Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Gothic Drama - Michael Gamer (essay date winter 1999)

Michael Gamer (essay date winter 1999)

SOURCE: Gamer, Michael. “Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama.” ELH 66, no. 4 (winter 1999): 831-57.

[In the following essay, Gamer discusses the Gothic dramas of Matthew Lewis and Sir Walter Scott.]

Of genius, in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening of human sensibility … of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before. … Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown. … Therefore to create taste is to call forth and bestow power, of which knowledge is the effect.

—William Wordsworth, Essay, Supplementary to the Preface¹

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