The object of literature is Delight; its soul is Imagination; its body is Style.
A man should like what he does like:[[808]] and his likings are facts in criticism for him.
To which the extremer men would add these, or some of them, or something like them:—
Nothing depends upon the subject; all upon the treatment of the subject.
It is not necessary that a good poet or prose writer should be a good man: though it is a pity that he should not be. And Literature is not subject to the laws of Morality, though it is to those of Manners.[[809]]
Good Sense is a good thing, but may be too much regarded: and Nonsense is not necessarily a bad one.
The appeals of the arts are interchangeable: Poetry can do as much with sound as Music, as much with colour as Painting, and perhaps more than either with both.
The first requisite of the critic is that he should be capable of receiving Impressions: the second that he should be able to express and impart them.
There cannot be Monstrous Beauty: the Beauty itself justifies and regularises.
Once more it has to be stipulated that these articles are not to be regarded as definitely proposed ends and aims, which the critical practice of the period set before itself, and by which it worked. They are, for the most part, piece-meal results and up-shots of a long and desultory campaign, often reached as it were incidentally, “windfalls of the Muses,” kingdoms found while the finder is seeking his father’s (or anybody’s) asses. If anything general is to be detected before and beneath them, it is a sort of general feeling of irksomeness at the restraints of Neo-classicism—a revolt against its perpetual restrictions and taboos.