ABSTRACT
In the essay with which he opens his book John Mackinnon Robertson (1856–1933) declares his intention to make a contribution to the systematizing or ‘scientizing’ of ‘The Theory and Practice of Criticism’. He finds the influential criticism of Taine and Ste Beuve unduly subjective: he praises instead, while showing the bias of each, Hennequin's La Critique Scientifique (1888) and Renouvier's La Critique Philosophique (1889). Nevertheless, recognizing that subjectivity is inevitable and valuable, in critics as in writers, he exhorts the critic above all to know himself and to aim, as objectively as he can, to ‘confess’ openly to the reader his own temperamental characteristics and bias in thought and feeling. The critic, as Arnold and Lowell had done, can best approach just estimates by applying comparative standards and widening his outlook into as many fields as he can. The allround criticism may then comprise an ‘Aesthetic Analysis’, a ‘Psychologic Analysis’, and a ‘Sociological Analysis’.
