thetic? Was He like Mr. Bertrand Russell or
more like Mr. Gladstone? And did Mr. Epstein see Him with the eyes of
one who knew what for ages Christ had meant to Europe, or with those of
a Jew of the first century? Questions such as these--I will not swear to
any particular one of them--were what the critics threw into the arena,
and no one much blames the parsons and publicists for playing football
with them. But the critics must have known that such questions were
utterly irrelevant; that it mattered not a straw whether this statue,
considered as a work of art, represented Jesus Christ or John Smith.

This the critics knew: they knew that the appeal of a work of art is
essentially permanent and universal, and they knew that hardly one word
in their controversy could have meant anything to the most sensitive
Chinaman alive, unless he happened to be familiar with the Christian
tradition and Christian ethics. If there be no more in Mr. Epstein's
figure than what the critics talked about, then, should the Christian
religion ever become obsolete and half-forgotten, Mr. Epstein's figure
will become quite insignificant. Most of us know next to nothing about
Buddhism and Totemism, and only a little about Greek myths and Byzantine
theology, yet works of art historically associated with these remain,
by reason of their permanent and universal, that is to say their purely
aesthetic, qualities, as moving and intelligible as on the day they left
their makers' hands. About Mr. Epstein's sculpture the important thing
to discover is whether, and in what degree, it possesses these permanent
and universal qualities. But on that subject the critics are dumb.

An instructive parallel in literary journalism occurs to me. I have
noticed lately a tendency in the intellectual underworld--for here I
take leave of first-class criticism--to belittle Ibsen, with the object,
apparently, of magnifying Tchekov, and always it is in the name of art
that Ibsen is decried. Now, if our literary ragamuffins cared two pence
about art they would all be on their knees before Ibsen, who is, I
suppose, the finest dramatic artist since Racine. Few things are more
perfect as form, more admirably consistent and self-supporting, than
his later plays. It was he who invented the modern dramatic method of
seizing a situation at the point at which it can last be seized, and
from there pushing it forward with imperturbable logic and not one
divagation. As an artist Ibs