rsification, whether
the poet-critic is Dryden or Wordsworth or Poe. Consider the criticism
of painting by the painters themselves,--how frankly it is concerned
with the processes of the art, whether the painter-critic is Fromentin
or La Farge. It is La Farge who records that Rembrandt was a "workman
following his trade of painting to live by it," and who reminds us that
"these very great artists"--Rembrandt and his fellows--"are primarily
workmen, without any pose or assumption of doing more than a daily
task." What they did was all in the day's work. One of the most
distinguished of American sculptors was once standing before a
photograph of the Panathenaic frieze, and a critical friend by his side
exprest a wonder as to "what those old Greeks were thinking of when they
did work like that?" The professional artist smiled and responded: "I
guess that, like the rest of us, they were thinking how they could pull
it off!"

The method, the tricks of the trade, the ingenious devices of one kind
or another, these are what artists of all sorts like to discuss with
fellow-practitioners of the art; and it is by this interchange of
experiences that the means of expression are multiplied. The inner
meaning of what they have wrought, its message, its morality, its
subtler spirit, the artists do not care ever to talk over, even with
each other. This is intangible and incommunicable; and it is too
personal, too intimate, to be vulgarized in words; it is to be felt
rather than phrased. Above all, it must speak for itself, for it is
there because it had to be there, and not because the artist put it
there deliberately. If he has not builded better than he knew, then is
the result of his labor limited and narrow. A story is told of
Thorwaldsen in his old age, when a friend found him disconsolate before
a finished statue and inquired if he was despondent because he had not
been able to realize his ideal. And the sculptor responded that, on the
contrary, he had realized his ideal, and therefore he was downcast; for
the first time his hand had been able to accomplish all that his mind
had planned.

"Neither in life, nor even in literature and in art, can we always do
what we intend to do," M. Brunetiere once asserted, adding that, "in
compensation, we have not always intended to do all that we have
actually accomplished." Often no one is more astonished than the artist
himself--be he poet or painter--at what the critics sometimes find i