THE AGE OF CRPTICISM
191
people of this sort than what a bad critic says of a bad criticism of
a fashionable writer; what a good critic says of a good CrItICism of
him is equally interesting, if it is equally difficult, complicated, or
novel.
If, at such parties, you wanted to talk about
Ulysses
or
The Castle
or
The Brothers Karamazov
or
The Great Gatsby
or Graham Greene's
last novel-Important books-you were at the right place. (Though
you weren't so well off if you wanted to talk about
Remembrance of
Things Past.
Important, but too long.) But
if
you wanted to talk
about Turgenev's novelettes, or
The House of the Dead,
or
Lavengro,
or
Life on the Mississippi,
or
The Old Wives' Tale,
or
The Golovlyov
Family,
or Cunningham-Grahame's stories, or Saint-Simon's memoirs,
or
Lost Illusions,
or
The Begga-rs Opera,
or
Eugen Onegin,
or
Little
Dorrit,
or the
Burnt Njal Saga,
or
Persuasion,
or
The Inspector–
General,
or
Oblomov,
or
Peer Gynt,
or
Far from the Madding
Crowd,
or
Out of Africa,
or the
Parallel Lives,
or
A Dreary Story,
or
Debits and Credits,
or
Arabia Deserta,
or
Elective Affinities,
or
Schweik,
or--or any of a thousand good or interesting, but Unim–
portant books, you couldn't expect a very ready knowledge or sympathy
from most of the readers there. They had looked at the big sights,
the current sights, hard, with guides and glasses; and those walks in
the country, over unfrequented or thrice-familiar territory, all alone–
those walks from which most of the joy and good of reading come–
were walks that they hadn't gone on very often. And unless they
were poets or poetry-critics, or of the minority that still
is
fond of
poems, they weren't likely to know much poetry. Nothing would
surprise the readers of another age more than the fact that, to most
of us, literature is primarily fiction. It still surprises visitors from
another culture: a Colombian student of mine, marveling at it, said,
"In my country business men, quite a good many of them, write
poetry; and when the maid cleans my room, she often picks up one
of my poetry books and reads in it." When he said this I remembered
that the critic and historian of ideas I spoke of had said to me, in
a tone he would not have used for prose: "Now about
Paterson–
what do you think of it? Is it really much good?" I amused myself
by trying to imagine Dr. Johnson asking Christopher Smart this about
Gray's
Elegy.
Many of the critics one reads or meets give an odd impression
about reading, one that might
be
given this exaggerated emblematic
form: "Good Lord, you don't think I
like
to read, do you? Reading
is
serious business, not something you fool around with in your spare
