have been happening in Dante for six hundred years. Baudelaire and others. The transference of emotion. Not through life but through art can we realize perfection. The immorality of art. "For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call society." A further comparison between action and contemplation. Ernest asks, "We exist, then, to do nothing," and Gilbert answers, "It is to do nothing that the elect exist." There follows one of the few passages that contains any outspoken mention of a decadence. (This word was freely used as a label in England and France at this time.) "But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself." "In the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race." Heredity, "the only one of the gods whose real name we know," brings gifts of strange temperaments and impossible desires, and the power of living a thousand lives. Imagination is "concentrated race-experience." Being and becoming compared with doing. Defence of egotism. "The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful." Schoolmasters. Self-culture, not the culture of others, the proper aim of man. The idea is dangerous: so are all ideas. Ernest suggests that the fact that a critical work is subjective places it below the greatest work, which is impersonal and objective. Gilbert replies that "the difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form merely. It is accidental, not essential. All artistic creation is absolutely subjective." Critics not even limited to the more obviously subjective forms of expression, but may use drama, dialogues, narrative, or poetry. He then turns more particularly to the critic's qualifications. He must not be fair, not be rational, not be sincere, except in his devotion to the principle of beauty, Journalism, reviewing, and prurience. Intrusion of morals into art. Further consideration of the critic's qualifications. Temperament, its cultivation through decorative art. A digression on modern painting, returning to the subject of decorative art. The influence of the critic should be the mere fact of his existence. "You must not ask of him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself." It is not his business to reform bad artists, who are probably quite irreclaimable. Remembering, but not alluding to Whistler's attack, he lets Ernest ask, "But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry, and the painter of painting?" Gilbert replies, "The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic temperament." Great artists unable to recognize the beauty of work different from their own. Examples:--Wordsworth on Keats,