The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 75
who know so many things hidden from the majority and are
able to throw so much light on subjects. Not only has the art
that is most remote from us need of this assistance, but also
that of the nearest past, called contemporary, which, al-
though it treats of subjects and presents forms that seem to
be obvious, is yet not always sufficiently obvious; and some-
times a great effort is requisite in order to prepare people to
feel the beauty of a BttIe poem or of some work of art, though
born but yesterday. Prejudices, habits and forgetfulness form
hedges barring the approach to that work: the expert hand
of the interpreter and of the commentator is required to re-
move them. Criticism in this sense is certainly most useful,
but we do not see why it should be called criticism when
that sort of work already possesses its own name of interpre-
tation, comment, or exegesis. To call this criticism is at best
useless, for it is equivocal.

It is equivocal because criticism demands to be, wishes to
be and is something different: it does not wish to invade art,
nor to rediscover the beauty of the beautiful, or the ugliness
of the ugly, nor to make itself small before art, but rather to
make itself great before art which is great and, in a certain
sense, above it. What, then, is legitimate and true criticism?

First of all, it is at once all three of the things that I have
hitherto explained; that is to say, all these three things are
its necessary conditions, without which it would not arise.
Without the moment of art (and, as we have seen, that criti-
cism which affirms itself to be productive or an aid to pro-
duction, or as repressing certain forms of production to the
advantage of certain other forms, is, in a certain sense, art
against art), the experience of art would be wanting to the
critic, art created within his spirit, severed from non-art, and
enjoyed in preference to that. And finally, this experience

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