. His office is 

 not to see the thing as it really is, but to see the vision which inspired 

 the artist, its beauty, or, if you will, the ughness which roused his 

 misguided enthusiasm, to judge of the skill with which he has 

 realized it, and to convey his sense of the same to his readers by his 

 exposition of it. We do not ask him to be infallible ; we require only 

 the clear statement of his interpretation, his view of what he criticizes 

 conveyed as forcibly as may be necessary, but put forward only as an 

 opinion, though based on collateral knowledge. We do not expect 

 him to be the critic in excelsis, who may make a fresh work of art 

 out of what he criticizes. But it should not be too much for him to 

 express a view and to avoid the tiara. Instead of which he is in- 

 fallible with almost indecent frequency, and it is often impossible to 

 understand what he means. 



Here, while still clearing the arena, we may consider the Whistler 

 heresy. Others before Whistler were guilty of it, but he put it 

 forward with such splendid Aryan pomp that it must always be 

 associated with him. He demands that any critic who is worth the 

 attention of the artists should be a life-long practitioner in the art he 

 criticizes ; and passionately resents Mr. Ruskin being ranked as a 

 critic at all, because he was not a painter (which, as a matter of fact, 

 he happened to be). " Two and two," Mr. Whistler exclaims, " make 

 four according to the mathematician, and it does not matter what the 



