The good critic ought to be master of
the three capacities, the three modes of seeing men and things--he
should be able simultaneously to see them as they are, as they might be,
and as they ought to be.
* * * * *
Modern culture is a delicate electuary made up of varied savors and
subtle colors, which can be more easily felt than measured or defined.
Its very superiority consists in the complexity, the association of
contraries, the skillful combination it implies. The man of to-day,
fashioned by the historical and geographical influences of twenty
countries and of thirty centuries, trained and modified by all the
sciences and all the arts, the supple recipient of all literatures, is
an entirely new product. He finds affinities, relationships, analogies
everywhere, but at the same time he condenses and sums up what is
elsewhere scattered. He is like the smile of La Gioconda, which seems to
reveal a soul to the spectator only to leave him the more certainly
under a final impression of mystery, so many different things are
expressed in it at once.
* * * * *
To understand things we must have been once in them and then have come
out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance,
illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment.
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