MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Farewell to the Gilded Age
In
the first half of the twentieth century, criticism in the English-speaking
world went through a momentous transformation. "When I did most of
my work," wrote Paul Elmer More , "there was almost a critical vacuum
in this country and in England.... It was something of an achievement
- [ say it unblushingly - just to ke ep going in such a desert." His long–
time antagonist H.
L.
Mencken said much the same thing. "When I be–
gan to practice as a critic, in 1908 . . . it was a time of almost
inconceivable complacency and conformity."
This situation would change dramatically with the development of
modernism. In a 1949 lecture, "The Responsibilities of the Critic,"
F.
O.
Matthiessen described how Eliot and other modern writers, in the face of
their wrenching experiences during the First World War, had set out " to
use a language that compelled the reader to slow down," a more diffi–
cult, more densely physical, more disjunctive language that also demanded
adifferent kind of reading.
I.
A. Richards called it "practical criticism" in
his famous book of the 1920s that had an especially strong impact on
American critics. "What resulted from the joint influence of Eliot and
Richards," noted Matthiessen , "was a criticism that aimed to give the
closest possible attention to the text at hand, to both the structure and
texture of the language."
But even before World War One, and long before the triumph of
modernism, America's cultural complacency was shaken by an earlier
"new criticism" with much stronger roots in the critical tradition of the
nineteenth century, which had decayed by 1900 into a fussy New Eng–
land moralism. Writers like Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, Joel Spingarn,
and Randolph Bourne, although they spoke for a rebellious younger
generation, still belonged to the tradition of the public critic. Unlike
later critics attached to universities, their work was essayistic rather than
Editor's Note: This essay is adapted from
Double Agent: The Critic and Society,
which will
be
published in September by Oxford University Press. It will appear in a different form
in
The
Cambridge History of Criticism, 1900-1950,
edited by A. Walton Litz and Louis
Menand, to be published in 1994 by Cambridge University Press.
