Daily Inspiration Quote by Clive Bell

Bell isn’t apologizing for subjectivity here; he’s weaponizing it. “I will try to account” frames criticism as a disciplined act of self-reporting, not a court verdict handed down from on high. The key word is “degree”: aesthetic emotion isn’t a simple on/off reaction but something with intensity, gradation, texture. Bell implies the critic’s job is to map that intensity onto language so it becomes legible to others. Not “prove the work is good,” but explain why it exerts force.

The subtext is a quiet rejection of criticism as biography, morality tale, or social scorekeeping. Bell, a central voice in early 20th-century British formalism and the Bloomsbury orbit, was pushing against Victorian habits of treating art as illustration of character or national virtue. His broader argument about “significant form” put the artwork’s internal relations - line, mass, color, composition - at the center, as the trigger of aesthetic feeling. So when he calls this “the function of the critic,” he’s drawing a boundary: criticism should be accountable to experience, but not reducible to gossip, history, or ethical posture.

There’s also an implicit humility that doubles as a flex. The critic can’t claim universal standards without sounding like a priest; instead, Bell offers a model where authority comes from precision. If you can describe your response with clarity and rigor, you’ve done the actual cultural work: you’ve turned private sensation into a shared vocabulary, and in doing so, you’ve made judgment feel less like decree and more like attention.