Present-day criticism avails itself of this larger outlook upon art. But the ends to be reached are understood differently by different critics. With M. Brunetiere, to cite now a few representative names, criticism is authoritative and dogmatic: he looks at the work objectively, refusing to be the dupe of his pleasure, if he has any; and approaching the work in the spirit of dispassionate impersonal inquiry as an object of historical importance and scientific interest, he decrees that it is good or bad. Matthew Arnold considers literature a "criticism of life," and he values a work with reference to the moral significance of its ideas. Ruskin's criticism is didactic; he wishes to educate his public, and by force of his torrential eloquence he succeeds in persuading his disciples into acceptance of his teaching, though he may not always convince. Impressionistic criticism, as with M. Anatole France or M. Jules Lemaitre, does not even try 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.