Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE STANDARDS OF CRITICISM The practice of criticism has, in many directions, profited incalculably by the long development of theories of criticism throughout the ages of men's dealings with literature. One practical demand upon critical theory, however, yet remains unsatisfied,—the demand for a standard of judgment. The standard of traditional authority which deductive criticism offers has been definitely rejected by modern critics. All but universally it is recognized that such a standard stultifies both criticism and literature. It substitutes a mechanical coercion for the living interconnections of criticism with literature, reduces the critic to an automaton while exalting him to a despot, and artificializes literature, by cutting it off from organic relation to its own time. Scientific criticism, of the extreme "inductive" school, reacts, perhaps immoderately, from this tyranny of the deductive standard, by denying to judgment any place whatsoever in the act of criticism. This seems, indeed, to throw out the child with the bath. It should not be necessary to repudiate all measures of value, in order to do away with those arbitrary and external standards whichhave no vital relation with the writings to which they are applied. More penetrating thinkers, of the type of Coleridge, recognize this fact, and, as Miss Laura J. Wylie has pointed out in her Evolution of English Criticism,1 stand with the romanticists not only in rejecting standards imposed from without upon "art, but also in conceiving of the laws which have present validity for literature as essentially organic, because derived from the writings in question rather than from the classic models. Even Coleridge, however, fails to indicate precisely what laws or standards they are which may be thus...