RTISTIC and literary criticism is often looked upon by artists as a morose and tyrannical pedagogue who gives capricious orders, imposes prohibitions, and grants permissions, thus aiding or injuring their works by wilfully deciding upon their fate. And so the artists either show themselves submissive, humble, flattering, adulatory, toward it, while hating it in their hearts; or, when they do not obtain what they want, or their loftiness of soul forbids that they should descend to those arts of the courtier, they revolt against it, proclaiming its uselessness with imprecations and mockery, comparing (the remembrance is personal) the critic to an ass that enters the potter’s shop and breaks in pieces with quadrupedante ungulae sonitu the delicate products of his art set out to dry in the sun. This time, to tell the truth, it is the artists’ fault, for they do not know what criticism is, expecting from it favours which it is not in a position to grant, and injuries which it is not in a position to inflict: since it is clear that, since no critic can make an artist of one who is not an artist, so no critic can ever undo, overthrow, or even slightly injure an artist who is really an artist, owing to the metaphysical impossibility of such an act: these things have never happened in the course of history, they do not happen in our day, and we can be sure that they will never happen in the future. But sometimes it is the critics themselves, or the self-styled critics, who do actually present themselves as pedagogues, as oracles, as guides of art, as legislators, seers, and prophets; they command artists to do this or that, they assign themes to them and declare that certain subjects are poetical and certain others not; they are discontented with the art at present produced, and would prefer one similar to that prevailing at this or that epoch of the past, or at another of which they declare they catch a glimpse in the near or remote future; they will reprove Tasso for not being Ariosto, Leopardi for not being Metastasio, Manzoni for not being Alfieri, D’Annunzio because he is not Berchet or Fra Jacopone; and they describe the great artist of the future, supplying him with ethic, philosophy, history, language, metric, with architectonic and colouristic processes, and with whatever it may seem to them that he stands in need. And this time it is clear that the blame lies with the critic; and the artists are right in behaving toward such brutality in the way that we behave toward beasts, which we try to tame, to illude and to delude, in order that they may serve us; or we drive them away and send them to the slaughter-house when they are no longer good for any service. But for the honour of criticism we must add that those capricious critics are not so much critics as artists: artists who have failed and who aspire to a certain form of art, which they are unable to attain, either because their aspiration was contradictory, or because their power was not sufficient and failed them; and thus, preserving in their soul the bitterness of the unrealised ideal, they can speak of nothing else, lamenting everywhere its absence, and everywhere invoking its presence. And sometimes, too, they are artists who are anything but failures,—indeed, most felicitous artists,—but, owing to the very energy of their artistic individuality, incapable of emerging from themselves in order to understand forms of art different from their own, and disposed to reject them with violence; they are aided in this negation by the odium figulinum, the jealousy of the artist for the artist, which is without doubt a defect, but one with which too many excellent artists appear to be stained for us to refuse to it some indulgence similar to that accorded to the defects of women, so difficult, as we know, to separate from their good qualities. Other artists should calmly reply to these artist-critics: “Continue doing in your art what you do so well, and let us do what we can do”; and to the artists who have failed and improvised themselves critics: “Do not claim that we should do what you have failed in doing, or what is work of the future, of which neither you nor we know anything.” As a fact, this is not the usual reply, because passion forms half of it; but this is indeed the logical reply, which logically terminates the question, though we must foresee that the altercation will not terminate, but will indeed last as long as there are intolerant artists and failures—that is to say, for ever.