thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life,
or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of
loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions
that man has not known, and so has sought for. To-night it may
fill one with that ??OS ?O? ??????O?, that Amour de l'Impossible,
which falls like a madness on many who think they live securely and
out of reach of harm, so that they sicken suddenly with the poison
of unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of what they may
not obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. To-morrow, like the
music of which Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music
of the Greek, it may perform the office of a physician, and give us
an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is wounded, and
'bring the soul into harmony with all right things.' And what is
true about music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as many
meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols.
Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it
shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

ERNEST. But is such work as you have talked about really
criticism?

GILBERT. It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely
the individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with
wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not
understood, or understood incompletely.

ERNEST. The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than
creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as
in itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe?