The Limitations of Genius by Oscar Wilde — Read

The appeal of all Art is simply to the artistic temperament. Art does / not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is / universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so far / from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really / great artist can never judge of other people's work at all, and can / hardly, in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration of vision / that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of / fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his / own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around / him. The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise their / worshippers. That is all. Wordsworth saw in _Endymion_ merely a / pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was / deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that / great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the / poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was / hidden from him. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles. / Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his / sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare, / any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough. Bad artists / always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and / free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life / being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those / that he has selected. Creation employs all its critical faculty within / its own sphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others. / It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge / of it. -- _The Critic as Artist_.