'Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic[,] by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.
We're hierarchical animals, none of this is new. Why though is the artist[,] as a person as well as a creator, endlessly anatomised, while the psychological make-up of a critic is let go hang? Who has investigated the oedipal pulsings of a Sainte-Beuve? Or the possible anal indelicacies of a Saintsbury? Or the Gestalt of all our critics who wrote a novel once? Nobody hangs their laundry out. Or sees them as men and women for a' that, outside the hall of fame like everybody else, beating their little welfare fists against the big bank door.'
from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part IV)
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