Summary of the sceptre and the torch by helen gardner
Answers
'Sceptre and the torch' is about ‘the profession of a critic’ by Helen Gardner. It is the 1st talk in the series “The profession of a critic”.
Criticism has become professionalized in this century. Today, criticism as a profession, hold very different views on what equipment the critic needs and what his purpose or function is.
Criticism is not like a profession but more of like an art according to the writer. To attempt to declare that some work is more valuable than some thing else, the result of the critics mostly depends on the critic’s personal predilections and on his reader’s nature of acceptance, which makes criticism an objective approach.
Literary journalism and literary reporting are valuable and highly skilled activities. But the capacity to write significant criticism is not the same as the power to make a rapid, immediate judgement.
Elucidation, or illumination, is the critic's primary task as H. Gardner conceives it. A criticism according to Gardner, should explain the meaning of a work more clearly and should through a light on a piece of work.
The beginning of the discipline of literary criticism lies in the recognition of the work of art's objective existence. The critic's task is to assist his readers to read for themselves, not to read for them. He is not supposed to write and display his own ingenuity, subtlety, learning, or sensitiveness; but to display the work in a manner which will enable it to exert its own power.
Attempts have been made in this century to ignore these truisms, or to depreciate their importance. The critics who tried to perform these attempts were, in fact, usually are highly sophisticated and well-educated persons.
How to make proper use of historical and biographical information and of the facts of literary history is a fundamental problem for the critic. The deepening of historical apprehension in his readers, the provision of a context for the work, is one of the main ways in which he can assist them in their approach to the meaning of the work. The writer's personal history, like the pressure of the age in which he lived, is a context which can help us to focus on the work as it is.
A critic's attitude to works of art must depend ultimately on his conception of the nature of man, that man's destiny is to enjoy the vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.
According to Gardner, although there is a problem with the ‘new critics’, fundamentally she’s on their side. But the literary history and biographical study of a work of art, for her, is the assistance that would contribute to the elucidation of the work.
Her primary concern is about the work itself which is to be criticized rather than using objective metrics to rate a work of art.