st be enjoyed. But to be
completely enjoyed it must be understood. We must know what the
artist was trying to express, and we must be able to read his
language; then we are prepared to take delight in the form and to
respond to the emotion.

To help us to understand a work of art in all the components that
entered into the making of it is the function of historical study. Such
study enables us to see the work from the artist's own point of view.
A knowledge of its background, the conditions in which the artist
wrought and his own attitude toward life, is the clue to his ideal; and
by an understanding of the language it was possible for him to
employ, we can measure the degree of expressiveness he was able to
achieve. This study of the artist's purpose and of his methods is an
exercise in explanation.

The interpretation of art, for which we look to criticism, deals with
the picture, the statue, the book, specifically in its relation to the
appreciator. What is the special nature of the experience which the
work communicates to us in terms of feeling? In so far as the
medium itself is a source of pleasure, by what qualities of form has
the work realized the conditions of beauty proper to it, delighting
thus the senses and satisfying the mind? These are the questions
which the critic, interpreting the work through the medium of his
own temperament, seeks to answer.

Theoretically, the best critic of art would be the artist himself. He
above all other men should understand the subtle play of emotion
and thought in which a work of art is conceived; and the artist rather
than another should trace the intricacies and know the cunning of the
magician processes by which the immaterial idea builds itself into
visible actuality. In practice, however, the theory is not borne out by
the fact. The artist as such is very little conscious of the workings of
his spirit. He is creative rather than reflective, synthetic and not
analytic. From his contact with nature and from his experience of
life, out of which rises his generative emotion, he moves directly to
the fashioning of expressive forms, without pausing on the way to
scan too closely the "meaning" of his work. Mr. Bernard Shaw
remarks that Ibsen, giving the rein to the creative impulse of his
poetic nature, produced in "Brand" and "Peer Gynt" a "great puzzle
for his intellect." Wagner, he says, "has expressly described how the
intellectual activity which he brought to the an