Principle in Art Etc.

It is not true, though it has so often been asserted, that criticism is of no use or of little use to art. This notion prevails so widely only because—among us at least—criticism has not been criticism. To criticise is to judge; to judge requires judicial qualification; and this is quite a different thing from a natural sensitiveness to beauty, however much that sensitiveness may have become heightened by converse with refined and beautiful objects of nature and works of art. “Criticism,” which has been the outcome only of such sensitiveness and such converse, may be, and often is,—delightful reading, and is naturally far more popular than criticism which is truly judicial.