arrangement the contents, expressed and implied, and the
emotional value, original and derived, of a piece of literature,
the value of the end, at least to the intelligent reader, is
out of all proportion to the laboriousness of the means. Sing,
reading's a joy! For me, I read.

But a feeling of this kind is, after all, not a reason to be
urged against the method. The real weakness of appreciative
criticism lies elsewhere. It teaches us to enjoy; but are we
to enjoy everything? Since its only aim is to reveal the
"intricate implications" of a work of art; since it offers,
and professes to offer, no literary judgments,--having indeed
no explicit standard of literary value,--it must, at least
on its own theory, take its objects of appreciation ready-made,
so to speak, by popular acclaim. It possesses no criterion;
it likes whate'er it looks on; and it can never tell us what
we are not to like. That is unsatisfactory; and it is worse,--
it is self-destructive. For, not being able to reject,
appreciation cannot, in logic, choose the objects of its
attention. But a method which cannot limit on its own principles
the field within which it is to work is condemned from the
beginning; it bears a fallacy at its core. In order to make
criticism theoretically possible at all, the power to choose
and reject, and so the pronouncing of judgment, must be an
integral part of it.

To such a task the critic may lend himself without arousing
our antagonism. We have no pressing need to know the latent
possibilities of emotion for us in a book or a poem; but whether
it is excellent or the reverse, whether "we were right in being