94 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



layman may say to the artist, your knowledge of technique is a 

 snare. In judging a work of art you examine the workmanship, 

 and forget to look at the work produced. Are you a writer ? 

 You allow the merit or demerit of word arrangements to distract 

 your attention from the idea they should suggest. Are you a 

 painter ? You see paint, and not a picture. Are you a musi- 

 cian ? You hear combinations, not music. The layman who 

 says such things is guilty of gross exaggeration, and yet his 

 words indicate a real danger to which an artist is liable when he 

 plays the critic. 



In mechanical arts the craftsman uses his skill to produce 

 something useful, but (except in the rare case when he is at 

 liberty to choose what he shall produce) his sole merit lies in 

 skill. In the fine arts the student uses skill to produce some- 

 thing beautiful ; he is free to choose what that something shall 

 be, and the layman claims that he may and must judge the 

 artist chiefly by the value in beauty of the thing done. Artistic 

 skill contributes to beauty, or it would not be skill ; but beauty 

 is the result of many elements, and the nobler the art the lower 

 is the rank which skill takes among them. The intense enjoy- 

 ment which the artist takes in the exercise of his own skill, and 

 from the generous and sympathetic perception of skill in others, 

 tempts him to overvalue this element of beauty, whereas most 

 laymen are apt to undervalue the skill which they only half 

 perceive. Passing to higher walks of criticism it is often said, 

 and with some truth, that our judgment of artistic work should 

 not depend on our mere personal perception, but should be based 

 on some acknowledged principles or canons of art. Now the 

 word principle is here used by the critic and artist in a very 

 different sense from that attached to it by his scientific brethren ; 

 and a very pretty, but uninstructive, wrangle ensues when the 

 man of science challenges the artist to put his principles into 

 clear language. Nevertheless, it may be granted that the so- 

 called principles of art current in each school at a given moment, 

 though vaguely defined, imperfectly apprehended, illogical, and 

 variable with the development of the art, do nevertheless exercise 

 a healthy influence, especially on the great mass of ordinary 

 men who get their living by that art ; nay, it must be allowed 

 that many statements about art made by Aristotle and Plato 



