The Literary Discipline

The following chapters were first published serially in _The North American Review_, from November, 1922, to March, 1923. For their reappearance in this volume I have made sligh...

The principle of literary decorum which applies to the representation of the body applies also to the allied theme of sex. The body is a fit subject for literature, but not in d...

The example of the musician may not seem to all writers a fair parallel; they may protest that the writer creates, as the composer does, but the player only interprets what is a...

But nowadays the desire for originality comes not only from the writer; a certain class of readers also demand it, the kind of person who reads with an eye out for imitations an...

To revert to the starting point of our lives is to seek nature in vain, since the alternations of art and nature proceed relentlessly, whether we rest our dead weight on the pro...

The cult of the contemporary follows logically from the cult of the natural. If we are to write of a life untouched with art, we can write only of life about us, as our fathers...

The movement began a few years ago in a protest against the narrow choice of books permitted by the requirements for entrance to college. Some of the schools thought they could...

These principles, it goes without saying, are not accepted by writers today; the average author is not aware of them, or if he is, he takes refuge in another remark of Aristotle...

Falstaff and Tartuffe illustrate the generalizing of inferior characters by the ascribing of their faults to human nature. A good illustration of the comic character which enlis...