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THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM

INTRODUCTORY

I. ASPECTS OF LITERATURE

I SUPPOSE that it will not be denied that comparison lies at the root of all our judgments in art and literature, and that our judgments are valid in proportion as the range of experience on which they are based is of greater or less extent. It is the principle in which Burke finds a foundation for the belief in the existence of a general standard of taste. A man who has never seen a piece of sculpture admires the representations of the human head afforded by a barber's shop; but his admiration for the waxen effigies of the barber is killed by a visit to a studio. The ordinary processes which minister to mental growth and to the training of eye and ear-education, experience, travel, and opportunities of social converse-together provide material which, unconsciously applied, is sufficient to enable us to form approximately correct judgments on every-day questions. In this way we become sensible to the charm of painting and music, learn to distinguish

between a harmonious and an inharmonious arrangement of form and colour, and are quickly. affected by any sense of incongruity in our social or material surroundings.

For all the purposes of every-day life taste will serve. But if we go round a picture gallery with an artist we soon find that while 'taste' makes the sight of these pictures a genuine enjoyment, it will go only a little way towards helping us to discriminate between the relative merits of the several works. Broadly speaking, we do not see much difference in them. But the artist, or the critic, sees both the excellencies and defects to which our eyes are blind.

As with art, so with literature. We read this or that book because, as we say, it 'interests' us, or it 'amuses' us. Our taste leads us to prefer one book to another, or one branch of literature, or style of writing, to another; but it does not enable us to explain the grounds on which in each case our preferences are based. Some readers do not care to analyze their feelings. For them this book will have little or no interest. But there are others— and they form an increasingly large proportion of the entire mass of readers of books-who have passed beyond the stage of unconscious pleasure, and who wish not merely to read but to study books. For them this book may have an interest, because the study of any form of literature cannot be usefully undertaken without a certain basis of inde

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