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PARTI iSAN REVIEW
bad or commonplace CrItIc can learn very easily (as easily as a
preacher or politician, almost) who are the right people to look down
on or up to, and what are the right things to write for any occasion,
the things his readers will admire and agree with almost before he
has written them. And he can write in an impressive and authoritative
way; can use a definitive tone, big words, great weighty sentences,
Clinching References-the plagues of Egypt couldn't equal all the
references to Freud and Jung and Marx and myths and existentialism
and neo-Calvinism and Aristotle and St. Thomas that you'll some–
times see in one commonplace article.
("If
he knows all these things
how can he be wrong about a little thing like a poem?" the reader
may well feel.) It is perpetually tempting to the critic to make his
style and method so imposing to everyone that nobody will notice or
care when he is wrong. And if the critic is detailedly and solemnly
enthusiastic about the great, and rather silent and condescending about
the small, how
can
he go very badly wrong? make a complete fool
of himself? But taking the chance of making a complete fool of him–
self-and, sometimes, doing so--is the first demand that is made upon
any real critic : he
must
stick his neck out just as the artist does, if he
is to be of any real use to
art.
The essential merit of a critic, then, is one that it is hard for
many of his readers to see. Critics have a wonderfully imposing look,
but this is only because they are in a certain sense impostors: the
judges' black gowns, their positions and degrees and qualifications,
their professional accomplishments, methods, styles, distinctions-all this
institutional magnificence hides from us the naked human beings who
do the judging, the fallible creatures who are what the accidents of
birth and life have left them.
If,
as someone says, we ought not to
forget that a masterpiece is something written by a man sitting alone
in a room before a sheet of paper, we ought not to forget that a piece
of criticism is produced
in
the same way: we have no substitute for
these poor solitary human souls who do the writing, the criticizing
and, also, the reading of poems and stories and novels. (I did recently
meet a Scandinavian social scientist who said that after "an extension
of the statistical methods of public opinion polls," this would no longer
be true.) It is easy for readers and critics to forget this: "Extra–
ordinary advances in critical method," writes an innocent anthologist,
"make the inspection of a poem today by a first-rate critic as close
and careful as a chemical analysis."
As
close and as careful, perhaps,
but more delightfully unpredictable: for these are chemists who, half
