Both time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire, And whosoever writes good poetry, Looks just to art. He does not write for you Defiles like vice, can art, for praise or hire, And that's success: if not, the poem's passed In pity on their fathers' being so dull, I find in these lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning a true statement of the actual relationship of the artist both to the critic and to the general mass of mankind. And, as I have already pointed out, criticism exhibits an increasing tendency to recognize these limits, and to confine itself to the interpretation of the ideal element in literature and art. Critical writers both in England and on the Continent have come to recognize that the critic's business is less with the poet and the artist, than with the reader 1 Aurora Leigh. Book V. and the spectator. Such writers do not try to tell the poet how to compose, or the painter how to paint ; they rather teach us how to admire. This criticism possesses a real and appreciable value. It distributes a knowledge of those characteristics of the best work in the several arts which can be conveyed by the medium of language. It is both honest and effective. It treats of what can be treated of by literature-the idea; and it conveys a kind of knowledge in which the layman is naturally most deficient. The eye is unconsciously trained to an appreciation of form and colour by the observation of objects in the ordinary business of life. It is not difficult to trace the resemblance between works of art and the originals which they imitate; nor do the characters of the poet differ in their external attributes from the men and women of every-day life. But the ideas, the moral beauty embodied in these forms of physical beauty (or in the symbols which represent these forms), have no external counterparts, and require, therefore, to be explained and interpreted. It is this useful office which contemporary criticism especially performs; and a perception of the ideal aspects of poetry and the arts has become as much a characteristic of modern critical inquiry as scientific exactness is of our study of nature and of man. And so in the writings of successive critics we have a record of the passage from unconscious to conscious appreciation of beauty in literature and in works of art. For the work of criticism has been to analyze, to formulate, and finally to reduce to terms of common thought effects produced from the first birth of art, but effects which have increased in force and vividness with the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man. |