144 Mr. Edward F. Benson [May 1, 



opinion on the work of Miss Marie Corelli would go to Mr. Hall 

 Caine for it? The very fact that these illustrious persons are the 

 practitioners of an art, invalidates their criticism on the work of their 

 colleagues, for as was long ago pointed out, " great artists do not 

 admire each other's work." They are inevitably biased ; their con- 

 centration on their own modes must necessarily have narrowed, or at 

 least focused, their taste ; it would be as reasonable to expect a lens 

 to serve the purpose of a plate glass window. They cannot have the 

 broad outlook of the competent critic, who, though he may not 

 wholly divest himself of personal preferences, must be al)le to survey 

 with a breadth impossible to the artist. For this reason Mr. William 

 Jilurris refused the chair of poetry at Oxford, definitely stating that 

 the practice of an art debars a man from criticizing it. So, too, 

 thought Moliere when he went for the criticism of his plays to his 

 housemaid. She — :my housemaid in fact — could take a view which was 

 barred to Moliere simply because he wrote plays. Indeed, Whistler 

 himself is an admirable refutation of his own heresy, and his views 

 on painting conclusively show how little right has a consummate 

 artist to have any. But where shall we find so acute a critic of other 

 people's manners ? x4.nd where shall we look for the cause of this 

 i3ut in the fact that he had not got any himself ? It must needs be 

 so : those who practise any form of art must be content to be 

 criticized by those who are hopelessly incapable, as they are some- 

 times unwise enough to show, of doing it themselves. 



We may take it, then, that part of the equipment of a critic is in- 

 competence in the practice of the art which he criticizes, and will not 

 demand a symphony from Mr. Robin Legge, a portrait from Sir 

 Claude Phillips, or a novel from Mr. Courtney. Just, then, as all 

 but })ainters may be listened to with patience about painting, so — for 

 criticism is an art in itself — everyone but critics may be permitted to 

 say something about criticism, which is precisely the reason why I 

 am doing so now. And as the critics of the present day find that 

 there is very little in the artistic world to which they are able to 

 extend their cordial approval, so certain of those who are not critics 

 find that there is little in the critical work of to-day that is worth 

 saying. In every profession there are, of course, at all times a large 

 quantity of wholly incompetent people, and the fact that the journals 

 in which they write give their observations so wide a currency, 

 perhaps makes the incompetent appear more conspicuous than they 

 really are. But wide circulation does not constitute authority, any 

 more than the advertisement boards which now decorate the fields 

 near railway lines are a guarantee of the efficacy of the tonics they 

 recommend ; or at the most, these tonics and these critics have a kind 

 of hypnotic authority arising from the effect which incessant repeti- 

 tion, like that of the importunate wddow, brings with it. Never 

 before, perhaps, has criticism been so scribal, and, in consequence, so 

 lacking in authority in spite of the thousand mouths through which 



