THE AGE OF CRITICISM
193
about it-there is always an inexhaustible, unexceptionable, indistinguish–
able supply. They are not interested in being wildcat drillers for oil, but
had rather have a hydro-electric plant at Niagara Falls. This was always
the policy of the
Criterion,
their immediate ancestor: it gave a bare
token representation to the literature of the '20's and 30's, and used up
its space on criticism, much of it by J . Middleton Murry, John Gould
Fletcher, Bonamy Dobree, and other Faithful Contributors.
A friend said to me one day, after he had opened his mail:
"Whenever I have a story published, I get two or three letters asking
me to write reviews." It isn't any different with poets. A young critic–
one who makes
his
living by teaching, as most serious young critics do-–
could say in practical justification of his work:
"If
you're a critic the
magazines
want
you to write for them, they
ask
you to write for them–
there's all that space just waiting to be filled with big articles, long
reviews. Look at this quarterly: 27'2 pages of poems, 11 of a story,
134 of criticism. My job depends on my getting things printed. What
chance have
I
got to get in those 137'2 pages? Me for the 134!" So he
might speak. But the chances are that it has never even occurred to the
young critic to write a story or a poem. New critic is but old scholar
writ large, as a general thing: the same gifts which used
to
go into
proving that the Wife of Bath was really an aunt of Chaucer's named
AIys Perse now go into proving that all of Henry James's work is really
a Swedenborgian allegory. Criticism will soon have reached the state of
scholarship, and the most obviously absurd theory-if it is maintained
intensively, exhaustively, and professionally-will do the theorist no
harm in the eyes of his colleagues.
But one must remember (or remain a child where criticism is con–
cerned) that a great deal of the best and most sensible criticism of any
age
is
necessarily absurd.
Hundreds of examples will occur to anybody:
Goethe and Schiller thought so little of HOlderlin that after a while they
wouldn't even answer his letters. "Ah, but
we
wouldn't have been so
foolish as Goethe and Schiller," we always feel; "you won't catch
us
making that mistake." And you don't: we love H6lderlin. But some
duckling we have never spared a smile for is
our
H6lderlin, and half
the swans we spent our Sundays feeding bread-crumbs to will
tum
out
to have been Southeys. And just as we will have been wrong about
such people, so all of our critics will have been wrong: it's their
metier,
isn't it?-it always has been. It is easy to nod to all this as a truism,
but it is hard to feel it as a truth. To feel it is to
be
fortified in the
independence and humility that we as readers ought to have.
