sense. The modern appreciative critic, in short, is too likely
to be the dupe of his "sophisticated reverie,"--like an epicure
who should not taste the meat for the sauces. A master work,
once beautiful according to the great and general laws, never
becomes, properly speaking, either more or less so. If a piece
of art can take us with its own beauty, there is no point in
superimposing upon it shades of sentiment; if it cannot so
charm, all the rose-colored lights of this kind of appreciative
criticism are unavailing.

The "literary" treatment of art, as the "emotional" treatment of literature,--for that is what "appreciation" and "interpretation"
really are,--can completely justify itself only as the crowning
touch of a detailed aesthetic analysis of those "order of
impression distinct in kind" which are the primary elements in
our pleasure in the beautiful. It is the absence--and not only
the absence, but the ignoring of the possibility--of such
analysis which tempts one to rebel against such phrases as those
of Professor Gates: "the splendid and victorious womanhood of
Titian's Madonnas," "the gentle and terrestrial grace of
motherhood in those of Andrea del Sarto," the "sweetly ordered
comeliness of Van Dyck's." One is moved to ask if the only
difference between a Madonna of Titian and one of Andrea is a
difference of temper, and if the important matter for the
critic of art is the moral conception rather than the visible
beauty.

I cannot think of anything for which I would exchange the
enchanting volumes of Walter Pater, and yet even he is not the
ideal aesthetic critic whose duties he made clear. What he has
done is to give us the most exquisite and delicate of