judge of the strength and splendour of sun or sea by the dust that
dances in the beam, or the bubble that breaks on the wave, as take
your critic for any sane test of art. For the artists, like the
Greek gods, are revealed only to one another, as Emerson says
somewhere; their real value and place time only can show. In this
respect also omnipotence is with the ages. The true critic
addresses not the artist ever but the public only. His work lies
with them. Art can never have any other claim but her own
perfection: it is for the critic to create for art the social aim,
too, by teaching the people the spirit in which they are to
approach all artistic work, the love they are to give it, the
lesson they are to draw from it.

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern
progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for
the voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,'
are appeals which should be made to the public. The art which has
fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions:
it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of
such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions.
'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for
anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great
men and the principle of Beauty.'

Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and
underlying our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and
wonderful, productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities,
yet for all its splendid achievements in poetry and in the
decorative arts and in painting, for all the increased comeliness
and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the like, not