THE AGE OF CRI :TlCISM
199
heartlessly, that the book he is married to isn't everything she should
be-ah, then it's a different affair!
But I have been talking of a "real critic" who would have a very
short half-life, one who may never have been on sea or land; let me
talk instead about good ordinary ones-viable ones, as a Modem Critic
would say. What
is
a critic, anyway? So far as I can see, he is an
extremely good reader-one who has learned to show to others what
he saw in what he read. He is always many other things too, but these
belong to his accident, not his essence. Of course, it is often the
accident and not the essence that we read the critic for: pieces of
criticism are frequently, though not necessarily, works of
art
of an
odd anomalous kind, and we can sympathize with someone when
he says lovingly about a critic, as Empson says about I.
A.
Richards,
that we get more from
him
when he's wrong than we do from other
people when they're right. I myself have sometimes felt this way
about Empson; and the reader surely has his favorites too, writers to
whom he goes for style and wit and sermons, informal essays, aesthe–
tics, purple passages, confessions, aphorisms, wisdom-a thousand
things. (One occasionally encounters intellectual couples for whom
some critic has taken the place of the minister they no longer have.)
Critics-I admit it very willingly-are often useful and wonderful and
a joy to have around the house;
but
they're the bane of our age,
because our age so fantastically overestimates their importance and so
willingly forsakes the works they are writing about for them. We are
brought into the world by specialists, borne out of it by specialists:
more and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle–
man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book
alone,
if
they could help it, than have a baby alone. How many of
us seem to think that the poem or story is in some sense "data" or
"raw material" which the critic cooks up into understanding, so that
we say, "I'd just never
read
'We Are Seven' till I got So-and-So's
analysis of it for Christmas!" But the work of
art
is as done as it will
ever get, and all the critics in the world can't make its crust a bit
browner; they may help
us,
the indigent readers, but they haven't
done a thing to it. Around the throne of God, where all the angels
read perfectly, there are no critics-there is no need for them.
Critics exist simply to help us with works of art-isn't that true?
Once, talking to a young critic, I said as a self-evident thing, "Of
course, criticism's necessarily secondary to the works of art it's about."
He looked at me as if I had kicked him, and said: "Oh, that's not
so!"
(I had kicked him, I realized.) And recently I ,heard a good
