author behind it.  And remember, though rightly we set high and apart that supreme rapture in which we are carried to a world of impersonal and disinterested admiration, our aesthetic experience would be small indeed were it confined to this.  More often than not it must be of works that have moved him partly by matching a mood that the best of critics writes.  More often than not he is disentangling and exhibiting qualities of which all he can truly say is that they have proved comfortable or exhilarating to a particular person at a particular moment.  He is dealing with matters of taste; and about tastes, you know, non est disputandum.

I shall not pretend that when I call the poetry of Milton good I suppose my judgement to have no more validity than what may be claimed for that of the urchin who says the same of peppermints:  but I do think a critic should cultivate a sense of humour.  If he be very sure that his enthusiasm is the only appropriate response of a perfectly disinterested sensibility to absolute beauty, let him be as dogmatic as is compatible with good breeding:  failing that, I counsel as great a measure of modesty as may be compatible with the literary character.  Let him remember that, as a rule, he is not demanding homage for what he knows to be absolutely good, but pointing to what he likes and trying to explain why he likes it.  That, to my mind, is the chief function of a critic.  After all, an unerring eye for masterpieces is perhaps of more use to a dealer than to him.  Mistakes do not matter much:  if we are to call mistakes what are very likely no more than the records of a perverse or obscure mood.  Was it a mistake in 1890 to rave about Wagner?  Is it a mistake to find him intolerable now?  Frankly, I suspect the man or woman of the nineties who was unmoved by Wagner of having wanted sensibility, and him or her who to-day revels in that music of being aesthetically oversexed.  Be that as it may, never to pretend to like what bores or dislike what pleases him, to be honest in his reactions and exact in their description, is all I now ask of a critic.  It is asking a good deal, I think.  To a lady who protested that she knew what she liked, Whistler is said to have replied—­“So, madame, do the beasts of the field.”  Do they?  Then all I can say is the beasts of the field are more highly developed than most of the ladies and gentlemen who write about art in the papers.

3. Last Thoughts

Already I am in a scrape with the critics.  I am in a scrape for having said, a couple of years ago, that a critic was nothing but a sign-post, and for having added, somewhat later, that he was a fallible sign-post at that.  So now, contributing to a supplement [T] which, being written by critics, is sure to be read by them, I naturally take the opportunity of explaining that what I said, if rightly understood, was perfectly civil and obliging.

[Footnote T:  Contributed to the Critical Supplement of The New Republic.]