Every critic or would-be critic has his own little theory of criticism, as every baby in _Utopia Limited_ had its own ickle prospectus. This makes him an avid, but generally a recalcitrant, student of other people’s theories. He is naturally anxious, that is, to learn what the other people think about what inevitably occupies so much of his own thoughts; at the same time, as he cannot but have formed his own theory after his own temperament, consciously or not, he must experience a certain discomfort when he encounters other theories based on temperaments alien from his own. You have, in fact, the converse of Stendhal’s statement that every commendation from _confrère_ to _confrère_ is a certificate of resemblance; every sign of unlikeness provokes the opposite of commendation. So I took up with somewhat mixed feelings an important leading article in the _Literary Supplement_ on “The Function of Criticism.” Important because its subject is, as Henry James said once in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward, among “the highest speculations that can engage the human mind.” (Oho! I should like to hear Mr. Bottles or any other _homme sensuel moyen_ on _that_!) Well, after reading the article, I have the profoundest respect for the writer, whoever he may be; he knows what he is talking about _au fond_, and can talk admirably about it. But then comes in that inevitable recalcitrancy. It seems to me that if the writer is right, then most art and criticism are on the wrong tack. Maybe they are—the writer evidently thinks they are—but one cannot accept that uncomfortable conclusion offhand, and so one cannot but ask oneself whether the writer _is_ right, after all. He is certainly wrong about Croce. The ideal critic, he says, “will not accept from Croce the thesis that all expression is art; for he knows that if expression means anything it is by no means all art.” Now the very foundation-stone of the Crocean æsthetic is that art is the expression of intuitions; when you come to concepts, or the relations of intuitions, though the expression of them is art, the concepts themselves (what “expression means”) are not; you will have passed out of the region of art. Thus your historian, logician, or zoologist, say, has a style of his own; that side of him is art. But historical judgments, logic, or zoology are not. Croce discusses this distinction exhaustively, and, I should have thought, clearly. Yet here our leader-writer puts forward as a refutation of Croce a statement carefully made by Croce himself. But this is a detail which does not affect the writer’s main position. I only mention it as one of the many misrepresentations of Croce which students of that philosopher are, by this time, used to accepting as, apparently, inevitable.