[Editorial] Michaelangelo -> Michelangelo

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 			<p>The same thing takes place at all the concerts with pieces by Liszt, Wagner, Berlioz, Brahms, and (newest of all) Richard Strauss, and the numberless other composers of the new school, who unceasingly produce opera after opera, symphony after symphony, piece after piece.</p>
 			<p>The same is occurring in a domain in which it seemed hard to be unintelligible⁠—in the sphere of novels and short stories.</p>
 			<p>Read <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book" xml:lang="fr">Là-Bas</i> by Huysmans, or some of Kipling’s short stories, or “<span epub:type="se:name.publication.short-story" xml:lang="fr">L’annonciateur</span>” by Villiers de l’Isle Adam in his <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book" xml:lang="fr">Contes Cruels</i>, <abbr>etc.</abbr>, and you will find them not only “<i xml:lang="fr">abscons</i>” (to use a word adopted by the new writers), but absolutely unintelligible both in form and in substance. Such, again, is the work by <abbr epub:type="z3998:given-name">E.</abbr> Morel, <i epub:type="se:name.publication.book" xml:lang="fr">Terre Promise</i>, now appearing in the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine" xml:lang="fr">Revue Blanche</i>, and such are most of the new novels. The style is very high-flown, the feelings seem to be most elevated, but you can’t make out what is happening, to whom it is happening, and where it is happening. And such is the bulk of the young art of our time.</p>
-			<p>People who grew up in the first half of this century, admiring Goethe, Schiller, Musset, Hugo, Dickens, Beethoven, Chopin, Raphael, da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Delaroche, being unable to make head or tail of this new art, simply attribute its productions to tasteless insanity and wish to ignore them. But such an attitude towards this new art is quite unjustifiable, because, in the first place, that art is spreading more and more, and has already conquered for itself a firm position in society, similar to the one occupied by the Romanticists in the third decade of this century; and secondly and chiefly, because, if it is permissible to judge in this way of the productions of the latest form of art, called by us Decadent art, merely because we do not understand it, then remember, there are an enormous number of people⁠—all the labourers and many of the non-labouring folk⁠—who, in just the same way, do not comprehend those productions of art which we consider admirable: the verses of our favourite artists⁠—Goethe, Schiller, and Hugo; the novels of Dickens, the music of Beethoven and Chopin, the pictures of Raphael, Michaelangelo, da Vinci, <abbr class="eoc">etc.</abbr></p>
+			<p>People who grew up in the first half of this century, admiring Goethe, Schiller, Musset, Hugo, Dickens, Beethoven, Chopin, Raphael, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Delaroche, being unable to make head or tail of this new art, simply attribute its productions to tasteless insanity and wish to ignore them. But such an attitude towards this new art is quite unjustifiable, because, in the first place, that art is spreading more and more, and has already conquered for itself a firm position in society, similar to the one occupied by the Romanticists in the third decade of this century; and secondly and chiefly, because, if it is permissible to judge in this way of the productions of the latest form of art, called by us Decadent art, merely because we do not understand it, then remember, there are an enormous number of people⁠—all the labourers and many of the non-labouring folk⁠—who, in just the same way, do not comprehend those productions of art which we consider admirable: the verses of our favourite artists⁠—Goethe, Schiller, and Hugo; the novels of Dickens, the music of Beethoven and Chopin, the pictures of Raphael, Michelangelo, da Vinci, <abbr class="eoc">etc.</abbr></p>
 			<p>If I have a right to think that great masses of people do not understand and do not like what I consider undoubtedly good because they are not sufficiently developed, then I have no right to deny that perhaps the reason why I cannot understand and cannot like the new productions of art, is merely that I am still insufficiently developed to understand them. If I have a right to say that I, and the majority of people who are in sympathy, with me, do not understand the productions of the new art simply because there is nothing in it to understand and because it is bad art, then, with just the same right, the still larger majority, the whole labouring mass, who do not understand what I consider admirable art, can say that what I reckon as good art is bad art, and there is nothing in it to understand.</p>
 			<p>I once saw the injustice of such condemnation of the new art with especial clearness, when, in my presence, a certain poet, who writes incomprehensible verses, ridiculed incomprehensible music with gay self-assurance; and, shortly afterwards, a certain musician, who composes incomprehensible symphonies, laughed at incomprehensible poetry with equal self-confidence. I have no right, and no authority, to condemn the new art on the ground that I (a man educated in the first half of the century) do not understand it; I can only say that it is incomprehensible to me. The only advantage the art I acknowledge has over the Decadent art, lies in the fact that the art I recognise is comprehensible to a somewhat larger number of people than the present-day art.</p>
 			<p>The fact that I am accustomed to a certain exclusive art, and can understand it, but am unable to understand another still more exclusive art, does not give me a right to conclude that my art is the real true art, and that the other one, which I do not understand, is an unreal, a bad art. I can only conclude that art, becoming ever more and more exclusive, has become more and more incomprehensible to an ever-increasing number of people, and that, in this its progress towards greater and greater incomprehensibility (on one level of which I am standing, with the art familiar to me), it has reached a point where it is understood by a very small number of the elect, and the number of these chosen people is ever becoming smaller and smaller.</p>

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 			<p>Universal art has a definite and indubitable internal criterion⁠—religious perception; upper-class art lacks this, and therefore the appreciators of that art are obliged to cling to some external criterion. And they find it in “the judgments of the finest-nurtured,” as an English aesthetician has phrased it, that is, in the authority of the people who are considered educated, nor in this alone, but also in a tradition of such authorities. This tradition is extremely misleading, both because the opinions of “the finest-nurtured” are often mistaken, and also because judgments which were valid once cease to be so with the lapse of time. But the critics, having no basis for their judgments, never cease to repeat their traditions. The classical tragedians were once considered good, and therefore criticism considers them to be so still. Dante was esteemed a great poet, Raphael a great painter, Bach a great musician⁠—and the critics, lacking a standard by which to separate good art from bad, not only consider these artists great, but regard all their productions as admirable and worthy of imitation. Nothing has contributed, and still contributes, so much to the perversion of art as these authorities set up by criticism. A man produces a work of art, like every true artist expressing in his own peculiar manner a feeling he has experienced. Most people are infected by the artist’s feeling; and his work becomes known. Then criticism, discussing the artist, says that the work is not bad, but all the same the artist is not a Dante, nor a Shakespeare, nor a Goethe, nor a Raphael, nor what Beethoven was in his last period. And the young artist sets to work to copy those who are held up for his imitation, and he produces not only feeble works, but false works, counterfeits of art.</p>
 			<p>Thus, for instance, our Pushkin writes his short poems, <i epub:type="se:name.publication.poem">Evgeniy Onegin</i>, <i epub:type="se:name.publication.poem">The Gipsies</i>, and his stories⁠—works all varying in quality, but all true art. But then, under the influence of false criticism extolling Shakespeare, he writes <i epub:type="se:name.publication.play">Boris Godunoff</i>, a cold, brain-spun work, and this production is lauded by the critics, set up as a model, and imitations of it appear: <i epub:type="se:name.publication.play">Minin</i> by Ostrovsky, and <i epub:type="se:name.publication.play">Tsar Boris</i> by Alexée Tolstoy, and such imitations of imitations as crowd all literatures with insignificant productions. The chief harm done by the critics is this, that themselves lacking the capacity to be infected by art (and that is the characteristic of all critics; for did they not lack this they could not attempt the impossible⁠—the interpretation of works of art), they pay most attention to, and eulogise, brain-spun, invented works, and set these up as models worthy of imitation. That is the reason they so confidently extol, in literature, the Greek tragedians, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe (almost all he wrote), and, among recent writers, Zola and Ibsen; in music, Beethoven’s last period, and Wagner. To justify their praise of these brain-spun, invented works, they devise entire theories (of which the famous theory of beauty is one); and not only dull but also talented people compose works in strict deference to these theories; and often even real artists, doing violence to their genius, submit to them.</p>
 			<p>Every false work extolled by the critics serves as a door through which the hypocrites of art at once crowd in.</p>
-			<p>It is solely due to the critics, who in our times still praise rude, savage, and, for us, often meaningless works of the ancient Greeks: Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and especially Aristophanes; or, of modern writers, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare; in painting, all of Raphael, all of Michaelangelo, including his absurd <i epub:type="se:name.visual-art.painting">Last Judgment</i>; in music, the whole of Bach, and the whole of Beethoven, including his last period⁠—thanks only to them, have the Ibsens, Maeterlincks, Verlaines, Mallarmés, Puvis de Chavannes, Klingers, Böcklins, Stucks, Schneiders; in music, the Wagners, Liszts, Berliozes, Brahmses, and Richard Strausses, <abbr>etc.</abbr>, and all that immense mass of good-for-nothing imitators of these imitators, become possible in our day.</p>
+			<p>It is solely due to the critics, who in our times still praise rude, savage, and, for us, often meaningless works of the ancient Greeks: Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and especially Aristophanes; or, of modern writers, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare; in painting, all of Raphael, all of Michelangelo, including his absurd <i epub:type="se:name.visual-art.painting">Last Judgment</i>; in music, the whole of Bach, and the whole of Beethoven, including his last period⁠—thanks only to them, have the Ibsens, Maeterlincks, Verlaines, Mallarmés, Puvis de Chavannes, Klingers, Böcklins, Stucks, Schneiders; in music, the Wagners, Liszts, Berliozes, Brahmses, and Richard Strausses, <abbr>etc.</abbr>, and all that immense mass of good-for-nothing imitators of these imitators, become possible in our day.</p>
 			<p>As a good illustration of the harmful influence of criticism, take its relation to Beethoven. Among his innumerable hasty productions written to order, there are, notwithstanding their artificiality of form, works of true art. But he grows deaf, cannot hear, and begins to write invented, unfinished works, which are consequently often meaningless and musically unintelligible. I know that musicians can imagine sounds vividly enough, and can almost hear what they read, but imaginary sounds can never replace real ones, and every composer must hear his production in order to perfect it. Beethoven, however, could not hear, could not perfect his work, and consequently published productions which are artistic ravings. But criticism, having once acknowledged him to be a great composer, seizes on just these abnormal works with special gusto, and searches for extraordinary beauties in them. And, to justify its laudations (perverting the very meaning of musical art), it attributed to music the property of describing what it cannot describe. And imitators appear⁠—an innumerable host of imitators of these abnormal attempts at artistic productions which Beethoven wrote when he was deaf.</p>
 			<p>Then Wagner appears, who at first in critical articles praises just Beethoven’s last period, and connects this music with Schopenhauer’s mystical theory that music is the expression of Will⁠—not of separate manifestations of will objectivised on various planes, but of its very essence⁠—which is in itself as absurd as this music of Beethoven. And afterwards he composes music of his own on this theory, in conjunction with another still more erroneous system of the union of all the arts. After Wagner yet new imitators appear, diverging yet further from art: Brahms, Richard Strauss, and others.</p>
 			<p>Such are the results of criticism. But the third condition of the perversion of art, namely, art schools, is almost more harmful still.</p>