shall also say that the principle of art for art's sake
needs to be understood and interpreted very differently. Its
implications are tremendous. Art is autonomous, and to be pursued for
its own sake, precisely because it comprehends the whole of human life;
because it has reference to a more perfectly human morality than other
activity of man; because, in so far as it is truly art, it is indicative
of a more comprehensive and unchallengeable harmony in the spirit of
man. It does not demand impossibilities, that man should be at one with
the universe or in tune with the infinite; but it does envisage the
highest of all attainable ideals, that man should be at one with
himself, obedient to his own most musical law.

Thus art reveals to us the principle of its own governance. The function
of criticism is to apply it. Obviously it can be applied only by him who
has achieved, if not the actual aesthetic ideal in life, at least a
vision and a sense of it. He alone will know that the principle he has
to elucidate and apply is living, organic. It is indeed the very
principle of artistic creation itself. Therefore he will approach what
claims to be a work of art first as a thing in itself, and seek with it
the most intimate and immediate contact in order that he may decide
whether it too is organic and living. He will be untiring in his effort
to refine his power of discrimination by the frequentation of the finest
work of the past, so that he may be sure of himself when he decides, as
he must, whether the object before him is the expression of an aesthetic
intuition at all. At the best he is likely to find that it is mixed and
various; that fragments of aesthetic vision jostle with unsubordinated
intellectual judgments.

But, in regarding the work of art as a thing in itself, he will never
forget the hierarchy of comprehension, that the active ideal of art is
indeed to see life steadily and see it whole, and that only he has a
claim to the title of a great artist whose work manifests an incessant
growth from a merely personal immediacy to a coherent and
all-comprehending attitude to life. The great artist's work is in all
its parts a revelation of the ideal as a principle of activity in human
life. As the apprehension of the ideal is more or less perfect, the
artist's comprehension will be greater or less. The critic has not
merely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and Shakespeare,
between Dante and Milton, bet