There has always been criticism. Aristotle did not begin it, but he is the starting-point of that great river of Thought-about-Art which has accompanied the developments of the arts since Greek times. The history of criticism is tremendous in volume, in brilliancy, and in seriousness; and it has a great utility and mission toward the world at large. If anyone have a curiosity to know what this literature is, let him glance through Saintsbury’s History of Criticism in three great tomes of many hundred pages each, in which the great names and the great theories in criticism are reviewed. This is a part of the literary history, of the bookish history of the world. From Plato to Lessing, from Longinus to Santayana there have been acute-minded individuals who loved the fine arts, poetry, sculpture, music, the drama, etc., and who busied themselves with speculation upon them. These men would pluck out the heart of the mystery, they would touch our quick with their needle, they would satisfy our intellect with their explanations. And here arises one of the subtlest difficulties in all psychology; the difficulty of explaining clearly how men of the greatest intellect may be subject to the grossest self-delusion. The reasonings of these critics about art are valid as reasonings of critics about art, so long as they are kept in the arena of the reasoning of critics about art. But if you try to translate those reasonings back again into the substance of art itself--if, for instance, you bid the artist follow the admonition of the critic, you will find that the artist cannot do this without making a retranslation of the critic’s ideas into terms which now become incomprehensible to the critic. In order to take the critic’s advice--to produce the effects which the critic calls for--the artist must do with his material things which the critic has not mentioned and does not conceive of. The critic, after all, is a parasite. He lives by illustrating the brains of the artist. He is an illuminator. He has produced a wonderful literature--a literature of embroidery--and this literature is very valuable to the world at large; but has, as it were, no mission as toward the artist. The reason is that the artist gets his experience of art by working directly and immediately in the art; and the problems he works on can neither be stated nor solved except in the terms of his art. The critic, meanwhile, believes that he himself has stated and solved those problems; but what he says is folly to the ears of the artist. The misunderstanding must continue forever, and neither of the parties is to blame for it. Listen to the most good-natured of artists, Molière, speaking with the authority of unbounded success, upon the subject that drives lesser men to helpless rage:--