MR. AGEE AND THE NEW YORKER
II~
criticism is an imaginative occupation. It seems, however, unnecessarily
one-sided; if the critic, instead of always regretting what we have missed,
were allowed occasionally to rejoice at the thought of what-for all we
know-we may have escaped, it might remove from criticism the un–
pleasant air of dreariness and humbug which sometimes hangs over it.
Similarly it might be helpful if the critic were pel"lll;itted to be a little
more honest (never too much so) about how annoyingly hard a difficult
author can be and how much too long
a1
long one.
If
we only took these
things a little more easily, our conventions would demand of the critic
not knowledge, but skill and dexterity
,in
the handling of his ignorance.
For the critic, it is truer every day that art is long and life short. So
much has the past heaped on him and so much is being added to it all
the time that unless our present conventions of critical knowledge are
relaxed, art will soon become the curse of criticism, its end, instead of
-as it should be-its beginning.
POEM
Out of the Eden of their innocence
Of pain, like Eve to lonely gardening,
Children go boldly, full of ignorance
And the Alice-hearted's love of travelling;
J
oumey to giant hospitals, filled with toys
Which grown-up ladies in chess-man hats and boys
From the comer drugstore, up and down long halls,
Play house with silently (where are the dolls?)
Mother explains about the smells and noise,
Who nonetheless, like God, cannot explain
What is to come; for this our proper pain,
Remains unknowable, till the serpent's sting
Sings along each separate nerve and vein
The fine persuasion of his reasoning.
ARTHUR MIZENER
