which has
converted much criticism of late from judgment pronounced into impression
recorded--recreative statement--a kind, in fact, of expression of the
critic's self, elicited through contemplation of a book, a play, a
symphony, a picture? For this kind of criticism there has even recently
been claimed an actual identity with creation. Esthetic judgment and
creative power identical! That is a hard saying. For, however
sympathetic one may feel toward this new criticism, however one may
recognise that the recording of impression has a wider, more elastic, and
more lasting value than the delivery of arbitrary judgment based on rigid
laws of taste; however one may admit that it approaches the creative gift
in so far as it demands the qualities of receptivity and reproduction--is
there not still lacking to this "new" critic something of that thirsting
spirit of discovery, which precedes the creation--hitherto so-called--of
anything? Criticism, taste, aesthetic judgment, by the very nature of
their task, wait till life has been focussed by the artists before they
attempt to reproduce the image which that imprisoned fragment of life
makes on the mirror of their minds. But a thing created springs from a
germ unconsciously implanted by the direct impact of unfettered life on
the whole range, of the creator's temperament; and round the germ thus
engendered, the creative artist--ever penetrating, discovering,
selecting--goes on building cell on cell, gathered from a million little
fresh impacts and visions. And to say that this is also exactly what the
recreative critic does, is to say that the interpretative musician is
creator in the same sense as is the composer of the music that he
interprets. If, indeed, these processes be the same in kind, they are in
degree so far apart that one would think the word creative unfortunately
used of both....

But this speculation--I thought--is going beyond the bounds of vagueness.
Let there be some thread of coherence in your thoughts, as there is in
the progress of this evening, fast fading into night. Return to the
consideration of the nature and purposes of Art! And recognize that much
of what you have thought will seem on the face of it heresy to the school
whose doctrine was incarnated by Oscar Wilde in that admirable apotheosis
of half-truths: "The Decay of the Art of Lying." For therein he said:
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are." Yet, that
half-truth m