st is inspired and irresponsible.]

The secret of representative genius is simple enough. All hangs on
intense, exhaustive, rehearsed sensation. To paint is a way of letting
vision work; nor should the amateur imagine that while he lacks
technical knowledge he can have in his possession all the ideal burden
of an art. His reaction will be personal and adventitious, and he will
miss the artist's real inspiration and ignore his genuine successes. You
may instruct a poet about literature, but his allegiance is to emotion.
You may offer the sculptor your comparative observations on style and
taste; he may or may not care to listen, but what he knows and loves is
the human body. Critics are in this way always one stage behind or
beyond the artist; their operation is reflective and his is direct. In
transferring to his special medium what he has before him his whole mind
is lost in the object; as the marksman, to shoot straight, looks at the
mark. How successful the result is, or how appealing to human nature, he
judges afterwards, as an outsider might, and usually judges ill; since
there is no life less apt to yield a broad understanding for human
affairs or even for the residue of art itself, than the life of a man
inspired, a man absorbed, as the genuine artist is, in his own travail.
But into this travail, into this digestion and reproduction of the thing
seen, a critic can hardly enter. Having himself the ulterior office of
judge, he must not hope to rival nature's children in their sportiveness
and intuition.

In an age of moral confusion, these circumstances may lead to a strange
shifting of roles. The critic, feeling that something in the artist has
escaped him, may labour to put himself in the artist's place. If he
succeeded, the result would only be to make him a biographer; he would
be describing in words the very intuitions which the artist had rendered
in some other medium. To understand how the artist felt, however, is not
criticism; criticism is an investigation of what the work is good for.
Its function may be chiefly to awaken certain emotions in the beholder,
to deepen in him certain habits of apperception; but even this most
aesthetic element in a work's operation does not borrow its value from
the possible fact that the artist also shared those habits and emotions.
If he did, and if they are desirable, so much the better for him; but
his work's value would still consist entirely in its power to propagate