its productions.  Life is short, and more important things, things of more significant import, demand attention.  The grounds on which the works of Bouguereau and Cabanel are admired are certainly insufficient.  But they are experts in their sphere.  What they do could hardly be better done.  If they appeal to a bourgeois, a philistine ideal of beauty, of interest, they do it with a perfection that is pleasing in itself.  No one else does it half so well.  To minds to which they appeal at all, they appeal with the force of finality; for these they create as well as illustrate the type of what is admirable and lovely.  It is as easy to account for their popularity as it is to perceive its transitory quality.  But not only is it a mark of limitation to refuse all interest to such a work as, for example, M. Cabanel’s “Birth of Venus,” in the painting of which a vast deal of technical expertness is enjoyably evident, and which in every respect of motive and execution is far above similar things done elsewhere than in France; it is a still greater error to confound such painters as M. Cabanel and M. Bouguereau with other painters whose classic temperament has been subjected to the universal romantic influence equally with theirs, but whose production is as different from theirs as is that of the thorough and pure romanticists, the truly poetic painters.

The instinct of simplification is an intelligent and sound one.  Its satisfaction is a necessary preliminary to efficient action of any kind, and indeed the basis of all fruitful philosophy.  But in criticism this instinct can only be satisfied intelligently and soundly by a consideration of everything appealing to consideration, and not at all by heated and wilful, or superior and supercilious, exclusions.  Catholicity of appreciation is the secret of critical felicity.  To follow the line of least resistance, not to take into account those elements of a problem, those characteristics of a subject, to which, superficially and at first thought, one is insensitive, is to dispense one’s self from a great deal of particularly disagreeable industry, but the result is only transitorily agreeable to the sincere intelligence.  It is in criticism, I think, though no doubt in criticism alone, preferable to lose one’s self in a maze of perplexity—­distressing as this is to the critic who appreciates the indispensability of clairvoyance in criticism—­rather than to reach swiftly and simply a conclusion which candor would have foreseen as the inevitable and unjudicial result of following one’s own likes and whims, and one’s contentment with which must be alloyed with a haunting sense of insecurity.  In criticism it is perhaps better to keep balancing counter-considerations than to determine brutally by excluding a whole set of them because of the difficulty of assigning them their true weight.  In this way, at least, one preserves the attitude of poise, and poise is perhaps the one essential element of criticism.  In a word, that catholicity of sensitiveness which may be called mere impressionism, behind which there is no body of doctrine at all, is more truly critical than intolerant depreciation or unreflecting enthusiasm.  “The main thing to do,” says Mr. Arnold, in a significant passage, “is to get one’s self out of the way and let humanity judge.”