interpretations. He has not failed to "disengage" the subtle
and peculiar pleasure that each picture, each poem or
personality, has in store for us; but of analysis and explanation
of this pleasure--of which he speaks in the Introduction to "The
Renaissance"--there is no more. In the first lines of his paper
on Botticelli, the author asks, "What is the peculiar sensation
which his work has the property of exciting in us?" And to
what does he finally come? "The peculiar character of Botticelli
is the result of a blending in him of a sympathy for humanity
in its uncertain conditions...with his consciousness of the
shadow upon it of the great things from which it sinks." But
this is not aesthetic analysis! It is not even the record of
a "peculiar sensation," but a complex intellectual interpretation.
Where is the pleasure in the irrepressible outline, fascinating
in its falseness,--in the strange color, like the taste of
olives, of the Spring and the Pallas? So, also, his great
passage on the Mona Lisa, his "Winckelmann," even his "Giorgione"
itself, are merely wonderful delineations of the mood of
response to the creations of the art in question. Such
interpretation as we have from Pater is a priceless treasure,
but it is none the less the final cornice, and not the corner
stone of aesthetic criticism.

The tendency to interpretation without any basis in aesthetic
explanation is especially seen in the subject of our original
discussion,--literature. It is indeed remarkable how scanty
is the space given in contemporary criticism to the study of
an author's means to those results which we ourselves
experience. Does no one really care how it is done? Or are
they all in the secret, and interested only in the temperament