d the obverse side of the medal. A good showing.
You may begin with Wincklemann or Goethe--we refer entirely to critics
of paint and painters--or run down the line to Diderot, Blanc,
Gautier, Baudelaire, Zola, Goncourt, who introduced to Europe Japanese
art; Roger Marx, Geoffroy, Huysmans, Camille Mauclair, Charles Morice,
and Octave Mirbeau. Zola was not a painter, but he praised Edouard
Manet. These are a few names hastily selected. In England, Ruskin too
long ruled the critical roast; full of thunder-words like Isaiah, his
vaticinations led a generation astray. He was a prophet, not a critic,
and he was a victim to his own abhorred "pathetic fallacy." Henley was
right in declaring that until R.A.M. Stevenson appeared there was no
great art criticism in England or English. The "Velasquez" is a
marking stone in critical literature. It is the one big book by a big
temperament that may be opposed page by page to Fromentin's critical
masterpiece. Shall we further adduce the names of Morelli, Sturge
Moore, Roger Fry, Perkins, Cortissoz, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Van
Dyke, Mather, Berenson, Brownell, and George Moore--who said of Ruskin
that his uncritical blindness regarding Whistler will constitute his
passport to fame, "the lot of critics is to be remembered by what they
have failed to understand." Walter Pater wrote criticism that is
beautiful literature. If Ruskin missed Whistler, he is in good
company, for Sainte-Beuve, the prince of critics, missed Balzac,
Stendhal, Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo was unfair. Yet, consider the
Osrics embalmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve's style. He, like many
another critic, was superior to his subject. And that is always fatal
to the water-flies.

George III once asked in wonderment how the apples get inside the
dumplings. How can a critic criticise a creator? The man who looks on
writing things about the man who does things. But he criticises and
artists owe him much. Neither in "ink-horn terms" nor in an "upstart
Asiatic style" need the critic voice his opinions. He must be an
artist in temperament and he must have a _credo_. He need not be a
painter to write of painting, for his primary appeal is to the public.
He is the middle-man, the interpreter, the vulgariser. The
psycho-physiological processes need not concern us. One thing is
certain--a man writing in terms of literature about painting, an art
in two dimensions, cannot interpret fully the meanings of the canvas,
nor can h