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Updated: June 17, 2025
Two years later there was a Keniston exhibition, to which the art-critics came from New York and Boston; and not long afterward a well-known Chicago collector vainly attempted to buy Professor Driffert's sketch, which the art journals cited as a rare example of the painter's first or silvery manner.
One could fancy that Tom was never traitor to the intent or soul of the theme. What God or the Devil meant to say by this or that harmony, what the soul of one man cried aloud to another in it, this boy knows, and is to that a faithful witness. His deaf, uninstructed soul has never been tampered with by art-critics who know the body well enough of music, but nothing of the living creature within.
By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand. On the reed- grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in the dock. The Greeks had no art-critics. GILBERT. Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are terribly unsound.
If the Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts. But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur-coloured cloud. Out of a tawny mane of drift she gleams like a lion's eye.
It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest. I have merely to do with literature. ERNEST. But what is the difference between literature and journalism? GILBERT. Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read. That is all. But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd.
You have seen him a thousand times you have seen him just as he is here and you confess, without reserve, that Titian WAS a Master. The doll-faces of other painted babes may mean one thing, they may mean another, but with the "Moses" the case is different. The most famous of all the art-critics has said, "There is no room for doubt, here plainly this child is in trouble."
It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend. ERNEST. It is true. Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that petulant manner. It is quite true. In the best days of art there were no art-critics. The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within it.
Yet when we find not merely his contemporaries electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art-critics of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries as well as their successors were completely right.
ERNEST. Ah! now you are flippant. GILBERT. Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that the Greeks had no art-critics? I can understand it being said that the constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but not that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not criticise. You will not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art criticism from Plato to Plotinus.
I get them direct from Cairo. The only use of our attaches is that they supply their friends with excellent tobacco. And as the moon has hidden herself, let us talk a little longer. I am quite ready to admit that I was wrong in what I said about the Greeks. They were, as you have pointed out, a nation of art-critics. I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them.
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