It is a jeer as cheap as any other to say that a critic is only an artist who has failed. It is, indeed, perfectly possible that plenty of criticisms that we hear are the result of jealousy, and are merely expressed at the expense of a more successful rival. But it is utterly untrue to imagine that criticism can only be of such a nature, or even that remarks based entirely upon such petty personal spite can ever be really criticism that is worthy of the name. Each soul, my own soul, has need of a distinctive and clear critical faculty, which it is part of my business in life to train. In an age which is alive and swarming with ideas (as every age must seem to the generation which inhabits it), no one, if he be content to accept everything and everybody at their own face-value or at the price at which they esteem their own importance, can hope to walk unscathed. To be the dupe of every charlatan is not Christian, but criminal. On the contrary, Christianity is meant to give us such a philosophy of life, such a genius and feeling for the real and the true, that we can detect the fallacy, the blustering or cunning fallacy, of the spirits that move around us. It is part of the Faith to test and discern of these spirits whether they be of God. Yet even so, to detect the defects of people and systems is a very rudimentary, the Very lowest, form of criticism. It must always be a function of criticism to dis cover error, and I must train myself to possess it lest I follow in blind hero-worship some wayward but forceful leader.
But it is much more necessary for me to be able to detect beauty, half-hidden or ill-expressed. That is the highest, because most creative, form of criticism, and will be of intensest help to me in the spiritual life. For really all through my days on earth, so much is coming into my view, which is, to all intents and purposes, lost on me, just because I have no eyes to see it. One of our writers has put all this idea very clearly in the form of a deft paradox "Experience," says he, "is a matter of intuition": Dy which, I suppose, he means that merely having existed for a long time need not teach us wisdom. For "the Bourbons learnt nothing and forgot nothing" with all their tragedies and their failures, their incessant successes and defeats, they never seemed to consider wherein their failure lay, for it is an intuitive gift which can alone make profit out of experience. In other words, we see only what our eyes have been trained to see, and not necessarily what is really there. A man who has disciplined himself to observe his surroundings, whose wit has been made nimble enough to notice and to deduce, can pass through the same place as a duller soul and find it alive with interests and principle and the lessons of life. Each finds what he has himself brought. Not sight, but insight, is man's chiefest need, the requisite faculty of discerning what is wasted on others. The critic in this sense is the most noble and magnanimous and helpful of men, for his gift of finding fault is balanced by his gift of finding value.
Now to achieve this wonderful state of soul, of discovering, beneath the rough and the unlovely, signs of beauty, there is required an intense appreciation of the ways of others, an intense gift of sympathy. To understand them and to see their value I must be able to put myself in their place, grasp the ideals possible to them in their circumstances, learn the pedigree of their thoughts and aspirations, and endeavour to find out the difficulties that they had to overcome. I must love them, in other words, before I can find out what there is to love in them. I must begin to expect beauty before I can hope to see it when it comes. Sudden appreciations of art or friendship are really the violent explosion of a fuse that has subconsciously been long alight. I must, therefore, in my attitude to life be ready to find good. In discussing people I must be as much alive to their valuable qualities, however hidden, as to their worthless ways, however blatant: the latter will be noted by the obvious-minded, the former by true critics alone. That is the true science of criticism, and its spiritual power is enormous. It enables me to pass by as of no account the petty gossip of the world. Any fool can see another's folly, but the wise alone can see another's wisdom. Just as the artist-critic amid much roughness and lack of technique can still discern gleams of beauty, can trace in lines, unkempt, ill drawn, ill-focussed, the hand of genius (even though untrained), so should the true follower of Christ be able to discover, by the quick intuition of charity, very much of grandeur and nobility in character, that else would be passed by as of little account. Indeed, the cynic is not even human. Let me not search the whole world for an honest man, but find in every man a whole world of honesty.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.