rsonal and
disinterested admiration, our aesthetic experience would be small indeed
were it confined to this. More often than not it must be of works that
have moved him partly by matching a mood that the best of critics
writes. More often than not he is disentangling and exhibiting qualities
of which all he can truly say is that they have proved comfortable
or exhilarating to a particular person at a particular moment. He is
dealing with matters of taste; and about tastes, you know, _non est
disputandum_.

I shall not pretend that when I call the poetry of Milton good I suppose
my judgement to have no more validity than what may be claimed for that
of the urchin who says the same of peppermints: but I do think a
critic should cultivate a sense of humour. If he be very sure that his
enthusiasm is the only appropriate response of a perfectly disinterested
sensibility to absolute beauty, let him be as dogmatic as is compatible
with good breeding: failing that, I counsel as great a measure of
modesty as may be compatible with the literary character. Let him
remember that, as a rule, he is not demanding homage for what he knows
to be absolutely good, but pointing to what he likes and trying to
explain why he likes it. That, to my mind, is the chief function of a
critic. After all, an unerring eye for masterpieces is perhaps of more
use to a dealer than to him. Mistakes do not matter much: if we are
to call mistakes what are very likely no more than the records of a
perverse or obscure mood. Was it a mistake in 1890 to rave about Wagner?
Is it a mistake to find him intolerable now? Frankly, I suspect the man
or woman of the nineties who was unmoved by Wagner of having wanted
sensibility, and him or her who to-day revels in that music of being
aesthetically oversexed. Be that as it may, never to pretend to like what
bores or dislike what pleases him, to be honest in his reactions and
exact in their description, is all I now ask of a critic. It is asking
a good deal, I think. To a lady who protested that she knew what she
liked, Whistler is said to have replied--"So, madame, do the beasts of
the field." Do they? Then all I can say is the beasts of the field are
more highly developed than most of the ladies and gentlemen who write
about art in the papers.

3. _Last Thoughts_

Already I am in a scrape with the critics. I am in a scrape for having
said, a couple of years ago, that a critic was nothing but a sign-post,
and f