The other forms of critical activity will then find their
true place as preliminaries or supplements to the essential
function of criticism
The other forms of critical activity will then find their
true place as preliminaries or supplements to the essential
function of criticism. The study of historical conditions,
of authors” personal relations, of the literary ‘moment,’
will be means to show the work of art ‘as in itself it really
is.’ Shall we then say that the method of appreciation, being
an unusually exhaustive presentment of the object as in itself
it really is, is therefore an indispensable preparation for
the critical judgment? The modern appreciator, after the
model limned by Professor Gates, was to strive to get, as it
were, the aerial perspective of a masterpiece,–to present it
as it looks across the blue depths of the years. This is
without doubt a fascinating study; but it may be questioned
if it does not darken the more important issue. For it is
not the object as in itself it really is that we at last
behold, but the object disguised in new and strange trappings.
Such appreciation is to aesthetic criticism as the sentimental
to the naive poet in Schiller”s famous antithesis. The virtue
of the sentimental genius is to complete by the elements which
it derives from itself an otherwise defective object. So the
aesthetic critic takes his natural need of beauty from the
object; the appreciative critic seeks a further beauty outside
of the object, in his own reflections and fancies about it.
But if we care greatly for the associations of literature, we
Are in danger of disregarding its quality. A vast deal of
pretty sentiment may hang about and all but transmute the most
prosaic object. A sedan chair, an old screen, a sundial,–to
quote only Austin Dobson,–need not be lovely in themselves to
serve as pegs to hang a poem on; and all the atmosphere of the
eighteenth century may be wafted from a jar of potpourri. Read
a lyric instead of a rose jar, and the rule holds as well. The
man of feeling cannot but find all Ranelagh and Vauxhall in
some icily regular effusion of the eighteenth century, and will
take a deeper retrospective thrill from an old playbill than
from the play itself. And since this is so,–since the interest
in the overtones, the added value given by time, the value for
us, is not necessarily related to the value as literature of the
fundamental note,–to make the study of the overtones an
essential part of criticism is to be guilty of the Pathetic
Fallacy; that is, the falsification of the object by the
intrusion of ourselves,–the typical sentimental crime.