Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 61:241 (Jan 1904)
Article: The Reader’s Contribution To The Power Of Literature
Author: Oscar W. Firkins

BSac 61:241 (Jan 1904) p. 89

The Reader’s Contribution To The Power Of Literature

Oscar W. Firkins

It must have fallen at some time to the lot of almost every student of literature who is at once sensitive and observant of his own sensations to notice a disparity between his perceptions and his feelings. Every cultivated man knows that certain attributes in a book ought to awaken pain or pleasure; he knows that pains and pleasures of a certain kind have actually attended the perusal of the book; he has, in other words, two sources or reservoirs of critical knowledge. It seems an easy task—it is certainly a diverting exercise—to associate and compare this double evidence; but the hopes of the inquirer are often dashed by results that are questionable and perplexing. It is easy enough to name merits in writings that please us and faults in writings that we do not like; but the instant we endeavor to establish an equation or a ratio, the instant we endeavor to associate the degrees of our pain of pleasure with corresponding intensities in the beauties or transgressions that excite them, that instant we are baffled and discomfited; we begin to despair of the usefulness of criticism.

The discipline of reflections and experiences such as these conducts us to interesting conclusions. We see that degrees of merit are not deducible from the inspection and comparison of literary traits. We see that any scheme of criticism that rests upon the designation of requirements, and calculations

BSac 61:241 (Jan 1904) p. 90

of the measure in which these requirements have been individually and collectively fulfilled, is a scheme which is certain to be profitless. To adopt the method of the school-examiner, to compute and combine percentages of attainment, is felt to be ridiculous and hopeless. The equations will not balance; the totals will not correspond. Books that have charmed or shaken us in the perusal reward analysis with a shorter list and poorer quality of merits than books which have only pleased; and the work which disgusts or vexes us is found on experiment to be no more assailable than the work which we tolerate or admire. There are novels which we reprobate for slighter infringements of the laws of plot than those we have condoned in Thackeray; there are poems which we chastise for fainter solecisms than those we have allowed in Browning; Works survive in defiance of standards, and perish in conformity with them. We are often nettled, in the reading of criticism, by contact with some long and strenuous indictment, —an indictment the more irritating that its counts are incapable of disproof,—which castigates and mutilates some favorite writer whose worth so far outweighs the proofs of it that truth itself is felt to be a calumny. We are often vexed, in the writing of cr...