a
single art, there is so much to be left unread which the length of our
life would not otherwise permit us to escape, that we are grateful to
the critic who aids us to omit gracefully and with success. But the
most serviceable criticism is positive and not destructive. The lesser
works may have a message for us, and it is that message in its
distinctive quality which the critic should affirm. In the end,
however, the use we make of criticism should not reduce itself to an
unquestioning acceptance of authority. In the ceremonial of the
Roman service, at the moment preceding the elevation of the Host,
two acolytes enter the chancel, bearing candles, and kneel between
the congregation and the ministrants at the altar; the tapers,
suffusing the altar in their golden radiance, throw the dim figures of
the priests into a greater gloom and mystery. So it happens that art
often is enshrouded by the off-giving of those who would seem to
illuminate it; and "dark with excess of light," the obscurity is
intensified. The layman is told of the virginal poetry of early Italian
painting; he is bidden to sit at the homely, substantial feast of the
frank actuality of Dutch art; he listens in puzzled wonder to the
glorification of Velasquez and Goya; he reads in eloquent, glowing
language of the splendor of Turner. He is more than half persuaded;
but he does not quite understand. From this tangle of contending
interests there seems for the moment to be no way out. It is assumed
that the layman has no standard of his own; and he yields himself to
the appeal which comes to him immediately at the instant. The next
day, perhaps, brings a new interest or another judgment which runs
counter to the old. Back and forth and back again, without purpose
and without reason; it is only an endless recurrence of the conflict
instead of development and progress. Taking all his estimates at
second hand, so for his opinion even of a concert or a play he is at
the mercy of a critic who may have dined badly. Some boy, caught
young at the university and broken to miscellaneous tasks on a big
newspaper, is sent to "do" a picture-exhibition, a concert, and the
theatre in the same day. He is expected to "criticise" in an hour the
work of a lifetime of struggle and effort and knowledge and thought
and feeling. This is the guide of opinion and the foundation of
artistic creed. I have stated the reduction to absurdity of the case for
authority in criticism. If th