Critic as Artist_.




THE TWO SUPREME AND HIGHEST ARTS


Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The
principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise
in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of the
latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can
hardly understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is that
which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated
the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material
of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of
reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying,
for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a
modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say,
with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they
were right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and the
fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower
classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to
appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is
really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek
to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even
the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of
English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of
mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the
true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect