Victory Game Center

Arnold Bennett wrote: The reason why you must avoid modern works at the beginning is simply that you are not in a position to choose among modern works. Nobody at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern works. To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an exceedingly long time. Modern works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive generations. Whereas, with classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. Your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative enough to decide. Your taste is unformed. It needs guidance, and it needs authoritative guidance. Into the business of forming literary taste faith enters. You probably will not specially care for a particular classic at first. If you did care for it at first, your taste, so far as that classic is concerned, would be formed, and our hypothesis is that your taste is not formed. How are you to arrive at the stage of caring for it? Chiefly, of course, by examining it and honestly trying to understand it. But this process is materially helped by an act of faith, by the frame of mind which says: "I know on the highest authority that this thing is fine, that it is capable of giving me pleasure. Hence I am determined to find pleasure in it." Believe me that faith counts enormously in the development of that wide taste which is the instrument of wide pleasures. But it must be faith founded on unassailable authority.

Arnold Bennett wrote: a classic is a classic because it gives pleasure to succeeding generations of the people who are most keenly interested in literature

And as the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.

Arnold Bennett wrote: In approaching a classic, the true wisdom is to place ourselves in the position of the mental inferior, aware of mental inferiority, humbly stripping off all conceit, anxious to rise out of that inferiority. Recollect that we always regard as quite hopeless the mental inferior who does not suspect his own inferiority.

John Carey wrote: Most pre-industrial societies did not even have a word for art as an independent concept, and the term 'work of art' as we use it would have been baffling to all previous cultures, including the civilizations of Greece and Rome and of Western Europe in the medieval period. These cultures would find nothing in their experience to match the special values and expectations attached to art that make it into a substitute religion, the creation of a spiritual aristocracy called geniuses, and the arena for the display of a refined discriminatory accomplishment called taste. On the contrary, in most previous societies, it seems, art was not produced by a special caste of people, equivalent to our 'artists', but was spread through the whole community.

Mario Praz wrote:

Faust. Oh, what delight! what woe! I cannot turn
My looks from her sweet piteous countenance.
How strangely does a single blood-red line,
Not broader than the sharp edge of a knife,
Adorn her lovely neck!

Here, one might say, through the lips of Faust speaks the whole of Romanticism. This glassy-eyed, severed female head, this horrible, fascinating Medusa, was to be the object of the dark loves of the Romantics and the Decadents throughout the whole century.

For the Romantics beauty was enhanced by exactly those qualities which seem to deny it, by those objects which produce horror; the sadder, the more painful it was, the more intensely they relished it. 'Welch eine Wonne! welch ein Leiden!'

In his Philosophy of Composition Poe explicitly admits that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world'. The sight of his mother dying of consumption, when Poe was hardly three years old, could not fail to leave in the child an indelible impression, which later transposed itself into the figures of Berenice, Morella, Eleonora, Ligeia. Romantic fashion for consumptive ladies can be abundantly illustrated, from Nodier's Filleule du Seigneur to Irving's The Wife and The Broken Heart, to the American Ode to Consumption which begins: 'There is a beauty in woman's decay.'