STATE OF CRITICISM
15
to
think that men of taste and perception in past ages read more
superficially than we do, the comments they left us often seem distant
and external.
Occasionally, a work of aesthetic theory, such as G.E. Lessing's
Laocoon,
would shade off into close textual commentary of a surpris–
ingly modern kind. There was also the precedent of a long tradition of
Biblical hermeneutics, as well as early legal commentaries such as
Blackstone. But by and large practical criticism developed in response
to the immediate exigencies of expanding middle-class cultural activ–
ity. During the Romantic period reviewing became the mediating force
between an increasingly difficult literature and an increasingly diverse
audience; and a reviewer was prompted to confront the individual
work as the aesthetician had not.
Yet the great English reviews which were founded then, such as
the
Edinburgh
and the
Quarterly,
were far from ideally receptive to the
best poetry of the age, and their critical work has come down to us
largely .as a sour footnote to the history of English Romanticism.
Before we conclude that the discovery of close reading coincided with
the loss of our ability to read, or at least to read deeply and feelingly, we
ought to remind ourselves of James's response to his reviewers' tribute
of incomprehension and disapproval: "a periodicity of platitude and
irrelevance."
It
would be hard to find a better phrase to describe the
work of those who populate LA. Richards's modern
Dunciad,
oddly
misnamed
Practical Criticism.
For several years in the late 1920s,
Richards distributed groups of anonymous short poems to his under–
graduate classes at Cambridge, giving them a week to compose written
comments. Selections from these comments or "protocols" make up
the body of
Practical Criticism.
Although Richards introduces his
material modestly, as an experimental survey and "documentation,"
and his own comments on the protocols and poems are spare and
laconic, others have followed his hints and asides to read recklessly
large implications into his evidence. According to Stanley Edgar
Hyman, who is no enemy of hyperbole, "what the protocols reveal, by
and large, is probably the most shocking picture, exhaustively docu–
mented, of the general reading of poetry ever presented."
Published exactly fifty years ago,
Practical Criticism
has always
been considered one of the landmarks of modern criticism, but, like
many so-called classics, it's more respected than read. After all, what
shocked Hyman in 1948 could hardly surprise anyone who corrects
undergraduate papers today. On the contrary, the contemporary reader
is likely to be impressed by the technical sophistication and polemical
