84 



or robins' notes ; innocent and carolling, they study no 

 form, but have the best, and are Saxon and monosyllabic 

 in style and structure. 



The community does not reflect its intelligence in criti- 

 cism of painting. It is the merest commonplace. Lit- 

 erature, the drama, music, are criticised discriminatingly. 

 People are impatient of criticism in painting, and think 

 their eye as good as another's. This is an art that requires 

 study and delicate judgment as the other arts. 



The justification of painting, the reason of its being 

 is, that we give what we feel. Otherwise photography 

 would be the greatest artist, and dispense with all other. 

 Science knows. Art feels. It is the interchange of the 

 soul with the object, each affecting the other, that makes 

 art. Goethe said art was greater than nature, because, of 

 the two factors, soul is the greatest and most important, 

 and summons nature to its throne and makes use of it. 

 Music is the great living art. No great picture has been 

 painted for two hundred years. Why genius rises in tides 

 every two or three hundred years, and expresses itself in 

 poetry, or painting, or architecture, and leaves the suc- 

 ceeding ages barren of great creative works, has never 

 been explained. At any rate it seems -we have not ex- 

 hausted the dispensation of fifty years ago and have had 

 no burst of poetry since. All is an after-math. No new 

 phase of imaginative feeling. 



Critics may judge of art more fairly than artists, for 

 artists are constituted to feel one thing intensely. This 

 prejudices them against other kinds of excellence. The 

 critic may be more impartial and universal if he has 

 sensibility, not being swayed by any predisposition, and 

 not himself gifted with any originating power. He 

 should be sympathetic and interpretative. What he can- 

 not discover must be technique and not universal, for art 



