ses?"

Nothing, by the by, you may have noticed, troubles your critic more than
the idea that the artist is wasting his time. It is the waste of time
that vexes the critic; he has such an exalted idea of the value of other
people's time. "Dear, dear me!" he says to himself, "why, in the time
the man must have taken to paint this picture or to write this book,
he might have blacked fifteen thousand pairs of boots, or have carried
fifteen thousand hods of mortar up a ladder. This is how the time of the
world is lost!"

It never occurs to him that, but for that picture or book, the artist
would, in all probability, have been mouching about with a pipe in his
mouth, getting into trouble.

It reminds me of the way people used to talk to me when I was a boy.
I would be sitting, as good as gold, reading "The Pirate's Lair," when
some cultured relative would look over my shoulder and say: "Bah! what
are you wasting your time with rubbish for? Why don't you go and do
something useful?" and would take the book away from me. Upon which I
would get up, and go out to "do something useful;" and would come home
an hour afterward, looking like a bit out of a battle picture, having
tumbled through the roof of Farmer Bate's greenhouse and killed a
cactus, though totally unable to explain how I came to be on the roof of
Farmer Bate's greenhouse. They had much better have left me alone, lost
in "The Pirate's Lair!"

The artists in this land of which I dreamed left off painting pictures,
after hearing what the critics said, and purchased ladders, and went off
and painted houses.

Because, you see, this country of which I dreamed was not one of those
vulgar, ordinary countries, such as exist in the waking world, where
people let the critics talk as much as ever they like, and nobody pays
the slightest attention to what they say. Here, in this strange land,
the critics were taken seriously, and their advice followed.

As for the poets and sculptors, they were very soon shut up. The idea of
any educated person wanting to read modern poetry when he could obtain
Homer, or caring to look at any other statue while there was still some
of the Venus de Medicis left, was too absurd. Poets and sculptors were
only wasting their time.

What new occupation they were recommended to adopt, I forget. Some
calling they knew nothing whatever about, and that they were totally
unfitted for, of course.

The musicians tried their art for a little while,