THE AGE OF CRITICISM
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leaden articles on Great or currently fashionable writers-always the
same fifteen or twenty, if the critic can manage it-which encounter us
as regularly as the equinoxes and the solstices? I have heard intelligent
and cultivated people complain more times than I can remember, "I can
hardly
read
the quarterlies any more"; and I once heard Elizabeth
Bishop say, "After I go through one of the literary quarterlies I don't
feel like reading a poem for a week, much less like writing one."
Many other people have felt so; and for weeks or months or years
afterwa·rds they have neither read poems nor written them, but have
criticized. For-one begins to see-an age of criticism is not an age
of writing, nor an age of reading: it is an age of criticism. People
still read, still write-and well; but for many of them it is the act
of criticism which has become the representative or Archetypal act
of the intellectual.
Critics may still be rather negligible figures in comparison to the
composers and painters they write about; but when they write about
writers, what a difference! A novelist, a friend of mine, one year
went to a Writers' Conference; all the other teachers were critics, and
each teacher had to give a formal public lecture. My friend went to
the critics' lectures, but the critics didn't go to his; he wasn't sur–
prised; as he said, "You could tell they knew I wasn't really literary
like them." Recently I went to a meeting at which a number of
critics discussed what Wordsworth had said about writing poetry.
It was interesting to me to see how consciously or unconsciously
patronizing they were to-poor Wordsworth, I almost wrote. They
could see what he had meant, confused as he was, layman that he
was; and because he had been, they supposed they must admit, a
great poet, it did give what he had to say a wonderful documentary
interest, like Nelson's remarks at Trafalgar. But the critics could not
help being conscious of the difference between themselves, and Words–
worth, and my friend:
they
knew how poems and novels are put
together, and Wordsworth and my friend didn't, but had just put them
together. In the same way, if a pig wandered up to you during a
bacon-judging contest, you would say impatiently, "Go away, pig!
What do you know about bacon?"
It is no wonder that, in some of the places where critics are most
concentrated, and their influence most overpowering, people write
less and less. (By
write
I mean
write stories, poems, or plays.)
Some
boys at a large and quite literary college I visited were telling me
how much trouble they have getting poems and stories for the
college'S magazine. "There are only four or five we can depend on
