First,* we must have made plain to ourselves what the poet’s aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his own eye, and how far, with such means as it afforded him, he has fulfilled it. Secondly, we must have decided whether and how far this aim, this task of his, accorded, — not with us, and our individual crotchets, and the crotchets of our little senate where we give or take the law, — but with human nature, and the nature of things at large; with the universal principles of poetic beauty, not as they stand written in our text-books, but in the hearts and imaginations of all men. Does the answer in either case come out unfavourable; was there an inconsistency between the means and the end, a discordance between the end and truth, there is a fault: was there not, there is no fault.*
From an essay on Johann Wolfgang Goethe dated 1828 and collected in ‘Thomas Carlyle: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays’ Vols 1 and 2 (1881) by Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881).
* Carlyle’s two points closely shadow what Goethe himself wrote in 1821, in a review of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Count of Carmagnola (1820): “Criticism is either destructive or constructive. The former is very easy; for one need only set up some imaginary standard, some model or other, however foolish this may be, and then boldly assert that the work of art under consideration does not measure up to that standard, and therefore is of no value. [...] Constructive criticism is much harder. It asks: What did the author set out to do? Was his plan reasonable and sensible, and how far did he succeed in carrying it out?”
* In a landmark address at Columbia University given in 1911, Joel Springarn, the acclaimed critic and civil rights campaigner, expanded Carlyle’s (and Goethe’s) two points into six, which were adopted as a canon by NL Clay in The English Critic (1939): “What has the author tried to to do? How has he fulfilled his intention? What is he striving to express? How has he expressed it? What impression does his work make on me? How can I best express that impression?” Clay asked us to notice that the reader’s feelings are not consulted until point five.
