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Good Taste and Conscience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Matthew Arnold's essay on the Literary Influence of Academies (1865) contains this characteristic passage:—
“‘In France,’ says M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘the first consideration for us is not whether we are amused and pleased by a work of art or mind, nor is it whether we are touched by it. What we seek above all to learn is, whether we were right in being amused with it, and in applauding it, and in being moved by it.’ Those are very remarkable words, and they are, I believe, in the main quite true. A Frenchman has, to a considerable degree, what one may call a conscience in intellectual matters; he has an active belief that there is a right and a wrong in them, that he is bound to honour and obey the right, that he is disgraced by cleaving to the wrong. All the world has, or professes to have, this conscience in moral matters. The word conscience has become almost confined, in popular use, to the moral sphere, because this lively susceptibility of feeling is, in the moral sphere, so far more common than in the intellectual sphere; the livelier, in the moral sphere, this susceptibility is, the greater becomes a man's readiness to admit a high standard of action, an ideal authoritatively correcting his everyday moral habits; here, such willing admission of authority is due to sensitiveness of conscience. And a like deference to a standard higher than one's own habitual standard in intellectual matters, a like respectful recognition of a superior ideal, is caused, in the intellectual sphere, by sensitiveness of intelligence. Those whose intelligence is quickest, openest, most sensitive, are readiest with this deference; those whose intelligence is less delicate and sensitive are less disposed to it.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1910
References
page 486 note 1 Essays in Criticism, First Series, London, 1893, p. 48.
page 486 note 2 I am unable to indicate where.
page 486 note 3 Impressionist versus Judicial Criticism, in these Publications, vol. xxi, p. 696.
page 487 note 1 Critique littéraire in Œuvres Choisies de A. Rivarol, Paris, 1880, vol. i, p. 306.
page 487 note 2 Cf. Essay on Joubert, Essays in Criticism, First Series, ed. cit., pp. 265 ff. There is a quotation from Joubert in the Essay On the Literary Influence of Academies, p. 66.
page 487 note 3 Pensées, Essais et Maximes de J. Joubert, Paris, 1842, vol. i, p. 243. With this maxim may be compared the following: “Le bon goût, le tact et le bon ton ont plus de rapport que n'affectent de le croire les gens de lettres. Le tact, c'est le bon goût appliqué au maintien et à la conduite; le bon ton, c'est le bon goût appliqué aux discours et à la conversation” (Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort in Œuvres de Chamfort et Rivarol, Paris, 1884, p. 187).
page 487 note 4 Ibid., p. 147.
page 488 note 1 Ibid., p. 261.
page 488 note 2 Vol. ii, p. 96.
page 488 note 3 Vol. ii, p. 132. Professor Babbitt called my attention to this aphorism.
page 488 note 4 Characteristics, ed. J. M. Robertson, London, 1900, vol. i, p. 262.
page 488 note 5 Vol. i, p. 260.
page 489 note 1 Vol. ii, p. 137.
page 489 note 2 Vol. i, p. 306.
page 489 note 3 Vol. ii, p. 265.
page 489 note 4 Vol. ii, p. 256.
page 489 note 5 Vol. i, p. 94.
page 490 note 1 Essays on the Characteristics, Second Edition, London, 1751, p. ii.
page 490 note 2 Essay on Taste, London, 1759, p. 202.
page 490 note 3 Ibid.
page 490 note 4 P. 203.
page 490 note 5 P. 205.
page 490 note 6 P. 74.
page 490 note 7 P. 126.
page 491 note 1 P. 128. Cf. Grillparzer: “Der Kunstsinn der Franzosen ist nicht immer auf der rechten Fährte, was ihm aber im Wege steht, ist doch immer nur eine falsche Ansicht, nie die Gemeinheit” (Werke, ed. Sauer, xix, p. 156).
page 491 note 2 Cf. B. Croce, Estetica, Bari, 1908, pp. 215 ff. and J. E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford, 1908, i, pp. xci ff.
page 491 note 3 Cf. A. Schopenhauer's German version, ed. E. Grisebach, Leipzig (Reclam).
page 491 note 4 In Des Freyherrn von Canitz Gedichte. I quote from the edition printed at Berlin in 1765.
page 491 note 5 P. 428.
page 492 note 1 In seinem Oraculo Manual zu Ende der 298. Maxime sagt er: “Un buon gusto sazona toda la vida. Herr D. August Friedrich Müller in Leipzig, welcher eine Übersetzung davon in drey Theilen 1715. in 8. herausgegeben, hat in seinen beigefügten Anmerckungen den Geschmack in der Sitten-Lehre sehr gründlich untersucht” (König's note). Müller's translation is not accessible to me.
page 492 note 2 P. 469.
page 492 note 3 Cf. O. F. Walzel, Shaftesbury und das deutsche Geistesleben des 18. Jahrhunderts in Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, i, pp. 416 ff.
page 492 note 4 Letter to Körner, 9. Febr., 1789.
page 493 note 1 Sämmtliche Werke herausgegeben von Friedrich Hebbel, Wien, 1853. Cf. The Hygiene of the Soul, Memoir of a Physician and Philosopher, by Gustav Pollak, New York, 1910.
page 493 note 2 Ed. Hebbel, iii, p. 329.
page 493 note 3 Ibid., vi, p. 46.
page 493 note 4 Vol. iv, p. 64.
page 494 note 1 I cannot determine from whom these verses are quoted.
page 494 note 2 Vol. iv, p. 147.
page 494 note 3 Vol. iv, p. 46.
page 495 note 1 Vol. iii, p. 376.
page 495 note 2 Vol. v, p. 312.
page 495 note 3 Vol. v, p. 304.
page 495 note 4 Tagebücher herausgegeben von R. M. Werner, Berlin, 1903, ii, p. 422, No. 3191.
page 496 note 1 Prose Works, Boston, 1892, vol. vi, pp. 177 f.
page 497 note 1 Poetical Works, ed. cit., vol. iv, pp. 197 f.