In one of his early essays Renan points out that the proper apology for the old French aristocracy is that it performed the proper function of a leisured class.  It maintained standards.  Unlike the English, it concerned itself neither with politics nor with money-making, nor yet with local affairs:  it stood apart, “formant dans la nation une classe qui n’avait d’autre souci que les choses liberales.”  Renan recognized that a leisured class is the source of civilization; whether he also recognized that there is no earthly reason why a leisured class should be the ruling class is not clear.  In Europe we have now no leisured class; we have only a number of rich men, mere wealth-producers, who perform for high wages the useful functions that miners and milkmaids perform for low ones.  Our leisured class, moribund before the war, died peacefully in its sleep the year before last.  There is no class on this side the Atlantic to insist on quality now.  But if, as I am told, we all owe money to America, has not America acquired, along with her financial supremacy, certain moral obligations?  Has she not become the leisured class of the world, and, as such, responsible to civilization for the maintenance of those standards without which civilization falls?  If so, it is for America to insist in the fine arts on some measure of talent and intelligence, in society on decent manners, in life on a critical attitude:  it is for her to reaffirm those standards of excellence below which neither art nor thought nor manners nor merchandize shall be suffered to fall:  for her to teach us once again to be fastidious, to embolden us to say to a poet, a painter, a politician, a newspaper proprietor, or even to a maitre d’hotel—­“This is not good enough.”  America possesses the means; she can crack the only whip that carries much conviction nowadays.  Whether she has the will to use it is quite another matter.

CRITICISM

(I) Criticism

Critics do not exist for artists any more than palaeontologists exist for fossils.  If both critics and artists could recognize this, how much poorer the world would be in malice and rancour!  To help the artist is no part of a critic’s business:  artists who cannot help themselves must borrow from other artists.  The critic’s business is to help the public.  With the artist he is not directly concerned:  he is concerned only with his finished products.  So it is ridiculous for the artist to complain that criticism is unhelpful, and absurd for the critic to read the artist lectures with a view to improving his art.  If the critic reads lectures it must be with a view to helping the public to appreciate, not the artist to create.  To put the public in the way of aesthetic pleasure, that is the end for which critics exist, and to that end all means are good.