the precept. Wilde had in his mind as he wrote such fine flaming things as Swinburne's study of Blake, and such slow-moving magnificent pageants as "Marius the Epicurean," in which Pater had criticized a century of manners and ideas. And, perhaps, he did not forget his own 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' that was "a study in green," as well as a summary of the life and talents of Janus Weathercock of The London Magazine.

Beautiful criticism had been made as long ago as when Sidney wrote of the "blind crowder," whose song moved his heart like the sound of a trumpet. But men had not known what they were doing, and made lovely things with quite another purpose. Coleridge set the key for many men's playing when he said that "the ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgments on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could be separated." And Mr. Arthur Symons, who has in our own day made fine critical things, yet says, quite humbly, that "the aim of criticism is to distinguish what is essential in the work of a writer," and again, that "criticism is a valuation of forces." Hazlitt was no further from the truth when he wrote, in a pleasant, rather malicious article on the critics of his time, that "a genuine criticism should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work." Criticism, as Wilde saw it, was free to do all these things, but had a further duty to itself. Hazlitt, and those who read him in his own day, thought that he was giving opinions, talking, reflecting "the soul and body of a work"; but it is for himself that we read him now, and his subjects and opinions matter little beside the gusto and the fresh wind of the chalk downs that make his essays things in themselves and fit for such criticism as he liked. Wainewright too, who learnt from Hazlitt, "deals," as Wilde saw, "with his impressions of the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate these impressions into words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for his imaginative and mental effect." But he did not say so, and perhaps Walter Pater's essays were the first to make it impossible not to recognize that criticism was more than a series of judgments, opinions and ideas, necessarily subordinate to the thing criticized.

Wilde, at any rate, recognized this, and carried passive recognition into active proclamation of a new creed for critics. He gave them a new creed and a new charter, and, if he had done nothing else, would have earned a place in the

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history of our literature. He showed that they were free to do all they had ever attempted, to track the secret stream of inspiration to its source, to work out alike the melody and counterpoint of art, to discover its principles, to enjoy its examples, to paint portraits, to talk with their sitters, to enounce ideas, to catch the fleeting sunlight and shadow of impression. They were free to do all this, and for a creed he taught them that criticism is itself a creative art, perhaps the most creative of the arts, certainly an art to be practised with no less delicate care than that of the maker of poems, the teller of stories, the painter of pictures, the man who captures a melody, or the man who shapes a dream in stone.

My private predilections may have led me to lay too much emphasis on the main contention of 'The Critic as Artist.' I hope not, but must take this opportunity of remembering that, like 'The Decay of Lying,' this dialogue is rich in other matter than theory. Wilde never, unless in the essay on Wainewright, deliberately set himself to estimate an artist or to paint a portrait. But throughout the two dialogues are scattered fragments of vivid criticism, sometimes a little swift and careless, always subordinated as notes of colour to the prevailing scheme of the whole, but never impersonal or dull. It is impossible to read a page of Intentions without experiencing a delightful stimulus. It is, in my opinion, that one of Wilde's books that most nearly represents him. In nothing else that he wrote did he come so near to pouring into literature the elixir of intellectual vitality that he royally spilled over his conversation.

The fourth essay in the book is not on the high level of the others. It is more practical and less beautiful, was written earlier than the rest, and published in the year after Wilde's marriage. It is interesting, but less as a thing in itself than as an indication of the character of Wilde's knowledge of the theatre. I have therefore passed it over to the next chapter.

VII

THE THEATRE

THERE is a public glory in the art of the theatre, a direct and immediate applause that is nearer to the face-to-face praise and visible worship that is won by conversation than the discreet approval of readers of books. Of all the arts that of the drama is most likely to attract the talker for talk's sake. By its means he can set his fancies moving on the boards, fling his metaphors dressed and coloured on a monstrous screen, and entertain a thousand listeners at once. Hazlitt never wrote a play; but his was talk with a purpose. He talked to learn, to teach, to think aloud. But Lamb, who talked for the delight of himself and his friends, tried to amuse a larger audience with "Mr. H.," and, when that play was damned, joined heartily in the hisses, for fear of being mistaken for the author. Those who conspired at the Mermaid Tavern to send brave argosies of wit trafficking on a bluer sea than ever sailed Drake's galleons were playwrights to a man. Particularly the theatre attracts those dandies among authors and ✓ talkers, for whom social means as much as artistic