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PARtiSAN REVIEW
cntlc, objecting to most of the cntlClsm in the quarterlies, say what
real
criticism did: what it did, as he put it, was almost exactly what
people usually say that religion, love, and great works of art do.
Criticism, which began by humbly and anomalously existing for the
work of art, and was in part a mere by-product of philosophy and
rhetoric, has by now become, for a good many people, almost what
the work of art exists for: the animals come up to Adam and Eve
and are named-the end crowns the work.
There is an atmosphere or environment, at some of the higher
levels of our literary culture, in which many people find it almost
impossible not to write criticism and almost impossible to write any–
thing else,
if
they pay much attention to the critics. For these fond
mothers not only want the artist to be good, they want him to be
great; and not simply great, but great in just the way he should be:
they want him to be exactly the same as, only somehow entirely
dif–
ferent from, the
Divine Comedy.
If
the reader says, "It's always been
that way," I'll answer, "Of course, of course. But critics are so much
better armed than they used to be in the old days: they've got tanks
and flame-throwers now, and it's harder to see past them to the work
of art-in fact, magnificent creatures that they are, it's hard to
want
to see past them. Can't you imagine an age in which critics are like
paleontologists, an age in which the last bone that the youngest critic
has wired together is already hundreds of years old? Scholars are like
that now. And critics are already like conductors, and give you
their
'Lear,'
their
'Confidence Man,'
their
'Turn of the Screw.' It's begin–
ning to frighten me a little; do we really
want
it to be an Age of
Criticism?"
Ben Jonson called one of his poems "A Fit of Rhyme against
Rhyme," and perhaps I should have called this article "A Fit of
Criticism against Criticism." But of course I'm complaining not just
about criticism and the literary quarterlies, but about the age; and
that's only fair-what is an age but something to complain about?
But
if
the age, the higher literary levels of it, doesn't wish to be an
age of criticism, and an increasingly Alexandrian one at that, it needs
to care more for stories and novels and poems and plays, and less for
criticism; it needs to read more widely, more independently, and more
joyfully; and it needs to say to its critics: "Write so as to be of some
use to a reader-a reader, that is, of poems and stories, not of criticism.
Vary
a little, vary a little! Admit what you can't conceal, that critic–
ism is no more than (and no less than) the helpful remarks and the
