ry to see the work "as in itself it really is," but is an account of
the critic's own subjective reaction on it, a narrative of what he
thought and felt in this chance corner of experience. With Walter
Pater criticism becomes _appreciation._ A given work of art
produces a distinctive impression and communicates a special and
unique pleasure; this active power constitutes its beauty. So the
function of the critic as Pater conceives it is "to distinguish, analyze,
and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a
landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this
special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source
of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced."
The interpretative critic--represented in the practice of Pater--stands
between a work of art and the appreciator as mediator and revealer.

Each kind of criticism performs a certain office, and is of use within
its own chosen sphere. To the layman, for his purposes of
appreciation, that order of criticism will be most helpful which
responds most closely and amply to his peculiar needs. A work of
art may be regarded under several aspects, its quality of technical
execution, its power of sensuous appeal, its historical importance;
and to each one of these aspects some kind of criticism applies. The
layman's reception of art includes all these considerations, but
subordinates them to the total experience. His concern, therefore, is
to define the service of criticism to appreciation.

The analysis of a work of art resolves it into these elements. There is
first of all the emotion which gives birth to the work and which the
work is designed to express. The emotion, to become definite,
gathers about an idea, conceived in the terms of its own medium, as
form, or color and mass, or musical relations; and this artistic idea
presents itself as the subject or motive of the work. The emotion and
artistic idea, in order that they may be expressed and become
communicable, embody themselves in material, as the marble of a
statue, the pigment of a picture, the audible tones of a musical
composition. This material form has the power to satisfy the mind
and delight the senses. Through the channel of the senses and the
mind the work reaches the feelings; and the aesthetic experience is
complete.

As art springs out of emotion, so it is to be received as emotion; and
a work to be appreciated in its true spirit mu