as nose to knee, &c.
&c., (and the critics have done a great deal)--then is the work
oracularly pronounced one of 'High Art;' and the obsequious artist is
pleased to consider it is.

But if, per contra, as in the former case, the works are not to be
literally reconciled, though wrought in the self-same spirit; then
this unfortunate creature of genius is degraded into a lower rank of
art; and the artist, if he have faith in the learned, despairs; or,
if he have none, he _swears_. But listen, an artist speaks: "If I
have genius to produce a work in the true spirit of high art, and yet
am so ignorant of its principles, that I scarce know whereon the
success of the work depends, and scarcely whether I have succeeded or
no; with this ignorance and this power, what needs your knowledge or
your reasoning, seeing that nature is all-sufficient, and produces a
painter as she produces a plant?" To the artist (the last of his
race), who spoke thus, it is answered, that science is not meant for
him, if he like it not, seeing he can do without it, and seeing,
moreover, that with it _alone_ he can never do. Science here does not
make; it unmakes, wonderingly to find the making of what God has
made--of what God has made through the poet, leading him blindly by a
path which he has not known; this path science follows slowly and in
wonder. But though science is not to make the artist, there is no
reason in nature that the artist reject it. Still, science is
properly the birthright of the critic; 'tis his all in all. It shows
him poets, painters, sculptors, his fellow men, often his inferiors
in their want of it, his superiors in the ability to do what he
cannot do; it teaches him to love them as angels bringing him food
which _he_ cannot attain, and to venerate their works as a gift from
the Creator.

But to return to the critical errors relating to 'High Art.' While
the constituents of high art were unknown, whilst its abstract
principles were unsought, and whilst it was only recognized in the
concrete, the critics, certainly guilty of the most unpardonable
blindness, blundered up to the masses of 'High Art,' left by
antiquity, saying, "there let us fix our observatory," and here came
out perspective glass, and callipers and compasses; and here they
made squares and triangles, and circles, and ellipses, for, said
they, "this is 'High Art,' and this hath certain proportions;" then
in the logic of their hearts, they continued, "all th