Is not silence the "better business"? Exactly! Why not maintain the temperature steadily at the comfortable 70 degrees? It is of no avail to declare the atmosphere intellectually stifling and spiritually enervating; no, nor even to hint of the importance of the critical integrity. Commend or be silent! And as the permitted alternative allows the critic the negative possession of his honesty, what more is desirable? Andrew Jackson could say that searching his heart he knew he was entirely free from all prejudice, but he hated a nigger; and the artist, while protesting his desire for truth, perceives nothing contradictory in a vehement distaste for the mildest deprecatory remarks. This, which may be termed the ceremonial view of criticism, is fast becoming a part of the code of the artist. It is of small account who speaks, so long as "be they Solomon's words or the words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, they are canonical." Under these circumstances it is quite clear that, no matter what this obscurantist spirit may concede for the moment to the missionary, the authority of the critic is doomed. The "better business" is bound finally to dominate, and judgment of a work of art must tend to become more and more an ambidextrous affair.

to court. icised

I am ready without hesitation to admit that this statement will not miss protest. Indeed, it was the expectation of opposition that induced me at the outset to subpoena Mr. Taft "Mr. MacMonnies has been critis it reasonable to find fault to reproach him. . . ? To learn to appreciate his sincere contribution is better business." There is, I hold, a naïvely candid air about this, and the enfant terrible who blurts out the domestic secret could not be more completely convincing. Not for a moment be it understood Mr. Taft has been indiscreet. I venture to say that all who move critically these days among our artists recognize how wise it is to step with a light foot in another's house, and they, I am sure, will corroborate my assertion that Mr. Taft's words fairly represent the situation. It may be that the taste for the saccharine is not in all quarters quite so extreme as I put it, but in that case any difference of opinion will only be as to degree.

And even so, it may be urged, granting the necessary reasonable qualifications to all that is stated above, is not the artist's position in some degree tenable? People speak of criticism, continues the objector, as Emerson

said people spoke in his day of transcendentalism "as a known and fixed element like salt or meal." One is bound, of course, in a discussion of this matter to hear it re-echoed that the business of criticism is to "see things as in themselves they really are." These and similar phrases, are they not of so fine an intellectuality that they pass too easily into cant? They are not only not "the simple produce of the common day," but they truly are, to use Bacon's word, of the nature of "transcendentals," never to be quite realized by any stretch of the thinking faculty. They remind one of Don Quixote's Beauty"Had I once shown you that Beauty, what wonder would it be to acknowledge so notorious a truth? The importance of the thing lies in obliging you to believe it, confess it, swear it and maintain it without seeing her." Precisely as it has been said that there are some utterances so obscure that it would seem that they must contain some superior truth, so are there some statements so apparently clear, so deceitfully obvious, that they are rarely subjected to the test of the understanding. To speak of seeing things as in themselves they really are, and like dicta, are but metaphysical speeches that lend to criticism at least the fictitious air of a fine impartiality. But after all we see that our judgment does not operate in a vacuum, and to free our opinions from the sense of ourselves is as impossible as the somersault by means of the boot-straps. Public criticism

and it is public criticism our supposititious objector is speaking of—is essentially an exchange between at least two minds. It is related to an audience somewhere. It is easy enough to declare that criticism is not instruction, but it is much more difficult to prove that the schoolmaster is not inevitably present. And if criticism presupposes purpose, audience, instruction, and the everdangerous presence of the critic's personality, ought we to insist that criticism shall be a sort of fire-bell flinging its arousing notes promiscuously to the wind? Is criticism at all the worse if it proceed a little with the occasion? May its fine wine be carried wisely to any wayside inn? And what is all this but just Mr. Taft's "better business," cr, to appeal over Mr. Taft's head to a higher opinion-that of Montaigne-can we not say that "truth must be able to bear the yoke of our necessity?" Even with the artist himself, all other things being equal, may we not expect

the effect of judgment to be in proportion to its hospitality? It is absurd to expect the patient to possess a surgical indifference to his treatment. There are so few qualities that do not impinge upon some fault, and to-day, where the qualities are so easily missed by a raw and uninstructed public, is not the fostering of a generous appreciation of good work of far more worth to the artist and the layman alike than a too scrupulous insistence upon shortcomings? Even if "the thing as in itself it is" must be the preoccupation of the critic, may he not at the same time see other things as well?

This view of criticism as a sort of direct-acting utility, a commodity for immediate consumption, is, for the initiated, extant in many strenuous variations. There is, no doubt, a coarse practicality about it all, even the air of a good-natured working compromise. It is this, I believe, that frequently commends it to the layman, who I am sure is inclined to side with the artist, at least to the extent of regarding all thoroughgoing criticism as essentially unfair, as a sort of unwarranted attack upon property which the owner is legally unable to resent. The common instincts, to the credit of humanity, are generous, and popular criticism in the mass is unfortunately much more vicious in its strictures than in its praise. The vulgar identification of criticism with fault-finding is unconscious testimony to this fact; and indeed, is not too much even of the better class of critical work that finds its way into the public prints rankly vitiated the moment the line of commendation is crossed by the writer's evident relish for the smart phrase, the witty quip, or the flippant jibe? It is instinct, at best, not with genuine insight but with verbal ingenuity. The praise given may be unintellectual even to the limit of taste, but by its own nature it polices itself, whereas when "the criticism" comes in, to use the vernacular, it is too often as an exhibition of literary bad manners. How much this strengthens the general distaste for criticism and the argument against its full, free, disinterested exercise is not to be estimated offhand. It tends to obscure in the popular mind the whole case for criticism, and clouds to misapprehension the real issue, so far as the public takes any interest in it.

I hope I shall not be understood as implying that were criticism shorn of its mere smartness the layman would evince any greater

intellectual concern about it. At best it is a case of many called, few chosen. Art, despite its omnipresent intrusion now-a-days, is still in a great measure an extraneous affair in the common life, a matter chiefly of superficial decoration and embellishment. It lends a distinction to existence, not value. It is not really an essential element, and in the very nature of things criticism cannot hope to rise above its source or transcend at any moment the value and vitality of its subject-matter. If this be correct, there must be something erroneous in the idea that criticism is entirely an affair with the public, which one hears expressed so often by the very persons who deplore most strongly Mr. Taft's "better business" and all the rest with it. The artist, we are assured, cares nothing about it. You cannot get his ear. Turn, therefore, so runs the exhortation, to the public and instruct it as to what it ought to think about the artist's work. As though the public ear were a whit more receptive! As though this were not merely a different phase of Mr. Taft's heresy and of those other errors of principle that lead up to the notions of compromise, judicious reticence, and expectation of direct returns upon the critical investment!

I have returned to Mr. Taft's words perhaps more frequently than was quite fair; let me therefore now quote from someone else in support of the point of view to which I believe we must finally hold. "Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints." It lives, I would like to add, upon much else, but not much else that criticism can deal with effectively. In other words, art is in some measure an intellectual business, and criticism is simply the expression of this intellectual business in operation. As soon as we become in any degree curious about a work of art, and begin to discuss it, exchange views regarding it, or compare standpoints, the critical faculty is at work. We are started upon an intellectual pursuit as full of adventure and magical surprise and delicious discovery as ever befell traveller in romantic lands. The botanist studying petals and sepals, stamens and stigma, comparing plant with plant, recording then his observations and grouping the plant world into species and genus, is no more concerned with the "better business" than is the critic. Neither is he, in the narrow class-room meaning of

the word, any more of an instructor. The critic's is not an affair with anybody's ignorance. He is oriented neither toward the improvement of the artist nor the education of the public. His address is Minerva's Tower, which I would like to believe is in Perigord, in the atmosphere Montaigne breathed. I recognize how far, by more than geographical miles, this removal is from the existing "field of operations," but the more we inject any restricted purpose into criticism the more we limit it and deprive it of intellectuality. Its "better business" is to be absolutely free, absolutely curious, absolutely removed from practical results.

Nobody, I suppose, will imagine that in insisting upon the intellectual detachment of the critical function I am asserting that by nature it is entirely an affair of dry understanding. Taine confessed that he knew the arts only by the intellect; but this, if true in his case, is to miss much, for the critical spirit must be but the artistic spirit viewed from another side, if it is to be in any sense interpretative and more than a scientific business -a making of catalogues, an enumeration of dates, a classification or description of superficial data. Still less, of course, must I be understood as asserting that criticism is not fecund with practical results. The economic principle in life rarely fails in its service to humanity, and the critical function, by producing "the return again and yet again on one's own impressions," is no more likely to remain a mental sport without issue in daily affairs than is pure science or pure morality. The beauties of art are after all fixed, and the great thing is to get them expressed in and recognized through their variable forms. Herein lies the great service that criticism ultimately renders to the artist and to the public. It renders the soil fertile, the atmosphere benevolent. Lacking these favorable conditions, great art is impossible. The artist's individuality imposes itself so intensely upon our recognition that art is apt to be regarded as largely a personal impulse, whereas, fundamentally, in its most important aspect, it is a part of our intellectual and so

cial life. If art is not borne along by the national current, precisely as is the case with commerce or science, religion or literature, it cannot go far toward the realization of supreme results. I have no great faith in the idea, so frequently expounded, that separates periods of great critical effort from periods of high creative production. I rather think the two are usually contemporaneous, and that the great art epochs were also times of the keenest critical effort. The error that begets the separation of the one from the other is due to a too exclusive recognition of criticism as documentary expression. One feels pretty sure, however, that the atmosphere of the Periclean Age or of the high-noon of the Renaissance was every bit as alive with the critical as with the creative spirit. All the better for the latter, one is impelled to say, if the former is in the agora, the forum, or the street. This is in very fact to launch our galley on the stream of national life! And if criticism is to assist this process, it must possess a wider horizon than the "better business." If unfortunately it is called upon to exercise its function somewhat isolated from its great companion, its first affair is to arouse the sleeper, get it on the march again, and at the same time awaken the public from the dull sensualism of the commonplace-for alone, criticism is but a paper judiciary. And to this end the critic, in dealing with whatever may be at hand, must at first, like the surveyor, try firmly to establish his points, his bases for the future measurements of unknown distances. In his utterances he must omit nothing material to the elucidation of any particular point of view, and while seeking to establish the characteristic in any work of art, remember that his chief concern is not with the particular example, but with the universal case-all that we mean by artistic integrity, hospitality, progress. The "better business" will not help us far in this direction. Much more to the purpose would it be with a work of art to insist, as old Burton reports Alexander the physician would have done by lapis lazuli, that it be "fifty times washed before it be used." HARRY W. DESMOND.

-"Diagnosis."