David Cecil Bücher

Drawing on Jane Austen's letters, novels and other people's memories of her, Lord David Cecil sets out 'to reconstruct and depict her living personality and to explore its relation to her art'. The portrait that emerges is of a clear-sighted, observant, strong-minded woman whose witty and ironic representation of her own society has delighted readers for centuries.

Focusing on the interplay between poetry and visual art, this work highlights the influence of imaginative literature on two pivotal English Romantic painters. Samuel Palmer, known for his visionary style, and Edward Burne-Jones, celebrated for his Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, both drew inspiration from literary giants like Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats. The narrative explores how their inner lives and poetic inspirations shaped their artistic expressions, revealing the profound connection between poetry and painting during their era.

The Fine Art of Reading was Cecil's inaugural lecture as Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford in 1949; it is also the title of a collection of studies from which the present essay is taken. Like all his other works, the piece combines scholarly attention to detail with accessibility to a general audience. In an engaging manner, Cecil assesses the relative merits of great authors and poets such as Milton, Gray and Shelley, while stressing that the only important distinction is between good and bad art. There are as many different kinds of good book as there are different kinds of good writer. Each has something to give us. We should admire each in so far as he strikes us as good in his particular kind. In order to property appreciate good writing we need to cultivate a point of view from which a work's aesthetic qualities occupy our centre vision. This happens naturally with other art forms such as music, where the appeal is purely aesthetic. Proper reading is an art in itself and David Cecil is the finest of instructors.