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PARTI 'SAN REVIEW
much," the editor said sadly; "everybody else that's any good writes
criticism." I suppose I should have said to
him,
"Make the magazine
criticism"; after all, isn't that the way you run a literary magazine?–
but I hadn't the heart to.
These days, when an ambitious young intellectual finishes college,
he buys himself a new typewriter, rents himself a room, and settles
down to write . . . book reviews, long critical articles, explications.
"As for living, our servants can do that for us," said Villiers de l'Isle
Adam; and in the long run this gets said not only of living but also
of writing stories and poems, which is almost as difficult and helpless
and risky as living. Why stick one's neck out so far for so little? It
is hard to write even a competent naturalistic story, and when you
have written it what happens?-someone calls it a competent natural–
istic story. Write another "Horatian Ode," and you will be praised
as "one of the finest of our minor poets." No, as anyone can see, it
is hardly worthwhile being a writer unless you can be a great one;
better not sell your soul to the Muse till she has shown you the
critical articles of 2100. Unless you are one of a dozen or so writers
you will have a life like Trigorin's; he said that they would put on his
tombstone that he had been a fine writer,
.but not so good as Tur–
gene
v-and sure enough, if you go and look on his tombstone that
is what is there. Our Trigorins can hardly fail to see that, in serious
critical circles, the very recognition of their merit dismisses it and
them; there is written on their hearts in little red letters, "It's only
me." I never remember hearing
anybody
say of a critic, "He's all
right, but he's no Saint-Beuve"; but substitute
Dante
or some such
O. K. name for
Saint-Beuve,
and there are very few writers about
whom the statement hasn't been made. When the first book of one
of the best of living poets was published, one of the best of living
critics said about it only that it was "grating," and lacked the sweet–
ness of the
Divine O()medy.
So it did; the poet might have replied
with the same truth that his critic lacked Matthew Arnold's yellow
kid gloves.
Critics can easily infect their readers (though usually less
by
precept than example) with the contempt or fretful tolerance which
they feel for "minor" works of art.
If
you work away, with sober,
methodical, and industrious complicatiEm, at the masterpieces of a few
great or fashionable writers, you after a while begin to identify your–
self with these men; your manner takes on the authority your subject
matter has unwittingly delegated to you, and when-returned from
the peaks you have spent your life among, picking a reluctant way
