We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the
stars.--_The Critic as Artist_.
THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS
The appeal of all Art is simply to the artistic temperament. Art does
not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is
universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so far
from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really
great artist can never judge of other people's work at all, and can
hardly, in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration of vision
that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of
fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his
own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around
him. The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise their
worshippers. That is all . . . Wordsworth saw in _Endymion_ merely a
pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was
deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that
great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the
poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was
hidden from him.
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