is
extraordinary masterpiece, may even bring it again into fashion. But
it has got a bad name by keeping low company; for it has come to be
associated with those journalistic reviewers who describe, not the
feelings and ideas provoked in them by reading a book, but what they
thought and felt and did at or about the time they were supposed to be
reading it. These are the chatterboxes who will tell you how they got
up, cut themselves shaving, ate sausages, spilt the tea, and nearly
missed the train in which they began to read the latest work of
Benedetto Croce, which, unluckily, having got into conversation with
a pretty typist or a humorous bagman, they quite forgot, left in
the carriage, and so can tell you no more about. But this is not
Impressionism, it is mere vulgarity.

If in literary criticism the impressionist method is falling into
disfavour, in the criticism of music and painting it holds the field.
Nor is this surprising: to write objectively about a symphony or a
picture, to seize its peculiar intrinsic qualities and describe them
exactly in words, is a feat beyond the power of most. Wherefore, as
a rule, the unfortunate critic must either discourse on history,
archaeology, and psychology, or chatter about his own feelings. With the
exception of Mr. Roger Fry there is not in England one critic capable of
saying so much, to the purpose, about the intrinsic qualities of a work
of visual art as half a dozen or more--Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr. Murry,
Mr. Squire, Mr. Clutton Brock, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and Mr.
McCarthy to begin with--can be trusted to say easily, and, if necessary,
weekly, about the intrinsic qualities of a book. To be sure, Mr. Fry is
a great exception: with my own ears have I heard him take two or three
normally intelligent people through a gallery and by severely objective
means provoke in them a perfect frenzy of enthusiasm for masterpieces of
utterly different schools and ages. Doubtless that is what art-criticism
should be; but perhaps it is wrong to despise utterly those who achieve
something less.

Just at present it is the thing to laugh at biographical and historical
critics, a class of which Sainte-Beuve is the obvious representative,
and to which belong such writers as Taine and Francesco de Sanctis and
all who try to explain works of art by describing their social and
political circumstances. "At any rate," it is said, "these are not
_critics_." I shall not quarrel over words; but