succession of heroic endeavours and perilous escapes, is happy in the enjoyment of what is Art, and nothing but Art? If to those of riper years and different tastes the art seems poor, does that make it poor? Does such a judgement condemn either writer or reader? Surely not. The writer, to be sure, may be something less than Homer: but the spirit of the reader, simple, credulous, enjoying, is the spirit in which, of old, before criticism was born, some Greek king and his high-born guests listened to the tale of Troy and the wanderings of Ulysses.
I do not, of course, either say or think that the pleasures of Art diminish as the knowledge of Art augments. Some loss there commonly is, as men grow old and learned, yet we may hope that in most cases it is compensated a hundred-fold. But it is not always so. In popular usage the very word 'criticism' suggests the detection of faults and the ignoring of merits; in popular esteem the refusal to admire marks the man of taste. This singular view, which suggests the inference that artistic education is an instrument for making men fastidious and preventing them being happy, derives, it may be, some faint support from facts. Are there not persons to be found who have sharpened the delicacy of their aesthetic discrimination to the finest edge, yet take but small
