tir. 5-24 43, Rhetoric Library 11-1-1928 PREFACE HIS volume consists of two distinct treatises, each TH of which is meant to be complete in itself. They are, however, closely related, not only in subject, but also in the nature and conduct of their argument. Both, in fact, are attempts to substantiate and illustrate a general theory of art in the facts of a particular art. But, while the first treatise, The Theory of Poetry, organises the data of poetical criticism at large, the second, The Idea of Great Poetry, is concerned with a peculiar and recognisable variety of poetical achievement, and discusses this in order to show how actual critical judgement (and not merely the methods of criticism) may be derived from æsthetic theory. That there are limits to the validity of intellectual criticism in art, I hope I have shown myself properly aware: temperament and feeling are no more to be denied here than anywhere else. But where they come in, criticism, in any strict sense of the word, must stand aside. Enjoyment, no question, is the main thing; but the case for criticism is just this, that enjoyment varies directly with understanding. Now criticism is precisely an attempt to improve and secure understanding; and if criticism must stand aside to let temperament and feeling pass, it does so in order to allow them to pass forward, on the path its pioneering has cleared; and intelligence is its hatchet. I know very well that both treatises have deficiencies for which some apology may be expected. In the first, the grounds of criticism are in some places but cursorily surveyed; in the second, many obvious instances of great poetry are but casually mentioned, and many more are not mentioned at all. My plea is, in both cases, that I am printing lectures; and a lecturer's powers of expatiation must accommodate themselves to his audience's powers of endurance. There are advantages in this which, I think, are worth transferring from the platform to the printed page, even at the risk of leaving unsatisfied those readers whose appetites are exacting. Accordingly, I have kept the lectures substantially in the form in which they were delivered; though here and there I have fortified their texture. The Theory of Poetry consists of public lectures given in the Universities of Liverpool and of Leeds; The Idea of Great Poetry of the Clark lectures in Trinity College, Cambridge, revised and condensed to suit the requirements of the Ballard Mathews lectures in the University College of North Wales, Bangor. I must record my sense of the privilege these institutions have conferred on me. When I was honoured with the suggestion that these lectures might be put forth in an American edition, I readily acquiesced in the proposal that the two series should be allowed to assist each other by appearing side by side in one volume. But this makes it necessary, after apologising for faults of deficiency, to apologise also for faults of superfluity. Inevitably, there is some repetition, both of argument and of results. A radical correction of this would have meant a complete re-writing, and indeed a complete re-conception, of the two treatises, for which I had neither the time nor the inclination. Some tinkering might have been possible; a paragraph or two might have been struck out or modified, but I could find no place where this could be done without leaving hiatus in the immediate argument. Rather than break the continuity of each chain of reasoning, I preferred to duplicate several of the links. I do not think there is any need for me to give an abstract of the æsthetic philosophy (I use the term with a good deal of diffidence) which this book assumes. Its tenor will be sufficiently discerned in the course of the concrete arguments which are here set out. What it owes to Croce will be evident enough; and also, I hope, what it declines to owe to that stimulating and persuasive thinker. At any rate, a theory which makes so much of the thing he so serenely disregards-technique could hardly seem to him anything more than a bastard slip which cannot thrive. No one, of course, can escape Croce's influence nowadays; but I should like to point out that, so far at least as my own reckoning goes, my debt to Aristotle is a good deal greater. In æsthetic theory, Aristotle, it seems to me, is still what he was to Dante-"the master of those who know"; and I doubt if there is anything of permanent value in Croce's Estetica which does not make explicit (and that means, at the hands of such a writer, irre sistibly explicit) something which was already implicit in Aristotle. But, if it were a question of the parentage of my theory, what I should chiefly like to point out, had I any hopes that such audacity would be allowed, would be its claims to an ancestry even more illustrious: I should like, in fact, to point out the claims of my philosophy to direct descent from Common Sense. If anyone wishes to examine them, they may be found in An Essay Towards a Theory of Art, which was published in England several years ago. L. A. THE UNIVERSITY, LEEDS. |