Principles of literary criticism

The literature of Criticism is not small or negligible, and its chief figures, from Aristotle onwards, have often been among the first intellects of their age. Yet the modern st...

A more serious defect in æsthetics is the avoidance of considerations as to value. It is true that an ill-judged introduction of value considerations usually leads to disaster,...

Whatever the disadvantages of modern æsthetics as a basis for a theory of Criticism, the great advance made upon prescientific speculation into the nature of Beauty must also be...

The two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest are an account of value and an account of communication. We do not sufficiently realise how great a part of our experi...

Between the general inquiry into the nature of the good and the appreciation of particular works of art, there may seem to be a wide gap, and the discussion upon which we are ab...

It has always been found far more easy to divide experiences[15] into good and bad, valuable and the reverse, than to discover what we are doing when we make the division. The h...

Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them, but becaus...

From this excursus let us return to our proper task, the attempt to outline a morality which will change its values as circumstances alter, a morality free from occultism, absol...

Every true view, perhaps, has its crude analogues, due sometimes to a confused perception of the real state of affairs, sometimes to faulty statement. Often these clumsy or mist...

Another possible misapprehension which cannot be left unmentioned arises in connection with the doctrine ‘Art for Art’s sake’, a doctrine definitely and detrimentally dated; it...

M. Jules Romains recently observed[34] that psychology hitherto has merely contrived to say laboriously and obscurely, and with less precision, what we all know without its aid...

Sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure, unpleasure and pain are names for the conscious characteristics of impulses: How they may best be sorted out is a p...

In alluding to the cœnesthesia we came very near to giving an account of emotion as an ingredient of consciousness. Stimulating situations give rise to widespread ordered reperc...

So far we have alluded only casually to memory, to that apparent revival of past experience to which the richness and complexity of experience is due. Every stimulus which is ev...

The interventions of memory are not confined to sensation and emotion. They are of equal importance in our active behaviour. The acquisition of any muscular accomplishment, danc...

The result of the co-ordination of a great number of impulses of different kinds is very often that no _overt_ action takes place. There is a danger here of supposing that no ac...

The qualifications of a good critic are three. He must be an adept at experiencing, without eccentricities, the state of mind relevant to the work of art he is judging. Secondly...

Rhythm and its specialised form, metre, depend upon repetition, and expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where it fails, all rhythmical and metrical effects spr...

A more serious omission is the neglect by the majority of metrists of the pitch relations of syllables. The reading of poetry is of course not a monotonous and subdued form of s...

not be done otherwise or in violation of the natural effects of sound. Violations of the natural emphases and tones of speech brought about for the sake of the further effects d...

The diagram and account given of the processes which make up the reading of a poem may be easily modified to represent what happens when we look at a picture, a statue or buildi...

sense organs in that the receptor, the retina, is a part of the brain, instead of being a separate thing connected with the brain more or less remotely by a peripheral nerve. Mo...

The initial signs from which the work of art is built up psychologically in the case of sculpture differ in several respects from the initial signs of painting. There are of cou...

For fairly obvious reasons the psychology of Music is often regarded as more backward than that of the other arts, and the _impasse_ which has here been reached more baffling an...

Artificial mysteries are as prevalent in unreflecting and even in elaborately excogitated opinion upon communication as elsewhere. On the one hand are some who define communicat...

That he is the wisest, the happiest and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible; the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the mos...

It is strange that speculations upon the arts should so rarely have begun from the most obvious fact about them. Mr Roger Fry, in his interesting Retrospect, records the shock w...

If the availability of his past experience is the first characteristic of the poet, the second is what we may provisionally call his normality. So far as his experience does not...

The theory of badness in poetry has never received the study which it deserves, partly on account of its difficulty. For with bad art even more than with good unless we are care...

Ambiguity in a poem, as with any other communication, may be the fault of the poet or of the reader. The ambiguities due to erratic reading are as important for criticism as oth...

There still remains the most interesting of the cases in which apparent agreement disguises real differences, that in which a work occasions valuable responses of the same kind...

We have distinguished between impulses which are involved at all stages of development, their course and fate naturally varying with the stage, and those which do not go off at...

The permanence of poetry is a subject closely connected with the foregoing. Just as there is a prejudice in favour of work with a wide popular appeal, so there is another in fav...

Men take the words they find in use among their neighbours, and that they may not seem ignorant what they stand for use them confidently without much troubling their heads about...

The value of the experiences which we Seek from the arts does not lie, so we have insisted, in the exquisiteness of the moment of consciousness; a set of isolated ecstasies is n...

At least six distinct senses of the word ‘imagination’ are still current in critical discussion. It is convenient to separate them before passing on to consider the one which is...

Oh never rudely will I blame his faith In the might of stars and angels! ’Tis not merely The human being’s pride that peoples space With life and mystical predominance; Since li...

The intelligible forms of ancient poets The fair humanities of old religion . . . They live no longer in the faith of reason: But still the heart doth need a language, still Dot...

What I see very well is the wide-spread, infinite harm of putting fancy for knowledge (to speak like Socrates), or rather of living by choice in a twilight of the mind where fan...

Justice, for example, is fatal to _Prometheus Unbound_, so in another way is the belief that the Millennium is at hand. To steer an unperplexed path between these opposite dange...