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PARTISAN REVIEW
systematic, or impersonal, or rational, or safe, or sure road to criticism.
Most people understand that a poet is a good poet because he does
well some of the time; this is true of critics-if we are critics we can
see this right away for everybody except ourselves, and everybody
except ourselves can see It right away about
us.
But many critics have
the bearing of people who are right all the time, and most of us like
this: it makes them look more like our fathers.
Real criticism demands of human beings an inhuman disinterested–
ness, one which they adopt with reluctance and maintain with dif–
ficulty: the real critic must speak
ill
of friends and well of enemies,
ill
of agreeable bad works and well of less agreeable good ones; must
admire writers whom his readers will snicker at him for admiring,
and dislike writers whom it will place him among barbarians to dislike.
For it is the opinion he offers with trepidation, thinking: "Nobody
will believe it, and I hardly see how it
can
be so; but just the same,
it seems so to me"-it is this opinion that may be all the next age
will value him for; though in all probability it will value him for
nothing-critics had better make the best of their own age, for few
of them ever survive to the next. Criticism demands of the critic an
inhuman nakedness: a real critic has no one but himself to depend
on. He can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own
response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses-and
yet he must regard that self as no more than the instrument through
which the work of art is seen, so that the work of art will seem
everything to him and his own self nothing: the good critic has,
as Eliot says, a great "sense of fact." Real critics do some of the time
see what is there, even when-especially when-it is not what they
want to be there. The critic must in this sense get away from his self–
as-self; and he must as much as he can, for as long as he can, train
and expose and widen this self, get rid of all that he can see as merely
self-prejudices and disabilities and predilections-without ever losing
the personal truth of judgment that his criticism springs from. (In the
end the critic disappears, like the rest of us, in the quicksand of his
own convictions.) Real criticism demands not only unusual human
qualities but an unusual combination and application of these: it is
no wonder that even real critics are just critics, most of the time. So
much of our society is based, necessarily, on lies, equivocations, gloss–
ings-over; a real critic, about a part of this society, tries to tell only
the truth. When it is a pleasant truth-and it often is-reader and
writer and critic are a joy to one another; but when the critic comes
to the reader's house and tells him, causelessly and senselessly and
