Let us now swing around the obverse side of the medal.  A good showing.  You may begin with Wincklemann or Goethe—­we refer entirely to critics of paint and painters—­or run down the line to Diderot, Blanc, Gautier, Baudelaire, Zola, Goncourt, who introduced to Europe Japanese art; Roger Marx, Geoffroy, Huysmans, Camille Mauclair, Charles Morice, and Octave Mirbeau.  Zola was not a painter, but he praised Edouard Manet.  These are a few names hastily selected.  In England, Ruskin too long ruled the critical roast; full of thunder-words like Isaiah, his vaticinations led a generation astray.  He was a prophet, not a critic, and he was a victim to his own abhorred “pathetic fallacy.”  Henley was right in declaring that until R.A.M.  Stevenson appeared there was no great art criticism in England or English.  The “Velasquez” is a marking stone in critical literature.  It is the one big book by a big temperament that may be opposed page by page to Fromentin’s critical masterpiece.  Shall we further adduce the names of Morelli, Sturge Moore, Roger Fry, Perkins, Cortissoz, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Van Dyke, Mather, Berenson, Brownell, and George Moore—­who said of Ruskin that his uncritical blindness regarding Whistler will constitute his passport to fame, “the lot of critics is to be remembered by what they have failed to understand.”  Walter Pater wrote criticism that is beautiful literature.  If Ruskin missed Whistler, he is in good company, for Sainte-Beuve, the prince of critics, missed Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo was unfair.  Yet, consider the Osrics embalmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve’s style.  He, like many another critic, was superior to his subject.  And that is always fatal to the water-flies.

George III once asked in wonderment how the apples get inside the dumplings.  How can a critic criticise a creator?  The man who looks on writing things about the man who does things.  But he criticises and artists owe him much.  Neither in “ink-horn terms” nor in an “upstart Asiatic style” need the critic voice his opinions.  He must be an artist in temperament and he must have a credo.  He need not be a painter to write of painting, for his primary appeal is to the public.  He is the middle-man, the interpreter, the vulgariser.  The psycho-physiological processes need not concern us.  One thing is certain—­a man writing in terms of literature about painting, an art in two dimensions, cannot interpret fully the meanings of the canvas, nor can he be sure that his opinion, such as it is, when it reaches the reader, will truthfully express either painter or critic.  Such are the limitations of one art when it comes to deal with the ideas or material of another.  Criticism is at two removes from its theme.  Therefore criticism is a makeshift.  Therefore, let critics be modest and allow criticism to become an amiable art.