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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In my recent discussion of drama and the passions I here and there cited Cicero and W. B. Yeats; and on further reading in them I find that I had more occasion than I suspected. In criticism, since there are no longer any rules or scarcely any generally accepted principles, argument from authority is almost the only argument acceptable; and the best authority is a genius, either a critic like Aristotle or Longinus, who has had a wide and life-long experience, or else an artist who takes to criticism for a change. Some of the most notable critics have been artists—Horace, Petronius, Sidney, Milton, Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Goethe and Heine, Arnold and Swinburne, Molière and Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Delacroix, Wagner, Berlioz.
1 In my Shakespeare and Other Masters (1940).
2 Longinus, On the Sublime, vi, “a just judgment of style is the final fruit of long experience.”
3 Ephemera Critica (1902) 278–9.
4 Though taking some liberties, I have made use of the translations of J. S. Watson for the De Oratore and the Brutus, and of C. D. Yonge and Sir J. E. Sandys for the Orator.
4a “Si fuit una syllaba aut brevior aut longior.” Possibly a false quantity is meant.
5 Essays (1924), p. 265.
6 P. 346.
7 Pp. 296–297.
8 xxxviii, 6.
9 Dramatis Personae (1936), p. 128.
9a South Seas Ed. (1925) xiii, p. 155. Stevenson, in turn may have been Henley's original as quoted in my volume (cited above, note 1) p. 53.
9b Cf. Dramatis Personae, p. 127.
10 Harper's Magazine, Dec., 1935, ‘The Dying Theatre.‘
11 Essays (1924), p. 339.
12 Ibid., pp. 339–342.
13 Criterion, Oct., 1930, p. 139.
14 L. A. G. Strong, Common Sense about the Drama (1937), p. 47. The ancients Mr. Strong does not include.
15 Even here Mr. Yeats seems to have anticipated me: “an essential part of his method to give slight or obscure motives of many actions that our attention may dwell on what is of chief importance” (ibid., p. 124).
16 Ibid., p. 414.
17 Yeats, Essays, p. 263.
18 P. 207.
19 Pp. 245, 263.
20 Pp. 151, 227. Cf. Longinus, i, 4; xv, 2, 10–12. Also Keats, letter to John Taylor, Feb. 27, 1818: “I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity.”
21 Op. cit., p. 243.
22 Pp. 489–492.
23 P. 421.
24 Essay on Shakespeare (1907), p. 53.
25 Ibid., pp. 75–76.
26 Ibid., p. 55.