burlesque. These brigands and cut-throats,
pimps and pickpurses are set before us without bravado, without the
genteel glaze of the timid painter, without an attempt to call a
prostitute a _cocotte_. Indeed, persons are called by their true names
in these hasty sketches of Lautrec's, and so clearly sounded are the
names that sometimes you are compelled to close your ears and eyes.
His models, with their cavernous glance, their emaciated figures, and
vicious expression, are a commentary on atelier life in those days and
regions. Toulouse-Lautrec is like a page from Ecclesiastes.

XIV. LITERATURE AND ART

I - CONCERNING CRITICS

The annual rotation of the earth brings to us at least once during its
period the threadbare, thriceworn, stale, flat, and academic
discussion of critic and artist. We believe comparisons of creator and
critic are unprofitable, being for the most part a confounding of
intellectual substances. The painter paints, the composer makes music,
the sculptor models, and the poet sings. Like the industrious crow the
critic hops after these sowers of beauty, content to peck up in the
furrows the chance grains dropped by genius. This, at least, is the
popular notion. Balzac, and later Disraeli, asked: "After all, what
are the critics? Men who have failed in literature and art." And
Mascagni, notwithstanding the laurels he wore after his first success,
cried aloud in agony that a critic was _compositore mancato_. These be
pleasing quotations for them whose early opus has failed to score. The
trouble is that every one is a critic, your gallery-god as well as the
most stately practitioner of the art severe. Balzac was an excellent
critic when he saluted Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme as a
masterpiece; as was Emerson when he wrote to Walt Whitman. What the
mid-century critics of the United States, what Sainte-Beuve, master
critic of France, did not see, Balzac and Emerson saw and, better
still, spoke out. In his light-hearted fashion Oscar Wilde asserted
that the critic was also a creator--apart from his literary worth--and
we confess that we know of cases where the critic has created the
artist. But that a serious doubt can be entertained as to the relative
value of creator and critic is hardly worth denying.

Consider the painters. Time and time again you read or hear the
indignant denunciation of some artist whose canvas has been ripped-up
in print. If the offender happens to be a man who d