John Addington Symonds and the Science of Criticism

Abstract

Among late-nineteenth-century critics, John Addington Symonds was both one of the most outspoken and most unlikely advocates of a scientific approach to literary criticism. This article examines the ambiguities in Symonds’ advocacy of scientific literary criticism, starting from the question of how far he appears to have held a genuine belief in science as a way to solve certain problems criticism was struggling with at the time. One such widely debated problem was the question whether literary judgment could – and should – be based on objective criteria or whether it should be left to individual aesthetic preference. Symonds’ fascination for and unbounded faith in evolutionary thought ostensibly led him to propound a scientific approach along evolutionary lines that tended toward the exclusion of subjective judgment. However, as this article demonstrates, while on the one hand embracing objective science, Symonds on the other sought ways to reconcile science with individual human experience. This ultimately led him to the paradoxical conclusion that criticism could only ever hope to be placed on a scientific footing through an awareness of the imperfections of science as a critical instrument.