THE AGE OF CRI 'fICISM
189
over those Parnassian or Castalian foothills along whose slopes herd–
boys sit playing combs-you are required to judge the competitions
of such artists, you do so with a certain reluctance. Everybody has
observed this in scholars, who feel that live authors, as such, are self–
evidently inferior to dead ones; but a broadminded scholar will look
like an X-ray machine at such a writer as Thomas Mann, and feel,
relenting: "He's as good as dead." This sort of thing helps to make
serious criticism as attractive as it is to critics: they live among the
great, and some of the greatness comes off on them. No wonder poor
poets become poor critics, and count themselves blest in their bargain;
no wonder young intellectuals become critics before, and not after,
they have failed as artists. And sometimes-who knows?-they might
not have failed; besides, to have failed as an artist may be a respectable
and valuable thing.
Some of us write less; all of us, almost, read less-the child at his
television set, the critic or novelist in the viewplate of the set, grayly
answering questions on topics of general interest. Children have fewer
and fewer empty hours, and the eight-year-old is discouraged from
filling them with the books written for his brother of ten; nor is anyone
at his school surprised when he does not read very much or very
well-it is only "born readers" who do that.
But if we read less and less-by
we,
this time, I mean the culti–
vated minority-a greater and greater proportion of what we read
is criticism. Many a man last read
M oby-Dick
in the eleventh grade,
The Brothers Karamazov
in
his
freshman year in college; but think
of all the articles about them he's read since! (A good and famous
critic, in a recent article on Jane Austen, based his sentences about
Pride and Prejudice
on a college reading of it thirty-five years before.)
It is no use to tell such a reader, "Go read
Moby-Dick";
he would
only answer, "I've read it," and start out on the latest book about
Melville. And imagine how he would look at you if you told him to
read, say,
Kim.
In such a case, whether he has or hasn't read it
doesn't matter: he knows that he doesn't need to. It is criticism, after
all, which protects us from the bad or unimportant books that we
would otherwise have to read; and during the time we have saved
we can read more of the criticism which protects us. I imagine, in
gray hours, a generation which will have read a few masterpieces,
a few thousand criticisms of these, and almost nothing else but-as
the generation will say apologetically-"trash." It is an Alexandrian
notion, but in many ways we
are
Alexandrian; and we do not grow
