THE
AGE OF CRI ,TICISM
195
put out of their misery, I am only crying to them out of mine. May
one of them say to the others, soon: "Brothers,
do
we want to sound
like the
Publications of the Modern Language Association,
only worse?
If
we don't set things straight for ourselves, others will set them
straight for us--or worse still, others won't, and things will go on
as they are going on until one day even you and I won't
be
able to
read each other, for sheer boredom."
Of
course I do not mean that critics should all go out and
try
to have Styles, or that we should judge them by the way they write-–
though an absolutely bad writer is at least relatively incapable of
distinguishing between good and bad in the writing that he criticizes.
It
is his reading that we judge a critic by, not his writing. The most
impressive thing about the good critic is the fact that he
does
respond
to
th~
true nature and qualities of a work of art-not always, but
often. But to
be
impressed by this you must be able to see these
qualities when they are pointed out to you: that is, you have to
be
under favorable circumstances almost as good a reader as the critic
is under less favorable ones. Similarly, the most impressive thing about
the bad critic is his methodical and oblivious contempt for unfashion–
able masterpieces, his methodical and superstitious veneration for
fashionable masterpieces and their reflections; but to be properly im–
pressed with this you must have responded to the works themselves,
and not to their reputations. There is a Critical Dilemma which might
be put in this fonn: To be able to tell which critics are reliable guides
to literature, you must know enough about literature not to need guides.
(This is a less-than-half-truth, but a neglected one.) What we need,
it might seem, is somebody who can tell us not which are the good
and bad writers, but which are the good and bad critics; and half
the critics I know are also trying to supply this need. In literature it
is
not that we have a labyrinth without a clue; the clues themselves
have become a worse labyrinth, a perfect Navy Yard of great coiling
hawsers which we are supposed to payout behind us on our way
into the darkness of--oh, "To His Coy Mistress," or whatever it is
we're reading.
It is easier for the ordinary reader to judge among poems or
stories or plays than it is for him to judge among pieces of criticism.
Many bad or commonplace works of art never even succeed in getting
him to notice them, and there
are
masterpieces which can shake
even the Fat Boy awake. Good critics necessarily disagree with some
of the reader's dearest convictions-unless he is a Reader among
readers--and they are likely to seem offensive in doing so. But the
