...art deals, at its best, with what has never been observed, or observed only peripherally-darts from what is to what might have been-asking with total interest and sobriety such questions as 'what if apple trees could talk?' or 'what if the haughty old woman next door should fall in love with Mr. Powers, our mailman?' The artist's imagination, or the world it builds, is the laboratory of the unexperienced, both the heroic and the unspeakable.

True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art's proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise.

The critic's proper business is explanation and evaluation, which means he must make use of his analytic powers to translate the concrete to the abstract.

Art combines fancy and judgement.

True art imitates nature's total process: endless blind experiment (fish that climb tress, hands with nine fingers, shifts in and out of tonality) and then ruthless selectivity-the artist's sober judgements, like a lion's, of what can be killed, what is better left alone, such as (for the lion) rhinos and certain nasty snakes. Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say. That is art's morality.

True art is too complex to reflect the party line.

Only in lament does the artist cry out, 'Birds build but not I build," and the lament points to how things out to be: art builds; it never stands pat; it destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about-preservation of the world of gods and men.

Only in lament does the artist cry out, 'Birds build but not I build," and the lament points to how things ought to be: art builds; it never stands pat; it destroys only evil. If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation. This, I have claimed, is what true art is about-preservation of the world of gods and men.

We are rich in schools which speak of how art 'works' and avoid the whole subject of what work it ought to do.