alysis of his music
dramas was in abeyance during their creation. Just so do we find
Ibsen, after composing his two great dramatic poems, entering on a
struggle to become intellectually conscious of what he had done."
Moreover, the artist is in the very nature of things committed to one
way of seeing. His view of life is limited by the trend of his own
dominant and creative personality; what he gains in intensity and
penetration of insight he loses in breadth. He is less quick to see
beauty in another guise than that which his own imagination weaves
for him; he is less receptive of other ways of envisaging the world.

The ideal critic, on the contrary, is above everything else catholic
and tolerant. It is his task to discover beauty in whatever form and to
affirm it. By nature he is more sensitive than the ordinary man, by
training he has directed the exercise of his powers toward their
fullest scope, and by experience of art in its diverse manifestations
he has certified his judgment and deepened his capacity to enjoy.
The qualifications of an authentic critic are both temperament and
scholarship. Mere temperament uncorrected by knowledge may
vibrate exquisitely when swept by the touch of a thing of beauty, but
its music may be in a quite different key from the original motive.
Criticism must relate itself to the objective fact; it should interpret
and not transpose. Mere scholarship without temperament misses art
at its centre, that art is the expression and communication of
emotional experience; and the scholar in criticism may wander his
leaden way down the by-paths of a sterile learning. To mediate
between the artist and the appreciator, the critic must understand the
artist and he must feel with the appreciator. He is at once the artist
translated into simpler terms and the appreciator raised to a higher
power of perception and response.

The service of criticism to the layman is to furnish him a clue to the
meaning of the work in hand, and by the critic's own response to its
beauty to reveal its potency and charm. With technique as such the
critic is not concerned. Technique is the business of the artist; only
those who themselves practice an art are qualified to judge in
matters of practice. The form is significant to the appreciator only so
far as regards its expressiveness and beauty. It is not the function of
the critic to tell the artist what his work _should be;_ it is the critic's
mission to reveal to th