note: _The critic's responsibilities._]

[Sidenote: _Toward the musician._]

[Sidenote: _Position and power of the newspaper._]

But when we place so great a mission as the education of public taste
before the critic, we saddle him with a vast responsibility which is
quite evenly divided between the musician and the public. The
responsibility toward the musician is not that which we are accustomed
to hear harped on by the aggrieved ones on the day after a concert. It
is toward the musician only as a representative of art, and his just
claims can have nothing of selfishness in them. The abnormal
sensitiveness of the musician to criticism, though it may excite his
commiseration and even honest pity, should never count with the critic
in the performance of a plain duty. This sensitiveness is the product
of a low state in music as well as criticism, and in the face of
improvement in the two fields it will either disappear or fall under a
killing condemnation. The power of the press will here work for good.
The newspaper now fills the place in the musician's economy which a
century ago was filled in Europe by the courts and nobility. Its
support, indirect as well as direct, replaces the patronage which
erstwhile came from these powerful ones. The evils which flow from the
changed conditions are different in extent but not in kind from the
old. Too frequently for the good of art that support is purchased by
the same crookings of "the pregnant hinges of the knee" that were once
the price of royal or noble condescension. If the tone of the press at
times becomes arrogant, it is from the same causes that raised the
voices and curled the lips of the petty dukes and princes, to flatter
whose vanity great artists used to labor.

[Sidenote: _The musician should help to elevate the standard of
criticism._]

[Sidenote: _A critic must not necessarily be a musician._]

[Sidenote: _Pedantry not wanted._]

The musician knows as well as anyone how impossible it is to escape
the press, and it is, therefore, his plain duty to seek to raise the
standard of its utterances by conceding the rights of the critic and
encouraging honesty, fearlessness, impartiality, intelligence, and
sympathy wherever he finds them. To this end he must cast away many
antiquated and foolish prejudices. He must learn to confess with
Wagner, the arch-enemy of criticism, that "blame is much more useful
to the artist than praise," and that "the musician who goes