‘The only true attitude of criticism is that of worship,’ he exclaimed. ‘The man who, in contemplating your consummate masterpiece, could be conscious of any feeling save of the surging forces of cosmic yearning, flowering into the form of perfect idealisation, and shining with the reflected light of coruscating eternities of sterile pain--such a man, I say, is capable of any social crime, and incapable of any aesthetic perception.’ ‘Pardon me,’ returned Serena. ‘What you say is doubtless very flattering, but if criticism is pure worship, how do you account for your own attacks on the literary productions of the enemies of the aesthetic school?’ ‘All modern schools but one are execrable,’ returned Ponto, with a grinding of the teeth and a waving of the hand. ‘It is enough for us to pronounce that they are not--Art! In approaching them we do not criticise--we simply obliterate; we crush, as we crush a reptile or an unclean thing. The man who denies absolute perfection to Potts, or universal mastery to Blanco Serena, at once proclaims, not merely his incompetence to speak on any artistic subject whatever, but by inference his moral degradation as a human being. We wave him from our vision--we wipe him out. He is a loathsome Philistine, an outcast, physically and intellectually abominable. Such a man once said, in my hearing, that “Mademoiselle de Maupin” was not the purest, wholesomest, most supremely sane and salutary book produced since the Divine Comedy, and that, on the whole, he preferred Wordsworth to Gautier as a moral teacher. My whole soul revolted. I shrank from that man with a shudder, and I am convinced that the wretch is ethically lost and intellectually paralytic.’ The Frenchman shook his head dolefully, as over some sad chronicle of human wickedness or sorrow. Serena laughed and turned with twinkling eyes to the excited critic. ‘Confess between ourselves that “Mademoiselle de Maupin” is not virile. For my own part, I never read it without feeling as if I had been slobbered over by a dirty baby.’