But where now is the painter critic and the professional critic?  “Stands Ulster where it did?” Yes, the written and reported words of artists are precious alike to layman and critic.  That they prefer painting to writing is only natural; so would the critic if he had the pictorial gift.  However, as art is art and not nature, criticism is criticism and not art.  It professes to interpret the artist’s work, and at best it mirrors his art mingled with the personal temperament of the critic.  At the worst the critic lacks temperament (artistic training is, of course, an understood requisite), and when this is the case, God help the artist!  As the greater includes the lesser, the artist should permit the critic to enter, with all due reverence, his sacred domain.  Without vanity the one, sympathetic the other.  Then the ideal collaboration ensues.  Sainte-Beuve says that “criticism by itself can do nothing.  The best of it can act only in concert with public feeling ... we never find more than half the article in print—­the other half was written only in the reader’s mind.”  And Professor Walter Raleigh would further limit the “gentle art.”  “Criticism, after all, is not to legislate, nor to classify, but to raise the dead.”  The relations between the critic and his public open another vista of the everlasting discussion.  Let it be a negligible one now.  That painters can get along without professional criticism we know from history, but that they will themselves play the critic is doubtful.  And are they any fairer to young talent than official critics?  It is an inquiry fraught with significance.  Great and small artists have sent forth into the world their pupils.  Have they always—­as befits honest critics—­recognised the pupils of other men, pupils and men both at the opposite pole of their own theories?  Recall what Velasquez is reported to have said to Salvator Rosa, according to Boschini and Carl Justi.  Salvator had asked the incomparable Spaniard whether he did not think Raphael the best of all the painters he had seen in Italy.  Velasquez answered:  “Raphael, to be plain with you, for I like to be candid and outspoken, does not please me at all.”  This purely temperamental judgment does not make of Velasquez either a good or a bad critic.  It is interesting as showing us that even a master cannot always render justice to another.  Difference engenders hatred, as Stendhal would say.

Can the record of criticism made by plastic artists show a generous Robert Schumann?  Schumann discovered many composers from Chopin to Brahms and made their fortunes by his enthusiastic writing about them.  In Wagner he met his Waterloo, but every critic has his limitations.  There is no Schumann, let the fact be emphasised, among the painter-critics, though quite as much discrimination, ardour of discovery, and acumen may be found among the writings of the men whose names rank high in professional criticism.  And this hedge, we humbly submit, is a rather stiff one to vault for the adherents of criticism written by artists only.  Nevertheless, every day of his humble career must the critic pen his apologia pro vita sua.