CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
1109
comply and play the ridiculous comedy of going just so· far and no
further because the second half of their lecture
must
counterbalance
the first half with Oh, such hopeful propositions.
Now, at the present moment, when lecturers and writers can
hardly avoid expressing the opinion that the world has indeed gone
to pieces, one has the almost surrealistic spectacle of a man who comes
to announce to a perfectly flabbergasted audience that man has
turned to beast, that the scientists playing with matches may well
blow up the whole planet, or that millions in Europe are condemned to
slow death because they have no "valid papers." And .after these
things are said, which cannot but create an atmosphere of tragic
silence if they are understood at all,
10,
there comes the announcer of
the world's end with
his
solution, a tiny little bit of a darling solution,
couched in paragraphs one, two, three, with sub-divisions A,B,C,D,–
a bridge of matches to be thrown over the abyss that has cut the world
in two, or a set of toothpicks to perform a major surgical operation.
It's exactly like advertising: The world goes to the dogs, everything
is dark, but we here at the factory have a new toothpaste that will
brighten your smile.
I wonder if the "constructivists" have ever paused long enough to
consider what would happen
in
the other fields of criticism if their
principles were suddenly accepted. For example, music. Now, when a
serious musical critic dismisses a symphony as bad, and gives only the
reasons why it does not hold together musically, that is rightly called
"criticism."
If
the same musical critic announced the next day that he
has composed a symphony of his own, that would be rightly referred to
as a symphony of his own. But if upon presenting his own composition
to the public, he said: "This music here is a constructive criticism of
the symphony criticized by me yesterday," he would rightly be sent to
the unholiest of places and criticized, not once but twice: first as a
critic who does not keep his place, and secondly as a composer who
pretends to be exempt from criticism because, until yesterday, he
was a critic too.
And we may easily imagine what would happen to an art critic
who, in a supreme effort to be constructive, asked the Fifty-seventh
Street galleries to reserve space on their walls near the paintings he
is about to criticize, for his own constructive canvases.
It
would seem, from the above two examples, that, in the arts
