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1889

They vote but do not print. The head tells you pretty promptly whether
the food is satisfactory or not; and everybody hears, and thinks the
whole man has spoken. It is a delusion. Only his taste and his smell
have been heard from--important, both, in a way, but these do not build
up the man; and preserve his life and fortify it.

The little child is permitted to label its drawings "This is a cow this
is a horse," and so on. This protects the child. It saves it from
the sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticized as
kangaroos and work benches. A man who is white-washing a fence is doing
a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man's house
with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these
performances by standards proper to each. Now, then, to be fair, an
author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line:
"This is written for the Head;" "This is written for the Belly and the
Members." And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put
away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard,
and thenceforth follow a fairer course.

The critic assumes, every time, that if a book doesn't meet the
cultivated-class standard, it isn't valuable. Let us apply his law all
around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures,
and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps
which lead up to culture and make culture possible. It condemns the
spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture;
it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the
child's primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the
university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the
cheap terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo
and the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till
he can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will
grant its sanction to nothing below the "classic."

Is this an extravagant statement? No, it is a mere statement of fact.
It is the fact itself that is extravagant and grotesque. And what is the
result? This--and it is sufficiently curious: the critic has actually
imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is
more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a