sees them flushed or dimmed by any
mood of his own. Nor does he allow the passions of his figures to affect
his representation of them or of their surroundings. He is cold,
himself, towards these passions, for to him they are only a part of the
bewilderment of actual experience. But in making forms he escapes from
that bewilderment and shows us matter utterly subject to mind. Yet in
this triumph there is always implied the sadness that such a triumph is
impossible in life, that the artist cannot be what he paints. The
Renaissance had failed, and Poussin's art was a bitterly sincere
announcement of its failure.

A Defence of Criticism

The only kind of critic taken seriously in England is the art critic;
and he is taken seriously as an expert, that is to say, as one who will
tell us not what he has found in a work of art, but who produced it. His
very judgment is valued not on a matter of art at all, but on a matter
of business. No one wants to know whether a certain picture is good or
bad. The question is, Was it painted by Romney? It might well have been
and yet be a very bad picture; but that is not the point. Experts are
called to say that it is by Romney; and they are proved to be wrong.
Thereupon Sir Thomas Jackson writes to the _Times_ and says that if
people learned to think for themselves the profession of art critic
would be at an end. The art critic, for him, is one who tells people
what to think. And then he proceeds--

It is only for the public he writes; he is of no use to
artists. I doubt whether any man in any branch of art could be
found who would honestly say he had ever learned anything from
the art critic, who, after all, is only an amateur. The
criticism we value, and that which really helps, is that of our
brother artists, often sharp and unsparing, but always salutary
and useful. And if useless to the artist, art criticism is
harmful to the public, who take their opinion from it at second
hand. Were all art criticism made penal for ten years lovers of
art would learn to think for themselves, and a truer
appreciation of art than the commercial one would result, with
the greatest benefit both to art and to artists. It is the
artist and not the professional critic who should be the real
instructor of the public taste.

Here there seems to be an inconsistency; for if we are to think for
ourselve