“It is not hard to see why the actor or painter who knows his craft chafes so often against the critic who knows his. The person thus chafed has missed the point at the start. He takes it that the critic has tried to be what no critic has any business to be; and, naturally, he thinks that the critic has failed. Probably the actor or painter has in mind a kind of ideal critic, according to the actor’s or painter’s notions — some creature compact of full technical knowledge of the actor’s or painter’s art, perfect judicial balance, scientific precision in the assessment of technical merit, and also complete freedom from the natural ambition and egoism of an artist. Of such a person there may be a pattern laid up in Heaven, and there may even be a use for him there. But he is no critic.
“The critic proper is neither a tutor in the technics of the art which he criticises, nor an examiner commissioned to allot marks to its practitioners in accord with strict distributive justice, as in the sight of God. He, too, in his humble way, is an artist as they are. And every artist’s business is to express his own individual, autonomous, possibly uncommon or wayward sense of something that presents itself to him… A critic differs from other literary artists in nothing but the accident that his subjects are found in a special field of his own, as indeed theirs are too, as a rule. Ostler in an old inn-yard or actor on a stage, the spoken work of some delectable Sarah Gamp or the written word of some delicious poet — little it matters what your delighted spirit delights in, so long as it does delight; whatever be the theme, a Falstaff himself or a comedian’s acting of him, the lark at dappled dawn, startling the dull night, or Milton’s rapture about it, a mother nursing her first child or the Sistine Madonna, the voice of your private ecstasy is art. Its utterance is not a judicial act nor a pedagogic one nor the professional act of a surveyor, a public analyst or an inspector of nuisances. An artistic act, it has to be judged by the canons of art and not by those of mensuration or of public justice.” (C. E. Montague, 1930, A Writer’s Notes on His Trade).