But it was not around such questions as these, vexatious, no doubt, but pertinent, that controversy raged.  The questions that eminent critics, writers, and dignitaries of divers churches discussed in public, while colonels, Socialists, and cultivated theosophical ladies wrangled over them at home, were:  “Has Mr. Epstein done justice to the character of Christ?” and, “What was His character?” Was Christ intelligent or was He something nobler, and what has Mr. Epstein to say about it?  Was He disdainful or was He sympathetic?  Was He like Mr. Bertrand Russell or more like Mr. Gladstone?  And did Mr. Epstein see Him with the eyes of one who knew what for ages Christ had meant to Europe, or with those of a Jew of the first century?  Questions such as these—­I will not swear to any particular one of them—­were what the critics threw into the arena, and no one much blames the parsons and publicists for playing football with them.  But the critics must have known that such questions were utterly irrelevant; that it mattered not a straw whether this statue, considered as a work of art, represented Jesus Christ or John Smith.

This the critics knew:  they knew that the appeal of a work of art is essentially permanent and universal, and they knew that hardly one word in their controversy could have meant anything to the most sensitive Chinaman alive, unless he happened to be familiar with the Christian tradition and Christian ethics.  If there be no more in Mr. Epstein’s figure than what the critics talked about, then, should the Christian religion ever become obsolete and half-forgotten, Mr. Epstein’s figure will become quite insignificant.  Most of us know next to nothing about Buddhism and Totemism, and only a little about Greek myths and Byzantine theology, yet works of art historically associated with these remain, by reason of their permanent and universal, that is to say their purely aesthetic, qualities, as moving and intelligible as on the day they left their makers’ hands.  About Mr. Epstein’s sculpture the important thing to discover is whether, and in what degree, it possesses these permanent and universal qualities.  But on that subject the critics are dumb.

An instructive parallel in literary journalism occurs to me.  I have noticed lately a tendency in the intellectual underworld—­for here I take leave of first-class criticism—­to belittle Ibsen, with the object, apparently, of magnifying Tchekov, and always it is in the name of art that Ibsen is decried.  Now, if our literary ragamuffins cared two pence about art they would all be on their knees before Ibsen, who is, I suppose, the finest dramatic artist since Racine.  Few things are more perfect as form, more admirably consistent and self-supporting, than his later plays.  It was he who invented the modern dramatic method of seizing a situation at the point at which it can last be seized, and from there pushing it forward with imperturbable logic and not one divagation.  As an artist Ibsen is to