In the second place, we don't believe in the subjection of writers to critics, or to fixed standards, or to anything except themselves. Whatever excuse there is for standards arises from the fact that writers have furnished the examples on which the standards are founded. The writer must find his authority in his own soul. The one thing he must do is to say what he has to say in the way which seems to him right. The history of art is one long example of the discarding by genius of rules founded on previous work. When was a new technique ever predicted by the academic critic? When has not the new genius been bitterly fought by the academic critic? The natural history of art is this--first the artist, then the intelligent critic, then the appreciative public. The function of the critic is to be a warrior for the artist. He must understand profoundly, he must be quick to detect and denounce artistic insincerity, he must declare the man who has attained the magic of real aesthetic rightness. The recognition of artistic excellence does not proceed by the scaffolding of academicism; it is instinctive, just as its creation was instinctive, emotional. The critic may, if he likes, oppose the artist, but his first duty is to make him known. He must say to the public, not "you will like this man" but "you must like this man, or at least you must experience him." No critic is fit to do these things unless he understands the passionate independence of the real artist, his service of no law except inner necessity. Our spiritual world is tangled up in mechanism. No sooner does a fresh wind make itself known than we try to imprison it in a system, to impale it with a classification. Let us have done with these futilities. The important joy is to feel the mysterious and dynamic glory of the wind. We need in our criticism, as in our literature, more insight, more emotion, more of the power that is produced by virility and the corresponding female quality for which there is as yet no adequate name. The heightening of consciousness, the intensifying of essential values--these shall be our critical aims. A sense of the obviousness of what we have said prevents us from amplifying it. Our excuse for saying it is that there are still many professors in the world! There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is something entirely too splendid to be sane.--_Oscar Wilde._ The Democrat (_With apologies to Mr. Galsworthy_) He knew himself for a democrat. He might be with a crowd of what he called "real people" and if he happened to pass a waiter who had served him or a barber who had shaved him he would speak to them. He would do it without the least embarrassment or condescension; anything else he would have considered low. His friends knew him to be essentially democratic; they would assure you of this quality in him as something that only the morally courageous possess.