painting into terms of diction. Of course, the rendering will be
inadequate—but so is Botticelli. It is a fact he would be the
first to admit. But anything which has been intelligently received can
at least be intelligently suggested. Pater does suggest an intelligent
cause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the
Sea." Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for Turner destroying
forests and falsifying landscapes. These two great critics were far too
fastidious for my taste; they urged to excess the idea that a sense
of art was a sort of secret; to be patiently taught and slowly learnt.
Still, they thought it could be taught: they thought it could be learnt.
They constrained themselves, with considerable creative fatigue, to find
the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been
clone in Italian painting. The same is true of Whistler and R. A. M.
Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez. They had
something to say about the pictures; they knew it was unworthy of the
pictures, but they said it.

Now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post
Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They
are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt
to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is
untranslatable—that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable,
impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their
banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper
on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried
to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good
old anti-democratic muddlements: that "the public" does not understand
these things; that "the likes of us" cannot dare to question the dark
decisions of our lords.

I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simple
test mentioned above. If there were anything intelligent in such art,
something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature. Man
is made with one head, not with two or three. No criticism of Rembrandt
is as good as Rembrandt; but it can be so written as to make a man go
back and look at his pictures. If there is a curious and fantastic art,
it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantastic
literary expression for it; inferior to it, doubtless, but still akin to
it. If they cann