Still,it does express something;the thread is not broken that connects God With Nature,or Nature with men,or men with critics.The "Mona Lisa"was in some respects (not all,I fancy)what God meant her to be.
Leonardo's picture was,in some respects,like the lady.And Walter Pater's rich description was,in some respects,like the picture.Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature,in the last resort,can express something other than its own unhappy self.
Now the modern critic is a humbug,because he professes to be entirely inarticulate.Speech is his whole business;and he boasts of being speechless.Before Botticelli he is mute.But if there is any good in Botticelli (there is much good,and much evil too)it is emphatically the critic's business to explain it:to translate it from terms of painting into terms of diction.Of course,the rendering will be inadequate--but so is Botticelli.It is a fact he would be the first to admit.But anything which has been intelligently received can at least be intelligently suggested.Pater does suggest an intelligent cause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the Sea."Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for Turner destroying forests and falsifying landscapes.These two great critics were far too fastidious for my taste;they urged to excess the idea that a sense of art was a sort of secret;to be patiently taught and slowly learnt.Still,they thought it could be taught:they thought it could be learnt.They constrained themselves,with considerable creative fatigue,to find the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been clone in Italian painting.The same is true of Whistler and R.A.M.
Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez.They had something to say about the pictures;they knew it was unworthy of the pictures,but they said it.
Now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post-Impressionism and Mr.Picasso)are eulogists and nothing else.They are not critics;least of all creative critics.They do not attempt to translate beauty into language;they merely tell you that it is untranslatable--that is,unutterable,indefinable,indescribable,impalpable,ineffable,and all the rest of it.The cloud is their banner;they cry to chaos and old night.They circulate a piece of paper on which Mr.Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots,and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements:that "the public"does not understand these things;that "the likes of us"cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords.
I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simple test mentioned above.If there were anything intelligent in such art,something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature.Man is made with one head,not with two or three.No criticism of Rembrandt is as good as Rembrandt;but it can be so written as to make a man go back and look at his pictures.If there is a curious and fantastic art,it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantastic literary expression for it;inferior to it,doubtless,but still akin to it.If they cannot do this,as they cannot;if there is nothing in their eulogies,as there is nothing except eulogy--then they are quacks or the high-priests of the unutterable.If the art critics can say nothing about the artists except that they are good it is because the artists are bad.They can explain nothing because they have found nothing;and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be found.
