the critic hops after these sowers of beauty, content to peck up in the furrows the chance grains dropped by genius.  This, at least, is the popular notion.  Balzac, and later Disraeli, asked:  “After all, what are the critics?  Men who have failed in literature and art.”  And Mascagni, notwithstanding the laurels he wore after his first success, cried aloud in agony that a critic was compositore mancato.  These be pleasing quotations for them whose early opus has failed to score.  The trouble is that every one is a critic, your gallery-god as well as the most stately practitioner of the art severe.  Balzac was an excellent critic when he saluted Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme as a masterpiece; as was Emerson when he wrote to Walt Whitman.  What the mid-century critics of the United States, what Sainte-Beuve, master critic of France, did not see, Balzac and Emerson saw and, better still, spoke out.  In his light-hearted fashion Oscar Wilde asserted that the critic was also a creator—­apart from his literary worth—­and we confess that we know of cases where the critic has created the artist.  But that a serious doubt can be entertained as to the relative value of creator and critic is hardly worth denying.

Consider the painters.  Time and time again you read or hear the indignant denunciation of some artist whose canvas has been ripped-up in print.  If the offender happens to be a man who doesn’t paint, then he is called an ignoramus; if he paints or etches, or even sketches in crayon, he is well within the Balzac definition—­poor, miserable imbecile, he is only jealous of work that he could never have achieved.  As for literary critics, it may be set down once and for all that they are “suspect.”  They write; ergo, they must be unjust.  The dilemma has branching horns.  Is there no midway spot, no safety ground for that weary Ishmael the professional critic to escape being gored?  Naturally any expression of personal feeling on his part is set down to mental arrogance.  He is permitted like the wind to move over the face of the waters, but he must remain unseen.  We have always thought that the enthusiastic Dublin man in the theatre gallery was after a critic when he cried aloud at the sight of a toppling companion:  “Don’t waste him.  Kill a fiddler with him!” It seems more in consonance with the Celtic character; besides, the Irish are music-lovers.

If one could draw up the list of critical and creative men in art the scale would not tip evenly.  The number of painters who have written of their art is not large, though what they have said is always pregnant.  Critics outnumber them—­though the battle is really a matter of quality, not quantity.  There is Da Vinci.  For his complete writings some of us would sacrifice miles of gawky pale and florid mediaeval paintings.  What we have of him is wisdom, and like true wisdom is prophetic.  Then there is that immortal gossip Vasari, a very biassed critic and not too nice to his contemporaries.