It was the Christians who gave the Devil a
grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. It
was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanists
never drew him at all.

And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity
and mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we may
separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt
from mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he
has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has
no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too
subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outree or
specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary
people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable
that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is
always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable;
but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to
come out of it.

Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the
thing called Art, and the people called Art Critics. It is obvious that
an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy
cunning that has made them what they are. It is equally obvious that
a landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape; a portrait
painter only half of the person; they are lucky if they express so much.
And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of the
pictures can only express half of them, and that the less important
half. Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken that
connects God With Nature, or Nature with men, or men with critics. The
"Mona Lisa" was in some respects (not all, I fancy) what God meant her
to be. Leonardo's picture was, in some respects, like the lady. And
Walter Pater's rich description was, in some respects, like the picture.
Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature, in the
last resort, can express something other than its own unhappy self.

Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely
inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being
speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. But if there is any good in
Botticelli (there is much good, and much evil too) it is emphatically
the critic's business to explain it: to translate it from terms of