it is not true, though it has so often been asserted, that criticism is of no use or of little use to art. this notion prevails so widely only because—among us at least—criticism has not been criticism. to criticise is to judge; to judge requires judicial qualification; and this is quite a different thing from a natural sensitiveness to beauty, however much that sensitiveness may have become heightened by converse with refined and beautiful objects of nature and works of art. “criticism,” which has been the outcome only of such sensitiveness and such converse, may be, and often is,—delightful reading, and is naturally far more popular than criticism which is truly judicial. the pseudo-criticism, of which we have had such floods during the past half-century, delights by sympathy with, and perhaps expansion of, our own sensations;{2} true criticism appeals to the intellect, and rebukes the reader as often as it does the artist for his ignorance and his mistakes. such criticism may not be able to produce good art; but bad art collapses at the contact of its breath, as the steam in the cylinder of an engine collapses on each admission of the spray of cold water; and thus, although good criticism cannot produce art, it removes endless hindrances to its production, and tends to provide art with its chief motive-power, a public prepared to acknowledge it. the enunciation of a single principle has sometimes, almost at a blow, revolutionised not only the technical practice of an art, but the popular taste with regard to it. strawberry hill gothic vanished like a nightmare when pugin for the first time authoritatively asserted and proved that architectural decoration could never properly be an addition to constructive features, but only a fashioning of them. the truth was manifest at once to amateur as well as to architect; and this one principle proves to have contained a power even of popular culture far greater than all the splendid “sympathetic” criticism which followed during the next fifty years. and it has done nothing but good, whereas the latter kind of writing, together with much good, has done much harm. pugin’s insight did not enable him to discover the almost equally{3} clear and simple principle which governs the special form of decoration that properly characterises each of the great styles of architecture. therefore, while his law of constructional decoration compelled all succeeding “critics” to keep within its bounds, they were still free to give the rein to mere fancy as to the nature of the decoration itself; and this has been becoming worse and worse in proportion as critics and architects of genius, but of no principle, have departed from the dry tradition of decorative form which prevailed in pugin’s day, and which finds its orthodox expression in parker’s glossary and the elementary works of bloxam and rickman. sensitiveness or natural “taste,” apart from principle, is, in art, what love is apart from truth in morals. the stronger it is, the further it is likely to go wrong. nothing can be more tenderly “felt” than a school of painting which is now much in favour; but, for want of knowledge and masculine principle, it has come to delight in representing ugliness and corruption in place of health and beauty. venus or hebe becomes, in its hands, nothing but a dame aux camélias in the last stage of moral and physical deterioration. a few infallible and, when once uttered, self-evident principles would at once put a stop to this sort of representation among{4} artists; and the public would soon learn to be repelled by what now most attracts them, being thenceforward guided by a critical conscience, which is the condition of “good taste.”
there is little that is conclusive or fruitful in any of the criticism of the present day. the very name that it has chosen, “?sthetics,” contains an implied admission of its lack of virility or principle. we do not think of lessing’s laoco?n, which is one of the finest pieces of critical writing in the world, as belonging to “?sthetics”; and, like it, the critical sayings of goethe and coleridge seem to appertain to a science deserving a nobler name—a science in which truth stands first and feeling second, and of which the conclusions are demonstrable and irreversible. a critic of the present day, in attempting to describe the difference between the usual construction of a passage by fletcher and one by shakespeare, would beat helplessly about the bush, telling us many things about the different sorts of feelings awakened by the one and by the other, and concluding, and desiring to conclude, nothing. coleridge in a single sentence defines the difference, and establishes shakespeare’s immeasurable superiority with the clearness and finality of a mathematical statement; and the delight of the reader of shakespeare is for ever heightened be{5}cause it is less than before a zeal without knowledge.
there already exists, in the writings and sayings of aristotle, hegel, lessing, goethe, and others, the greater part of the materials necessary for the formation of a body of institutes of art which would supersede and extinguish nearly all the desultory chatter which now passes for criticism, and which would go far to form a true and abiding popular taste—one which could render some reason for its likings and dislikings. the man, however, who could put such materials together and add such as are wanting does not live; or at any rate he is not known. hegel might have done it, had his artistic perception been as fine and strong as his intellect; which would then have expressed its conclusions without the mist of obscurity in which, for nearly all readers, they are at present shrouded. in the meantime it would be well if the professed critic would remember that criticism is not the expression, however picturesque and glowing, of the faith that is in him, but the rendering of sound and intelligible reasons for that faith.
