have dealt with it destructively. They have demolished the dogmas of their predecessors, but have advanced few dogmas of their own. So that, after some twenty-three centuries of aesthetic speculation, we are still without any accepted body of aesthetic doctrine.
Perhaps the most perverse of all forms of critical theory is that which flourished so luxuriantly immediately after the revival of learning. It professed to base itself on experience. Accepting the classical masterpieces as supreme models of excellence, it asked how they were made. To examine minutely the procedure of the great classical writers, to embody their example in rules, to standardize their practice, seemed the obvious method of enabling the moderns to attain some tincture of the literary merits so ardently admired in the ancients: and the method was applied with a simple-minded consistency which to the reader of the twentieth century seems both pathetic and ludicrous. If you would rival antiquity, said the critics, imitate it. If you would imitate it, note well its methods. When these have been thoroughly mastered, it should be as easy to frame recipes for writing an epic, as for compounding a plum-pudding:—and they framed them accordingly.[1]
- ↑ All this subject is admirably discussed in Professor Saintsbury's great History of Criticism.
