72 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
which is without doubt a defect, but one with which too
many excellent artists appear to be stained for us to refuse
to it some indulgence similar to that accorded to the defects
of women, so difficult, as we know, to separate from their
good qualities. Other artists should calmly reply to these
artist-critics “continue doing in your art what you do so well,
and let us do what we can do”; and to the artists who have
faded and improvised themselves critics: “Do not claim that
we should do what you have failed in doing, or what is work
of the future, of which neither you nor we know anything.”
As a fact, this is not the usual reply, because passion forms
half of it; but this is indeed the logical reply, which logically
terminates the question, though we must foresee that the
altercation will not terminate, but will indeed last as long as
there are intolerant artists and failures—that is to say, for
ever.
And there is another conception of criticism, which is ex-
pressed in the magistrate and in the judge, as the foregoing
is expressed in the pedagogue or in the tyrant; it attributes
to criticism the duty, not of promoting and guiding the life
of art,—which is promoted and guided, if you like to call it
so, only by history; that is, by the complex movement of the
spirit in its historical course,—but simply to separate, in the
art which has already been produced, the beautiful from the
ugly, and to approve the beautiful and reprove the ugly with
the solemnity of a properly austere and conscientious sen-
tence. But I fear that the blame of uselessness will not be
removed from criticism, even with this other definition, al-
though perhaps the motive of this blame may to some ex-
tent be changed. Is there really need of criticism in order to
distinguish the beautiful from the ugly? The production it-
self of art is never anything but this distinguishing, because