Drama -- History and criticism; Dramatic criticism; Theater
at random hither and thither in pure wantonness.”
Mr. Spingarn, in his exceptionally interesting, if somewhat overly
indignant, treatise on “Creative Criticism,” provides, it seems to me,
a particularly clear illustration of the manner in which the proponents
of the more modern theories of criticism imprison themselves in the
extravagance of their freedom. While liberating art from all the
old rules of criticism, they simultaneously confine criticism with
the new rules--or ghosts of rules--wherewith they free art. If each
work of art is a unit, a thing in itself, as is commonly agreed,
why should not each work of criticism be similarly a unit, a thing
in itself? If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual
expression, why should not criticism, in each and every such case, be
similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing
art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I
believe that it has been. I believe that there may be as many kinds of
criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound
analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic,
sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of
criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules--or, at
least, none save those that are obvious. If Brahms’ scherzo in E flat
minor, op. 4, is an entity, a work in and of itself, why shouldn’t
Huneker’s criticism of it be regarded as an entity, a work in and
of itself? If there is in Huneker’s work inspiration from without,
so, too, is there in Brahms’: if Brahms may be held a unit in this
particular instance with no consideration of Chopin, why may not
Huneker with no consideration of Brahms?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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