stars.--_The Critic as Artist_.




THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS


The appeal of all Art is simply to the artistic temperament. Art does
not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is
universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so far
from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really
great artist can never judge of other people's work at all, and can
hardly, in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration of vision
that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of
fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his
own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around
him. The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise their
worshippers. That is all . . . Wordsworth saw in _Endymion_ merely a
pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was
deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that
great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the
poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was
hidden from him. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles.
Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his
sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare,
any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough. Bad artists
always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and
free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life
being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those