But every one is a critic, a calico cat, your gallery god, as well as the most stately practitioner of the gentlest art. The difference between your criticism and mine, as I have remarked elsewhere, is that I am paid for mine, and you must pay for your privilege to criticise. As some Paris wit said of a certain actress: “She is not beautiful, she is worse.” A critic is never unjust--he is worse. Nevertheless, I prefer the plain critic’s opinions rather than the professional pronouncement of a composer. He always knows more than the critic, yet I doubt his attitude, which is seldom disinterested. How could it be? Why should it be? Schumann, who “discovered” Chopin and Brahms, missed Wagner. In Wagner he met his critical Waterloo, and as George Moore wrote of Ruskin vs. Whistler: “It is the lot of critics to be remembered by what they have failed to understand.” Berlioz also missed Wagner--Wagner who had helped himself so generously to the ideas on instrumentation of the Frenchman. But Balzac did not miss Stendhal, whose generation refused to recognize his genius. The “creative” critics are few. Montaigne, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Baudelaire, Georg Brandes, Nietzsche, Pater, Benedetto Croce, Havelock Ellis, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Symons, Anatole France, De Gourmont, Edgar Saltus, Brownell--the list might be spun out, but these names suffice. Yet my idol among them, Sainte-Beuve, missed Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo was inconsiderate--possibly on account of his affair with Adèle Hugo. Consider the Osrics of literature eternally embalmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve’s style, a fatal immortality for so many futile butterflies, and you will admit that he still lives when many a mighty reputation has withered. In sheer wonderment George III asked how the apples got inside the dumpling. How can a critic criticise a creator! Oscar Wilde, shrewd enough when he so willed, has a middle term; critics who are “creative.” But isn’t he the man who looks on while the other fellow does things! He should be artist as to temperament, and he should have a credo. And like most prima donnas, he is “catty.” He need not be a painter to write of painting, a composer to speak of music. His primary appeal is to the public. He is the interpreter. The psycho-physiological processes need not concern us. There are the inevitable limitations. Describing music in terms of prose is hopeless. The only true criticism of music is the playing thereof. We are again confronted by the Vance Thompson crux: write about your liver, or the weather, or calico cats, as I am now doing. All the rest is technical camouflage. Of course, a catholic critic doesn’t mean an unprejudiced one. A critic without prejudices would be a faultless monster, and like Aristides the Just, should be stoned.