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Men were no
longer satisfied to explain to themselves what Carlyle calls the
"garment" and the "body" of art; they set themselves to pierce through
these to the soul and spirit within. They instinctively felt that the
art which lives is the art that gives man something to live by; and
that, just because its form is more significant than other of man's
utterances, it must have a deeper significance also in substance and
in purport. Of this purport _Criticism of life_--the phrase suggested
by one who was at once a poet and a critic--is doubtless an unhappy,
because a pedantic definition; and it is rather creation of life, than
the criticism of it, that art has to offer. But it must be life in all
its fulness and variety; as thought, no less than as action; as energy,
no less than as beauty--
As power, as love, as influencing soul.
This is the mission of art; and to unfold its working in the art of
all times and of all nations, to set it forth by intuition, by patient
reason, by every means at his command, is the function of the critic.


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