Criticism is to Literature what legislation and government are to States.
Source: Ephemera Critica; Or, Plain Truths About Current Literature
Author
English · 1848-1908 · 11 quotes
English · 1848–1908
11 quotes in our collection
John Churton Collins (1848-1908) was an English literary critic, scholar, and educator known for his vigorous defense of serious literary study. He wrote and lectured widely on English literature, classical influence, and the standards needed for criticism to be more than impression. His important works include Essays and Studies, The Study of English Literature, and critical studies connected with Voltaire, Swift, and the formation of literary judgment. Collins also campaigned for English literature to be treated as a disciplined academic subject in universities, not merely as cultivated leisure. He matters because he helped give criticism a public and educational role, insisting that taste should be informed by knowledge, comparison, and historical sense. His quoted remarks often carry that teacherly edge: alert to books, standards, and the habits of mind that make reading serious.
Collected Quotes
Criticism is to Literature what legislation and government are to States.
Without standards, without touchstones, without principles, without knowledge, it appears to be regarded as the one calling for which no equipment and no training are needed.
They will sit in judgment on books written in languages of whose very alphabets they are ignorant.
They will pose as authorities and pronounce ex cathedrâ on subjects literary, historical, and scientific of which they know nothing more than what they have contrived to pick up from the works which they are "reviewing."
Books displaying in their writers the grossest ignorance of the very rudiments of the subjects treated, and literally swarming with blunders and absurdities, all of which pass undetected and unnoticed, are made the subjects of elaborate panegyrics.
Books, on the other hand, of unusual and distinguished merit are despatched summarily in a few lines of equally undeserved depreciation.
In everything but in criticism it is necessary to specialize.
A man who posed as an authority on all the literatures of the world, and on the history of every nation in the world, would be very justly set down as an impostor.
The two things which never seem to be considered are the interests of Literature and the interests of the public.
It would be no exaggeration to say, that the sole encouragement now left to authors to produce good books is the satisfaction of their own conscience.