THE AGE 0 FeR I 'T I CIS M
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the time, after the long weeks of analysis are over, can't even agree
whether what they werc analyzing was bread or beer. An
Encyclopedia
of Pseudo-Sciences
might define critical method as
the systematic
(q
.v.)
application of foreign substances to literature,' any series of de-vices by
which critics may treat different works of art as much alike as possible.
It is true that a critical method can help us neither to read nor to
judge; still, it is sometimes useful in pointing out to the reader a few
gross discrete reasons for thinking a good poem good-and it is in–
valuable, almost indispensable, in convincing a reader that a good
poem is bad, or a bad one good. (The best critic who ever lived could
not
prove
that the
Iliad
is better than
Trees;
the critic can only state
his belief persuasively, and hope that the reader of the poem will
agree-but
persuasively
covers everything from sneers to statistics.)
We do not become good critics by reading criticism and, second–
arily, the "data" or "raw material" of criticism: that is, poems and
stories. We become good critics by reading poems and stories and by
living; it is reading criticism which is secondary-if it often helps us a
great deal, it often hinders us even more: even a good critic or reader
has a hard time recovering from the taste of the age which has pro–
duced him. Many bad critics are bad, I think, because they have spent
their life in card-indexes; or
if
they have not, no one can tell.
If
works of art were about card-indexes the critic could prepare for
them in this way, but as it is he cannot. An interesting book about
recent criticism was called
The Armed Vision;
the title and a few
of the comments on the qualities of the ideal modem critic suggested
that he would rather resemble one of those robots you meet in science–
fiction stories, with a microscope for one eye, a telescope for the
other, and the mechanical brain at Harvard for a heart.
Everybody understands that poems and stories are written by
memory and desire, love and hatred, daydreams and nightmares–
by a being, not a brain. But they are read just so, judged just so; and
some great lack in human qualities is as fatal to the critic as it is to
the novelist. Someone asked Eliot about critical method, and he
replied: "The only method is to
be
very intelligent." And this is of
course only a beginning: there have been many very intelligent people,
but few good critics-far fewer than there have been good artists, as
any history of the arts will tell you. "Principles" or "standards" of
excellence are either specifically harmful or generally useless; the critic
has nothing to go by except his experience as a human being and a
reader, and is the personification of empiricism. A Greek geometer
said that there is no royal road to geometry-there is no royal, or
