pupil in the way of enjoying art, the good don or schoolmaster
teaches his how to make the most of life; while bad critics and
pedagogues stuff their victims with those most useless of all useless
things, facts and opinions.

Primarily, a critic is a sign-post. He points to a work of art and
says--"Stop! Look!" To do that he must have the sensibility that
distinguishes works of art from rubbish, and, amongst works of art, the
excellent from the mediocre. Further, the critic has got to convince,
he has got to persuade the spectator that there is something before him
that is really worth looking at. His own reaction, therefore, must be
genuine and intense. Also, he must be able to stimulate an appreciative
state of mind; he must, that is to say, have the art of criticism. He
should be able, at a pinch, to disentangle and appraise the qualities
which go to make up a masterpiece, so that he may lead a reluctant
convert by partial pleasures to a sense of the whole. And, because
nothing stands more obstructively between the public and the grand
aesthetic ecstasies than the habit of feeling a false emotion for a
pseudo-work-of-art, he must be as remorseless in exposing shams as a
good schoolmaster would be in exposing charlatans and short-cuts to
knowledge.

Since, in all times and places, the essence of art--the externalizing in
form of something that lies at the very depths of personality--has been
the same, it may seem strange, at first sight, that critical methods
should have varied. One moment's reflection will suffice to remind us
that there are often ten thousand paths to the same goal; and a second's
may suggest that the variety in critical methods is, at any rate, not
more surprising than the variety in the methods of artists. Always
have artists been striving to convert the thrill of inspiration
into significant form; never have they stuck long to any one
converting-machine. Throughout the ages there has been a continual
chopping and changing of "the artistic problem." Canons in criticism
are as unessential as subjects in painting. There are ends to which
a variety of means are equally good: the artist's end is to create
significant form; that of the critic to bring his spectator before a
work of art in an alert and sympathetic frame of mind. If we can realize
that Giotto, with his legends, and Picasso, with his cubes, are after
the same thing, surely we can understand that when Vasari talks of
"Truth to Nature" or