Art gratifies the emotions as truth should gratify the intellect. It is not always fully realized how large a part emotional elements, which may embrace every form of sensory and erotic excitation, as well as the whole tone of the subjective mind, play in the most intellectual criticism of an artistic achievement. Of these elements some may be irrelevant as well as irrational, and by no means realized by the critic at the time of writing his appreciation. Elliot Smith and Pear illustrate this point in a way few people would want to dispute. "Let us suppose that a musical critic, after hearing a new symphony by an unconventional composer, immediately writes a lengthy appreciation of the performance. It is clear that nobody would expect him to be able to give off-hand an account of his reasons for every sentence of the criticism. But it is obvious that a single phrase in this account may be but the apex of a whole pyramid of memories emanating from the critic's technical training, his attitude towards the new departure, experiences highly coloured with emotion which a few notes of music may have evoked, and his mental condition at the time he heard the performance. Nobody denies that these may have shaped or even determined his criticism. But who believes either that they were all conscious at the time of writing the article, or that he could resuscitate them without much time and trouble and perhaps the help of a cross-examiner?" In addition to the causal, largely emotional, elements might be added a prime determinant in artistic appreciation, namely, cosmic suggestion. In the case of a leading critic, overwhelmingly self-confident and secure of his position, the mere knowledge of the consensus of informed and uninformed opinion being favourable or otherwise might conceivably arouse an equally illogical desire to be esoteric and different at all costs. An antagonistic autosuggestion of this sort unconsciously underlying a critic's attitude would more than negative any body of opinion in one direction.[74] But if such artificial and diverse influences can affect the most highly trained and most honest critic, how much more will they affect the credulous and untrained? Far greater will be the power of authoritative opinion in influencing those whose emotional sensibility is blunt and untrained, who gape in unresponsive perplexity at some artist's canvas, waiting to have the emotions they do not feel suggested to them, and who, when given the lead, infuse by the power of association into the meaningless daub or the subtlest motif alike the same spirit of satisfaction they derive from the garish crudities which alone, unaided, find a responsive echo in their breasts. It is well known that the less tutored the intellect the more real, as a rule, are the creatures of the imagination. Children and savages have a wonderful faculty for believing in the reality of their illusions. Does not this account for the fact that the less clearly a thing is