And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity and mental confusion.  There is one very valid test by which we may separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt from mere impudent innovation and bluff.  The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea.  The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained.  The first idea may really be very outree or specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people.  But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all.  The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the thing called Art, and the people called Art Critics.  It is obvious that an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy cunning that has made them what they are.  It is equally obvious that a landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape; a portrait painter only half of the person; they are lucky if they express so much.  And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of the pictures can only express half of them, and that the less important half.  Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken that connects God With Nature, or Nature with men, or men with critics.  The “Mona Lisa” was in some respects (not all, I fancy) what God meant her to be.  Leonardo’s picture was, in some respects, like the lady.  And Walter Pater’s rich description was, in some respects, like the picture.  Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature, in the last resort, can express something other than its own unhappy self.

Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely inarticulate.  Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being speechless.  Before Botticelli he is mute.  But if there is any good in Botticelli (there is much good, and much evil too) it is emphatically the critic’s business to explain it:  to translate it from terms of painting into terms of diction.  Of course, the rendering will be inadequate—­but so is Botticelli.  It is a fact he would be the first to admit.  But anything which has been intelligently received can at least be intelligently suggested.  Pater does suggest an intelligent cause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli’s “Venus Rising from the Sea.”  Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for Turner destroying forests and falsifying landscapes.  These two great critics were far too fastidious for my taste; they urged to excess the idea that a sense of art was a sort of secret; to be patiently taught and slowly learnt.  Still, they thought it could be taught:  they thought it could be learnt.  They constrained themselves, with considerable creative fatigue, to find the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been clone in Italian painting.  The same is true of Whistler and R. A. M. Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez.  They had something to say about the pictures; they knew it was unworthy of the pictures, but they said it.