The Tasks of Criticism

§1. If the view of art here put forward is accepted, what must be the function and value of criticism? Under that name are loosely comprised two purposes essentially different though generally combined and sometimes overlapping. The first is that of establishing and interpreting what may be called the actual text or artefact of the artist. This, as we have said, is properly a branch of history. And if by history be understood not so much a record of dates, governments, conquests and economic changes as a sympathetic understanding of the thoughts and feelings of men in past ages, then no branch of history is more significant than such artistic criticism. For, as a great historian has confessed, it is works of art which are the best key to men’s hearts: “Between us and the old English there is a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of our cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive.” ¹ I have myself never had so strong an impression of insight into an alien religious enthusiasm as in the gloom of the tiny but grimly ponderous chancel of the Norman Church at Leuchars near St. Andrew’s. And if this is true of architecture and sculpture it must be even more so of mosaic, of painting and of poetry.