impact of experience is eased. The grind of ordinary
intercourse is dimmed. The rawness of Family and Business is refined
or removed. But now once more the world comes in to him, in the form
of the Critic. Here again, in a sharp concentrated sense, the world
moves on him: its complacency, its hysteria, its down-tending
appetites and fond illusions, its pathetic worship of yesterdays and
hatred of tomorrows, its fear-dogmas and its blood-avowals.

The artist shall leave the world only to find it, hate it only because
he loves, attack it only if he serves. At that epoch of his life when
the world's gross sources may grow dim, Criticism brings them back.
Wherefore, the function of the Critic is a blessing and a need.

The creator's reception of this newly direct, intense, mundane
intrusion is not always passive. If the artist is an intelligent man,
he may respond to the intervening world on its own plane. He may turn
critic himself.

When the creator turns critic, we are in the presence of a
consummation: we have a complete experience: we have a sort of
sacrament. For to the intrusion of the world he interposes his own
body. In his art, the creator's body would be itself intrusion. The
artist is too humble and too sane to break the ecstatic flow of vision
with his personal form. The true artist despises the personal as an
end. He makes fluid, and distils his personal form. He channels it
beyond himself to a Unity which of course contains it. But Criticism
is nothing which is not the sheer projection of a body. The artist
turns Self into a universal Form: but the critic reduces Form to Self.
Criticism is to the artist the intrusion, in a form irreducible to
art, of the body of the world. What can he do but interpose his own?

This is the value of the creator's criticism. He gives to the world
himself. And his self is a rich life.

It includes for instance a direct experience of art, the which no
professional critic may possess. And it includes as well a direct
knowledge of life, sharpened in the retrospect of that devotion to the
living which is peculiarly the artist's. For what is the critic after
all, but an "artistic" individual somehow impeded from satisfying his
esthetic emotion and his need of esthetic form in the gross and
stubborn stuff of life itself: who therefore, since he is too
intelligent for substitutes, resorts to the already digested matter of
the hardier creators, takes their assimilated food and does