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| | How to become a Music Critic |
 | | A man cannot become an expert in criticism without practising an art of some kind; and if that art is not music, then he naturally confines himself to the art he is accustomed to handle, writing about it if he has the requisite literary faculty, and if not, teaching it. |
 | | Whether he is praising or blaming, he always dwells on some of the hundred points that all players and executants have in common, and misses the final ones that make all the difference between mediocrity and genius and between one artist and another. |
 | | I wrote the criticisms, and he handed the emoluments over to me without deduction, contenting himself with the consciousness of doing generously by a young and forlorn literary adventurer, and with the honor and glory accruing from the reputed authorship of my articles. |
| www.ucalgary.ca /~rseiler/gbshaw.htm (1352 words) |
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