In England we find Home in his _Elements of
Criticism_ deriding the critics for asserting that there must be a
precise criterion for distinguishing epic poetry from all other forms of
composition. Literary compositions, he held, melt into one another, just
like colours.
The literary movement of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of
the nineteenth centuries attacked rules of all sorts. We will not dwell
upon the many encounters of these periods, nor record the names of those
that conquered gloriously, or their excesses. In France the preface to
the _Cromwell_ of V. Hugo (1827), in Italy the _Lettera semiseria di
Grisostomo_, were clarions of rebellion. The principle first laid down
by A.W. Schlegel, that the form of compositions must be organic and not
mechanic, resulting from the nature of the subject, from its internal
development not from an external stamp, was enunciated in Italy. Art is
always a whole, a synthesis.
But it would be altogether wrong to believe that this empirical defeat
of the styles and rules implied their final defeat in philosophy. Even
writers who were capable of dispensing with prejudice when judging works
of art, once they spoke as philosophers, were apt to reassume their
belief in those categories which, empirically, they had discarded. The
spectacle of these literary or rhetorical categories, raised by German
philosophers to the honours of philosophical deduction, is even more
amusing than that which afforded amusement to Home.
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