The name is absent

IV

CRITICISM AND THE HISTORY OF ART

ARTISTIC and literary criticism is often looked upon by
* artists as a morose and tyrannical pedagogue who
gives capricious orders, imposes prohibitions, and grants per-
missions, thus aiding or injuring their works by wilfully de-
ciding upon their fate. And so the artists either shew them-
selves submissive, humble, flattering, adulatory, toward it,
while hating it in their hearts; or, when they do not obtain
what they want, or their loftiness of soul forbids that they
should descend to those arts of the courtier, they revolt
against it, proclaiming its uselessness, with imprecations and
mockery, comparing (the remembrance is personal) the
critic to an ass that enters the potter’s shop and breaks in
pieces with quadrupedante ungulæ sonitu the delicate prod-
ucts of his art set out to dry in the sun. This time, to tell the
truth, it is the artists’ fault, for they do not know what criti-
cism is, expecting from it favours which it is not in a position
to grant, and injuries which it is not in a position to inflict:
since it is clear that since no critic can make an artist of one
who is not an artist, so no critic can ever undo, overthrow,
or even slightly injure an artist who is really an artist, owing
to the metaphysical impossibility of such an act: these things
have never happened in the course of history, they do not
happen in our day, and we can be sure that they will never
happen in the future. But sometimes it is the critics them-
selves, or the self-styled critics, who do actually present
themselves as pedagogues, as oracles, as guides of art, as
legislators, seers, and prophets; they command artists to do
this or that, they assign themes to them and declare that cer-

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