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Reading As One of The Fine Arts An Inaugural Lecture
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 30, 2025
Brilliant short lecture from one of my favorite Oxford academics, Lord David Cecil. I’m so thankful to Melody for bringing this to my attention and then scanning a copy and sending it to me as a PDF! So generous. I plan to write more about this.
October 29, 2025
"Reading as One of the Fine Arts" was Cecil's first lecture as Goldsmiths' Professor of English, a position he inaugurated. Cecil was an Oxford professor, a sought-after critic and public intellectual, friend to all the literati of his day, from C. S. Lewis (Cecil was an Inkling) to T. S. Eliot. Cecil had a happy family life, and the Cecils' hospitality was deeply appreciated in their circle of friends. Cecil edited The Oxford Book of Christian Verse and published many of his own works, including one on Jane Austen, one of his most-admired writers. I have been thoroughly enjoying by Cecil sojourns, but this one most of all, simply transcendent, full of good and challenging thoughts, certainly the best nonfiction writing about reading alongside An Experiment in Criticism by Lewis and A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love by Alan Jacobs.
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"Art is not like mathematics or philosophy. It is a subjective, sensual, and highly personal activity in which facts and ideas are the servants of fancy and feeling; and the artist's first aim is not truth but delight. Even when, like Spenser, he wishes to instruct, he seeks to do so by delighting. It follows that the primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted. His duty is to enjoy himself: his efforts should be directed to developing his faculty of appreciation." (4; emphasis mine)
"...to enjoy literature as it should be enjoyed is a task of immense difficulty; requiring, in addition to common sense and uncommon sensibility, faith, hope, charity, humility, patience and most of the other Christian virtues. It also involves a long and unhurried process of self-training." (5)
"It was foolish of Charlotte Brontë to condemn Jane Austen for not depicting the full fury of the passions. It would have been equally foolish if Jane Austen had criticized Charlotte Brontë for a morbid preoccupation with personal emotion. Charlotte Brontë was not a cool and healthy-minded person; and the spectacle of the passions in violent action did not kindle Jane Austen's creative spark. It is no use blaming a writer for failing to do something he never intended to do; and, most likely, would not have made a success of if he had." (6)
"The only test of a book's merit is the impression it makes on the reader. If the reader is pleased, it does not matter how many so-called rules of art the author has broken." (7)
"To treat them all [writers] as if they were the same and to mark them all accordingly is to misunderstand the nature of their activity. Our object should be, rather, first to discover what questions the writer has asked himself; and then, in the light of that knowledge, to discover how far he is successful." (7)
"Genius--the distinguishing quality of the individual genius, that is what matters. There are as many different kinds of good book as there are different kinds of good writer. Each has something to give us. We should admire them in so far as he strikes us as good in his particular kind." (8)
"A reader with a temperamental preference for the sober and restrained will find it hard to persuade himself into a mood to appreciate the grotesque extravagance of phrase with which [Robert] Browning so admirably expresses his natural idiosyncrasy. Some one who instinctively responds to the bold splendour of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins's verbal invention may scarcely notice, let alone enjoy, the subtle and unobtrusive felicity with which [Robert] Bridges uses the English language. Or our antipathy may be moral. The puritan will recoil instinctively from [Laurence] Sterne, the pacifist from [Rudyard] Kipling, the man of faith from [Lewis Grassic] Gibbon, the infidel from [John] Bunyan. Yet Hopkins and Bridges, Bunyan and Gibbon, Kipling and Sterne, are all in their different manners and degrees genuine artists. He who aspires to be a man of taste should suffer from a sense of failure if he does not enjoy them all. To do so, however, may mean subjecting himself to a stern course of self-discipline and self-effacement: he may have to learn to subdue his tenderly cherished prejudices, silence his garrulous self-important opinions, if he is to attain to that receptive state of mind in which he can freely and spontaneously surrender himself to the book which he has chosen to study. Some people never even try to do these things, though they devote their lives to literary criticism." (10-11; emphasis mine)
"The spirit experiences an extraordinary sense of expansion and exaltation when, after a long and arduous process of self-adjustment, it suddenly finds itself responding for the first time spontaneously and delightedly to a hitherto-unappreciated author." (12)
"No one person can ever know in practice what it is like to be both a man and a woman, a mystic and a materialist, a criminal and a pillar of society, an ancient Roman and a modern Russian. But books can teach us to be all these things in imagination. Every reader is a Lady of Shalott, who, secluded in his secret chamber, forgets the hours, as he sits watching the endless procession of human thought and passion and action, as it passes, motley and tumultuous, across the gleaming mirror of literature." (13)
"In actual life it would be boring to live at Middlemarch, shocking to behave like the characters in Love for Love [by William Congreve], depressing to look at mankind as Gulliver learnt to do, horrifying to find the story of King Lear occurring among one's own acquaintance. Yet one enjoys them all in literature." (13)
"There is a greater spiritual triumph in accepting Cordelia's sufferings than in accepting Viola's happiness. Thus tragedy is the most profoundly exhilarating of all literary forms. For tragedy brings glory out of the very stuff of despair; in it we are made to face life at its most baffling and dreadful, and yet to see it as a thing of beauty and a joy for ever." (15)
"Any phase of human feeling, however trifling, any point of view, however dismal or perverse, can be transmuted into an image of spiritual perfection--slighter no doubt than that evoked for us by Dante, yet an image of spiritual perfection all the same. The author may not have intended it to be. But he cannot help himself. By a sublime irony, not only pious [George] Herbert and mystical [William] Blake, but mocking [Lord] Byron and irresponsible [Laurence] Sterne and worldly [William] Congreve and despairing [Thomas] Hardy, are, in Sir Thomas Browne's sense of the word, devotional authors. For in so far as they have expressed their spirit in the harmony of a true work of art, they have opened the eyes of the soul to a sight of that divine and flawless essence whence she springs and for which, while her unquiet exile on earth endures, she is immedicably homesick." (15-16, emphasis mine)
-----
"Art is not like mathematics or philosophy. It is a subjective, sensual, and highly personal activity in which facts and ideas are the servants of fancy and feeling; and the artist's first aim is not truth but delight. Even when, like Spenser, he wishes to instruct, he seeks to do so by delighting. It follows that the primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted. His duty is to enjoy himself: his efforts should be directed to developing his faculty of appreciation." (4; emphasis mine)
"...to enjoy literature as it should be enjoyed is a task of immense difficulty; requiring, in addition to common sense and uncommon sensibility, faith, hope, charity, humility, patience and most of the other Christian virtues. It also involves a long and unhurried process of self-training." (5)
"It was foolish of Charlotte Brontë to condemn Jane Austen for not depicting the full fury of the passions. It would have been equally foolish if Jane Austen had criticized Charlotte Brontë for a morbid preoccupation with personal emotion. Charlotte Brontë was not a cool and healthy-minded person; and the spectacle of the passions in violent action did not kindle Jane Austen's creative spark. It is no use blaming a writer for failing to do something he never intended to do; and, most likely, would not have made a success of if he had." (6)
"The only test of a book's merit is the impression it makes on the reader. If the reader is pleased, it does not matter how many so-called rules of art the author has broken." (7)
"To treat them all [writers] as if they were the same and to mark them all accordingly is to misunderstand the nature of their activity. Our object should be, rather, first to discover what questions the writer has asked himself; and then, in the light of that knowledge, to discover how far he is successful." (7)
"Genius--the distinguishing quality of the individual genius, that is what matters. There are as many different kinds of good book as there are different kinds of good writer. Each has something to give us. We should admire them in so far as he strikes us as good in his particular kind." (8)
"A reader with a temperamental preference for the sober and restrained will find it hard to persuade himself into a mood to appreciate the grotesque extravagance of phrase with which [Robert] Browning so admirably expresses his natural idiosyncrasy. Some one who instinctively responds to the bold splendour of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins's verbal invention may scarcely notice, let alone enjoy, the subtle and unobtrusive felicity with which [Robert] Bridges uses the English language. Or our antipathy may be moral. The puritan will recoil instinctively from [Laurence] Sterne, the pacifist from [Rudyard] Kipling, the man of faith from [Lewis Grassic] Gibbon, the infidel from [John] Bunyan. Yet Hopkins and Bridges, Bunyan and Gibbon, Kipling and Sterne, are all in their different manners and degrees genuine artists. He who aspires to be a man of taste should suffer from a sense of failure if he does not enjoy them all. To do so, however, may mean subjecting himself to a stern course of self-discipline and self-effacement: he may have to learn to subdue his tenderly cherished prejudices, silence his garrulous self-important opinions, if he is to attain to that receptive state of mind in which he can freely and spontaneously surrender himself to the book which he has chosen to study. Some people never even try to do these things, though they devote their lives to literary criticism." (10-11; emphasis mine)
"The spirit experiences an extraordinary sense of expansion and exaltation when, after a long and arduous process of self-adjustment, it suddenly finds itself responding for the first time spontaneously and delightedly to a hitherto-unappreciated author." (12)
"No one person can ever know in practice what it is like to be both a man and a woman, a mystic and a materialist, a criminal and a pillar of society, an ancient Roman and a modern Russian. But books can teach us to be all these things in imagination. Every reader is a Lady of Shalott, who, secluded in his secret chamber, forgets the hours, as he sits watching the endless procession of human thought and passion and action, as it passes, motley and tumultuous, across the gleaming mirror of literature." (13)
"In actual life it would be boring to live at Middlemarch, shocking to behave like the characters in Love for Love [by William Congreve], depressing to look at mankind as Gulliver learnt to do, horrifying to find the story of King Lear occurring among one's own acquaintance. Yet one enjoys them all in literature." (13)
"There is a greater spiritual triumph in accepting Cordelia's sufferings than in accepting Viola's happiness. Thus tragedy is the most profoundly exhilarating of all literary forms. For tragedy brings glory out of the very stuff of despair; in it we are made to face life at its most baffling and dreadful, and yet to see it as a thing of beauty and a joy for ever." (15)
"Any phase of human feeling, however trifling, any point of view, however dismal or perverse, can be transmuted into an image of spiritual perfection--slighter no doubt than that evoked for us by Dante, yet an image of spiritual perfection all the same. The author may not have intended it to be. But he cannot help himself. By a sublime irony, not only pious [George] Herbert and mystical [William] Blake, but mocking [Lord] Byron and irresponsible [Laurence] Sterne and worldly [William] Congreve and despairing [Thomas] Hardy, are, in Sir Thomas Browne's sense of the word, devotional authors. For in so far as they have expressed their spirit in the harmony of a true work of art, they have opened the eyes of the soul to a sight of that divine and flawless essence whence she springs and for which, while her unquiet exile on earth endures, she is immedicably homesick." (15-16, emphasis mine)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews