if a man were to believe in its existence he would cease to be a collector.  The question to be asked is—­“Is this rare?” Suppose the answer favourable, there remains another—­“Is it genuine?” If the work of any particular artist is not rare, if the supply meets the demand, it stands to reason that the work is of no great consequence.  For good art is art that fetches good prices, and good prices come of a limited supply.  But though it be notorious that the work of Velasquez is comparatively scarce and therefore good, it has yet to be decided whether the particular picture offered at fifty thousand is really the work of Velasquez.

Enter the Expert, whom I would distinguish from the archaeologist and the critic.  The archaeologist is a man with a foolish and dangerous curiosity about the past:  I am a bit of an archaeologist myself.  Archaeology is dangerous because it may easily overcloud one’s aesthetic sensibility.  The archaeologist may, at any moment, begin to value a work of art not because it is good, but because it is old or interesting.  Though that is less vulgar than valuing it because it is rare and precious it is equally fatal to aesthetic appreciation.  But so long as I recognise the futility of my science, so long as I recognise that I cannot appreciate a work of art the better because I know when and where it was made, so long as I recognise that, in fact, I am at a certain disadvantage in judging a sixth-century mosaic compared with a person of equal sensibility who knows and cares nothing about Romans and Byzantines, so long as I recognise that art criticism and archaeology are two different things, I hope I may be allowed to dabble unrebuked in my favourite hobby:  I hope I am harmless.

Art criticism, in the present state of society, seems to me a respectable and possibly a useful occupation.  The prejudice against critics, like most prejudices, lives on fear and ignorance.  It is quite unnecessary and rather provincial, for, in fact, critics are not very formidable.  They are suspected of all sorts of high-handed practices—­making and breaking reputations, running up and down, booming and exploiting—­of which I should hardly think them capable.  Popular opinion notwithstanding, I doubt whether critics are either omnipotent or utterly depraved.  Indeed, I believe that some of them are not only blameless but even lovable characters.  Those sinister but flattering insinuations and open charges of corruption fade woefully when one considers how little the critic of contemporary art can hope to get for “writing up” pictures that sell for twenty or thirty guineas apiece.  The expert, to be sure, is exposed to some temptation, since a few of his words, judiciously placed, may promote a canvas from the twenty to the twenty thousand mark; but, as everyone knows, the morality of the expert is above suspicion.  Useless as the occupation of the critic may be, it is probably honest; and, after all, is it more useless than all other occupations, save only those of creating art, producing food, drink, and tobacco, and bearing beautiful children?