Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/13

Rh forbid such an one more than another to form or to utter the opinion which men unpractised in any form of art have an undisputed privilege to hold and to express. It is certain that a man's judgment may be shaped and coloured by the lines of his own life and the laws of his own labour; that a poet for example may be as bad a judge of painting as a painter may be of poetry, each man looking vainly in his neighbour's work for the qualities proper to his own; but it does not follow that either must of necessity be fool enough to mispraise or to dispraise a poem or a picture for the presence or the absence of qualities foreign to its aim. I would ask for either artist no more than is conceded as an unquestionable right to critics who are clear from any charge of good or bad work done in any but the critical line of labour: I would submit that there is really no evident or apparent reason why he should be less competent than his fellows to appreciate the merit or demerit of work which lies out of the way of his own ambition or achievement. A lifelong delight in the glories of an art which is not my own, quickened by the intercourse of many years with eminent artists of different and even of opposite schools, may have failed to make me a good critic of their art, but can hardly have left with me less right to judge or less faculty of judging than every writer on the subject is permitted to claim for himself. One thing at least the cultivation of this natural instinct or impulse of enjoyment can hardly have failed to ensure. A student from without who enjoys all forms and phases of an alien art as he respects, all forms and