doing it in their own way and with their own inviolable
secret, but limited, just as we are, by the basic limitations of all flesh.

The art of discrimination is, after all, only the art of appreciation,
applied negatively as well as positively; applied to the flinging away
from us and the reducing to non-existence for us, of all those forms
and modes of being, for which, in the original determination of our
taste, we were not, so to speak, born.

And this is precisely what, in a yet more rigorous manner, the artists
whose original and subtle paths we trace, effected for themselves in
their own explorations.

What is remarkable about this cult of criticism is the way in which it
lands us back, with quite a new angle of interest, at the very point
from which we started; at the point, namely, where Nature in her
indiscriminate richness presents herself at our doors.

It is just here that we find how much we have gained, in delicacy of
inclusion and rejection, by following these high and lonely tracks.
All the materials of art, the littered quarries, so to speak, of its
laborious effects have become, in fact, of new and absorbing interest.
Forms, colours, words, sounds; nay! the very textures and odours of
the visible world, have reduced themselves, even as they lie here, or
toss confusedly together on the waves of the life-stream, into
something curiously suggestive and engaging.

We bend our attention to one and to another. We let them group
themselves casually, as they will, in their random way, writing their
own gnomic hieroglyphics, in their own immense and primeval
language, as the earth-mothers heave them up from the abyss or
draw them down; but we are no more confined to this stunned and
bewildered apprehension.

We can isolate, distinguish, contrast.

We can take up and put down each delicate fragment of potential
artistry; and linger at leisure in the work-shop of the immortal gods.

Discrimination of the most personal and vehement kind in its
relation to human works of art, may grow largely and indolently
receptive when dealing with the scattered materials of such works,
spread out through the teeming world.

Just here lies the point of separation between the poetic and the
artistic temper. The artist or the art-critic, discriminating still, even
among these raw materials of human creation, derives an elaborate
and subtle delight from the suggestiveness of their colours, their
odours, and their fabric