76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE THEOEY OF STYLE 



By Pkofessor WALTER LIBBY 



NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 



ALTHOUGH signs of reaction are by no means wanting, the dom- 

 inant form of criticism at the dawn of the twentieth century 

 seems to be what is usually called literary impressionism. To keep his 

 mind sensitized to all the influences his reading can bring to bear upon 

 it, to disengage his impressions, and to set them forth in the choicest 

 phraseology at command, are now recognized as constituting the su- 

 preme virtue of the critic. This attitude of impressionism towards 

 literature is distinctly opposed to the literary dogmatism of the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries, and may be regarded as tending to 

 supersede the subsequent phase, the so-called historical criticism, which 

 traces calmly, if at times somewhat schematically, the evolution of 

 poets and literatures, and even the more distinctly scientific criticism, 

 which looks upon works of art as indices of the souls of artists and 

 nations to be explained on the bases of esthetics, psychology and sociol- 

 ogy. One remarks in all the more recent tendencies in literary criti- 

 cism a certain degree of catholicity. Literature is no longer to be 

 dogmatically approved or disapproved, but it is to be appreciated and 

 placed according to recognized principles or a frankly individualistic 

 point of view. 



Of course impressionism is very far indeed from being democratic. 

 Its high priest, the well-read, well-endowed, susceptible critic is still 

 in some sense a public guide. He is a superior sort of camera, and a 

 newly-acquired language may aid, like a new lens, to improve the qual- 

 ity of the impression. He starts, however, with no a priori principles 

 of taste, and he may even be disdainful of esthetics. His desire for 

 freedom from standards carries him perhaps too far in his contempt for 

 theory. At any rate, it is not obvious that an emotionalistic esthetic 

 which recognizes the conveyance and transmission of a mood as the 

 essential of art is at variance with the spirit of genuine impressionism. 

 In fact such an esthetic might ask, in view of the dearth of fixed prin- 

 ciples, and the great stress laid in recent criticism on the mere ability 

 to record impressions, whether literature about literature has not itself 

 become art and renounced all claim to be called scientific. The difficult 

 and tedious task of collecting and classifying impressions and striking 

 averages and seeking bases of agreement from the broadest possible data 

 is largely to be done before a science can be deduced from the mass of 

 esthetic judgments. 



