view with Lord Bacon in which the Chancellor explained to the poet
how "Hamlet" should have been written, and from which it has been
inferred that he took credit for having written it himself. [Laughter.]
Shakespeare naturally said what every artist must feel; for what is an
artist? That is hardly a question to be asked in such an assembly, where
I have only to look round to find plenty of people who realize the ideal
artist, persons who are simple, unconventional, spontaneous,
sweet-natured [laughter], who go through the world influenced by
impressions of everything that is beautiful, sublime, and pathetic.
Sometimes they seem to take up impressions of a different kind
[laughter]; but still this is their main purpose--to receive impressions
of images, the reproduction of which may make this world a little better
for us all. For such people a very essential condition is that they
should be spontaneous; that they should look to nothing but telling us
what they feel and how they feel it; that they should obey no external
rules, and only embody those laws which have become a part of their
natural instinct, and that they should think nothing, as of course they
do nothing, for money; though they would not be so hard-hearted as to
refuse to receive the spontaneous homage of the world, even when it came
in that comparatively vulgar form. [Laughter.]

But what is a critic? He is a person who enforces rules upon the artist,
like a gardener who snips a tree in order to make it grow into a
preconceived form, or grafts upon it until it develops into a
monstrosity which he considers beautiful. We have made some advance upon
the old savage. The man who went about saying, "This will never do," has
become a thing of the past. The modern critic if he has a fault has
become too genial; he seems not to distinguish between the functions of
a critic and the founder of a new religious sect. [Laughter.] He erects
shrines to his ideals, and he burns upon them good, strong, stupefying
incense. This may be less painful to the artist than the old-fashioned
style; but it may be doubted whether it is not equally corrupting, and
whether it does not stimulate a selfishness equally fatal to spontaneous
production; whether it does not in the attempt to encourage originality
favor a spurious type which consists merely in setting at defiance real
common sense, and sometimes common decency.

I hope that critics are becoming better, that they have learned