e layman who leans too heavily upon
criticism comes to realize the hopelessness of his position and thinks
the situation through to its necessary conclusion, he sees that the
authority of criticism is not absolute, but varies with the powers and
range of the individual critic, and that at the last he must find his
standard within himself.

There are, of course, certain standards of excellence recognized
universally and certain principles of taste of universal validity; and
to these standards and these principles must be referred our
individual estimates for comparison and correction. Given a native
sensibility to the worth of life and to the appeal of beauty, the justice
of our estimate will be in proportion to the extent of our knowledge
of life and of our contact with art. Our individual judgment,
therefore, must be controlled by experience,--our momentary
judgments by the sum of our own experience, and our total
judgment by universal experience. In all sound criticism and right
appreciation there must be a basis of disciplined taste. We must
guard ourselves against whims and caprice, even our own. So the
individual may not cut loose altogether from external standards. But
these must be brought into relation to his personal needs and applied
with reference to his own standard. Finally, for his own uses, the
individual has the right to determine the meaning and value to him
of any work of art in the measure that it links itself with his own
actual or possible experience and becomes for him a revelation of
fuller life. For beauty is the power possessed by objects to quicken
us with a sense of larger personality; and art, whether the arts of
form or of representation, is the material bodying forth of beauty as
the artist has perceived it and the means by which his emotion in its
presence is communicated. Upon this conception of beauty and this
interpretation of the scope and function of art rests the justice of the
personal estimate.

VII

BEAUTY AND COMMON LIFE

TO become sensitive to the meaning of color and form and sound as
the artist employs them for expression, to feel a work of art in its
relation to its background, to find in criticism enlightenment and
guidance but not a substitute for one's own experience,--these are
methods of approach to art. But the appreciator has yet to penetrate
art's inmost secret. At the centre, as the motive of all his efforts to
understand the language of art and the process