and upon all subjects: C'est une grande avantage de n'avoir rien fait,
mais il ne faut pas en abuser.

It is only through the mystery of creation that one can gain any
knowledge of the quality of created things. You have listened to
Patience for a hundred nights and you have heard me only for one. It
will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing something about
the subject of it, but you must not judge of aestheticism by the satire
of Mr. Gilbert. As little should you judge of the strength and splendour
of sun or sea by the dust that dances in the beam, or the bubble that
breaks on the wave, as take your critic for any sane test of art. For
the artists, like the Greek gods, are revealed only to one another, as
Emerson says somewhere; their real value and place time only can show. In
this respect also omnipotence is with the ages. The true critic
addresses not the artist ever but the public only. His work lies with
them. Art can never have any other claim but her own perfection: it is
for the critic to create for art the social aim, too, by teaching the
people the spirit in which they are to approach all artistic work, the
love they are to give it, the lesson they are to draw from it.

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern
progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the
voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,' are appeals
which should be made to the public. The art which has fulfilled the
conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions: it is for the critic
to teach the people how to find in the calm of such art the highest
expression of their own most stormy passions. 'I have no reverence,'
said Keats, 'for the public, nor for anything in existence but the
Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty.'

Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and underlying
our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful,
productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities, yet for all its
splendid achievements in poetry and in the decorative arts and in
painting, for all the increased comeliness and grace of dress, and the
furniture of houses and the like, not complete. For there can be no
great sculpture without a beautiful national life, and the commercial
spirit of England has killed that; no great drama without a noble
national life, and the commercial spirit of England has kille