74 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
demn ugliness already condemned, grown wearisome and
forgotten, or still praised in words, but with a bad conscience,
through prejudice and obstinate pride. Criticism, conceived
as a magistrate, kills the dead or blows air upon the face of
the living, who is quite lively, in the belief that its breath is
that of the God who brings life; that is, it performs a useless
task, because this has previously been performed. I ask my-
self what critics have established the greatness of Dante, of
Shakespeare, or of Michelangelo: if, among the legions who
have acclaimed and do acclaim these great men, there are
or have been men of letters and professional critics, their
acclamation does not differ in this case from that of youth
and of the people, who are all equally ready to open their
hearts to the beautiful, which speaks to all, save sometimes,
when it is silent, on discovering the surly countenance of a
critic-judge.
And so there arises a third conception of criticism: the
criticism of interpretation or comment, which makes itself
small before works of art and limits itself to the duty of dust-
ing, placing in a good light, furnishing information as to the
period at which a picture was painted and what it repre-
sents, explaining linguistic forms, historical allusions, the pre-
sumptions of fact and of idea in a poem; and in both cases,
its duty performed, permits the art to act spontaneously
within the soul of the onlooker and of the reader, who will
then judge of it according as his intimate taste tells him to
judge. In this case the critic appears as a cultivated cicerone
or as a patient and discreet schoolmaster: “Criticism is the
art of teaching to read,” is the definition of a famous critic;
and the definition has not been without its echo. Now no one
contests the utility of guides to museums or exhibitions, or of
teachers of reading, still less of erudite guides and masters