The anatomy of criticism a trialogue

In the present instance I can say that if I had not written this book in dialogue I should nothave written it at all.. As a matter of fact, the position repre-sented in the present dialo

SOMEHOW I feel that I ought to apologize forhaving cast the present volume in dialogue I donot know precisely why one should feel obliged tooffer excuses for employing a form that goes back

at least to Plato, that has been used by Hobbes,Hume, Berkeley, Voltaire, Diderot, Schopenhauer,

De Quincey, Landor, and, in our own day, by LowesDickinson and Santayana But the fact remains that

a large number of readers have a tendency to shyoff from a modern dialogue as they would from amodern tragedy in blank verse Such an aversion

is not without grounds Most dialogue presents atleast two obstacles to the reader, one superficial, theother more deep-seated The superficial obstacle isthe curious survival of the convention of endowingthe speakers with Greek names—names which, formost present-day readers, are either annoyinglyanachronistic, too long, too perilous to pronounce,too hard to keep in mind, or completely withoutmeaning Certainly it would not add to the popu-larity of the modern drama if the same conventionhad been retained there also The deeper obstacle

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

is the practice, in most dialogues, of confronting atoo sapient speaker, obviously the author's mouth-piece, with a straw-man who is always raising thewrong objections and stating them in the feeblest

or most vulnerable manner, while the author'smouthpiece keeps triumphantly knocking this dummydown until the latter can say nothing but "quiteright" to propositions which are, in fact, quitedubious

In the present dialogue I have tried to spare thereader with a sense of sportsmanship from the spec-tacle of so uneven a combat The dialogue form, itseems to me, is not to be adopted for its own sake,

or out of mere whim, but only for special reasons ineach case In the present instance I can say that if

I had not written this book in dialogue I should nothave written it at all Some of my reasons for choos-ing the form will be apparent on the surface, andothers are indicated by the speakers themselves intheir concluding remarks But I might supplementthese with one additional hint The dialogue drama-tizes an approach to the persistent problems of criti-

cism by a particular logical method Had Elder been named Thesis, Young y Antithesis, and `Mìddleton>

Synthesis, the reader would not have needed anyacquaintance with the Hegelian dialectic to appre-ciate one of my chief aims The names that thespeakers actually bear will, I hope, make it easy forthe reader to distinguish them; but I do not wishhim to assume that I myself suppose from the acci-

PREFACEdent of these names that older men are necessarilyapostles of tradition or younger men of subjectivismand revolt As a matter of fact, the position repre-

sented in the present dialogue by Young is nearer

to that of the middle generation of present Americancritics than it is to that of the youngest group But

it seems to me that the nomenclature as it standscorresponds best with the relative logical positions

of the speakers, and therefore allows the reader tofollow the argument with the least possibility ofconfusion

In a subject that has been so long thrashed over

by so many minds, it is not wise to credit oneselfwith much originality But I hope that some illumi-nation will be found in the present method of ap-proach itself In all fields of thought the traditionaldilemmas, on which thinkers have for a long timetaken opposite stands, generally rest, as Morris R.Cohen has pointed out in his "Reason and Nature",

on difficulties rather than on real contradictions, andpositive gains are to be made not by simply trying

to prove that one side or the other is the truth, but

by trying to get at the difficulty and determining inwhat respect and to what extent each side is justified.The present book might be regarded from one aspect

as the continuous application of that principle to theproblems of literary criticism The method is par-ticularly fruitful, it seems to me, in dealing with along-standing controversy like that between the im-pressionistic critics and their "objective" opponents

iii

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

So far as I am aware, the present book contains thefirst attempt to reconcile these two schools of thought

by the consistent use of the concept of the SocialMind

My speakers quote a large number—it may evenseem an excessive number—of writers They do thisfor several reasons First, where they have derived

an idea from a special source, and agree with it,they wish to give credit for it Secondly, even whenthey might already have held a given idea anyway,they are glad to have that added feeling of con-firmation which the same idea in another nearlyalways tends to give, and they like to cite those whohave stated the idea well Again, where their atti-tude is neutral, they are still interested in compre-hensiveness, in tracing the history of an idea and ofits various forms Finally, even where they are op-posed to an idea, and think it rubbish, they aredetermined to show that they are not knockingdown a man of straw, that someone has actually heldthis belief, and they want also, in fairness (or mali-ciousness), often to state that belief in the precisewords of its votaries Sometimes they are obliged

to refresh their memories by reading the remarksthey quote More often they cite them without suchhelp Their verbal memories will be found to berather remarkable, though to avoid too great artifi-ciality quotation marks are omitted wherever thecontext itself makes reasonably plain just where thequotation begins and ends

iv

PREFACEThe reader will be mistaken if he assumes thatany one of the speakers is consistently the mouth-piece of the author Some readers may find this verylack of an official spokesman confusing and unfortu-nate, for it means that all of the speakers are morestubborn than imaginary dialogue speakers usuallyare in clinging to opinions after those opinions havebeen pretty thoroughly discredited Their stubborn-ness may sometimes make the book seem repetitious,and it will sometimes compel the reader to decidefor himself which speaker, if any, has run off withthe victory But it has also a not unimportant advan-tage: it compels every idea to run the gauntlet, tosubmit to a sustained critical barrage.

My indebtedness is to too many writers to makepossible any special acknowledgments here; I ¾opethat specific debts are sufficiently indicated in theprogress of the dialogue itself The essays on Liter-ature and the Class War, and Marxism or Tolstoy-

ism, originally published in The Nation, appear here

as appendices written directly in the first person.There seemed little point in casting these in dia-logue, and it would have been in any case impossiblefor any one of my three critics to assume, with anyconsistency, the Communist role A Communistcould not have been a subjectivist on the one hand,

or a traditionalist on the other, and certainly hewould never have been a reconciler

H H

June, 1933.

P E R S O N S O F T H E D I A L O G U E S

Elder, a professor of English literature, 50.

Youngs book reviewer for the Daily Press, 25 Middleton, editor of The Hour-Glass, a monthly

philosophical and literary journal, 35

Arthur, a popular novelist, 30.

The scene throughout is the library of Elder's

subur-ban home

C O N T E N T S

Preface

DIALOGUES

i Criticism's Right to Exist

II The Critic's Function

VIII Vivisecting Signor Croce

ix Sincerity, Style, and Pure Art

x Realism Versus Romance

2 I I

*33

273287297

T H E A N A T O M Y

OF C R I T I C I S M

CRITICISM'S R I G H T T O EXIST

Elder I am delighted, Arthur, that you were

able to drive over for dinner Young and Middletonhere are spending the week-end with me, and I havebeen wanting for a long time to have you three meeteach other

Arthur It was more than kind of you to ask me.

Frankly, though, I feel as if I had fallen into theenemy's hands Young, here, is not only a profes-sional book-reviewer, which would make him anobject of suspicion in any case, but he derided mylast novel shamelessly You yourself, while you occa-sionally write delightful essays on Goethe and Em-erson, have not deigned to notice my work at all.And since Middleton here has become so immersed

in philosophical problems in the pages of his brow magazine, I am beginning to suspect that heconsiders himself above mere literature altogether jyet he of course is a critic too One author amongthree critics! Daniel in the lion's den was compara-tively well off

high-Elder It will make you even more

uncomfort-able to learn that the whole thing is a prearranged

7

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

plot I did not exactly bring Young and yourselftogether for the purpose of staging a fight 5 but Idid, candidly, hope to hear what each of you mighthave to contribute to the baffling subject of criticism,for on some of its fundamental problems my mind

of late has been less clear and certain than it used

to be

Arthur, On the whole I think it would be better

if I didn't discuss that subject

Elder, How so?

Arthur Well, I'm afraid I could not, in the

present company, discuss it candidly without causingoffense

Elder Lack of candor in such a discussion would

deprive it of nearly all value, and politeness by itsvery definition implies lack of candor What I shouldlike is not false assent, but healthy and even violentcontradiction I therefore propose that in any dis-cussion of this subject neither the usual demands ofcourtesy nor the feelings of our opponent shouldreceive the slightest consideration

Young Then we are all to be free to call each

other scoundrels and fools?

Elder Exactly.

Middleton May I suggest that such epithets

hardly seem calculated to advance the argument or

to clarify the issues?

Elder That is true 5 but each of us should at

least feel free to call the rest scoundrels and fools.

That is to say, we should never hold back an

argu-8

C R I T I C I S M ' S R I G H T TO EXIST

ment merely because that particular argument sarily implies that we have scant respect for ouropponent's intellect, or even that we regard him aspractically an idiot

neces-Middleton In other words, you feel that where

the interests of complete truth are paramount, goodmanners are the worst possible manners

Elder Precisely.

Arthur Well, then, since you will have it so,

I shall speak my mind freely It so happens thatthe only suggestion I have to make about criticism

Elder I am afraid, notwithstanding its exalted

origin, that we cannot act on that principle in dailylife If we adhered to it literally, no one would ever

be put in jail, and no conduct, no matter how vile

or outrageous, could ever be criticized Mutual cism, far from being an evil, is the greatest singleforce in the world for the maintenance of order anddecorum and decency, for preventing careless work,for spurring us on to our highest efforts I shudder

criti-to think what would become of civilization if a mancould be criticized only by the perfect, who do notexist It would be dangerous to contend even that

a man should be criticized only by his superiors, or

9

even only by his equals, for then how could any of

us presume to compare, say, the music of Beethovenwith that of Bach? No, we must concede not onlythe right of inferiors to criticize their superiors, butthe fact that they can often do so with justice, andfrequently to the benefit of mankind—indeed, occa-sionally even to the profit of the superiors them-selves You may know a hundred facts about a sub-ject and I but one, and yet your ignorance of thatfact may lead you to a wrong conclusion Should I,because I am your inferior, refrain from callingattention to the fact you have overlooked? Nojcriticism, as T S Eliot once said, is as inevitable

as breathing That being so, it is silly and futile totalk of its abolition; the only real question is whetherand how we can raise its quality

Arthur, But surely art criticism is futile Tastes

differ, and it is senseless to argue about them Yettaste is the one thing that critics are always arguingabout

Elder, De gustibus non disfutandum is an adage,

I fear, more ancient than true It is merely anotherform of the ignoramus's contention that he may notknow anything about art, but that he knows what

he likes And Whistler once crushingly replied: "So

do the beasts of the field." Taste is not an infallibleguide even in the domain of food; as in literature,

it must be supplemented by knowledge That is why

we have to keep so many things out of a baby'sreach

10

C R I T I C I S M ' S R I G H T TO EXIST

Arthur Well, when all is said, it is hard to think

of a drearier or more hollow occupation than cism I was reading the other night the marvellousletters o£ Chekhov, and I came upon this: "To talk

criti-of literature? But we have talked o£ that already Every year the same thing, the same thing, and allour talk about literature is usually reduced to dis-cussing who writes better and who worse."

Young That was merely the expression o£ a

passing mood It is an attitude that I imagine mostintelligent persons fall into from time to time towardtheir own occupation no matter what it happens to

be But Chekhov's letters contain some admirablecriticism

Arthur Well, when a real creator like Chekhov

writes it, even criticism can occasionally becomecharming But I think a writer in the late and la-

mented transition summed up the present situation

accurately when he said that o£ all the dull thingsdone in America today, writing about writing is thedullest and most futile What this country needs, hepointed out, is sluggers more than coaches, and hesuggested that the batting average o£ our literaryaspirants would have to be raised considerably be-fore there would be enough men on bases to requireany additional advisers

Elder The obvious reply to those who call for

more creation and less criticism, as Irving Babbitthas pointed out, is that one needs to be critical aboveall in examining what now passes for creation If

II

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

you succeed in driving criticism out of the world,what are you going to have in its place?

Arthur Why have anything? Why not follow

your Mr Whistler, who demanded that art be ceived in silence?

re-Young Ah, my friend, you are very cruel, and

more so, I am afraid, to artists than to critics If I

go to a new exhibit, and see a remarkable paintingthere by a hitherto unknown artist, must I remainsilent about it? Am I not to be permitted enthusi-astically to tell my friends to go to see the paint-ing? How else is the painter to emerge from obscur-ity? And if—for greater miracles have happened—Ishould admire a new novel of yours, am I not tohave the honor of lauding it in public?

Middleton We critics seem to be making pretty

obvious replies to pretty obvious criticisms, yet haps that is not on the whole to be regretted Euclidbuilt up his geometry by frankly beginning with theobvious, and the theory of criticism would be muchfurther advanced than it is today if critics hadstrained less to be original and had been more con-tent to start with truisms All of which is an intro-duction to pointing out that what Arthur has falleninto is the very common and painfully obvious fal-lacy of supposing that criticism means adverse criti-cism, fault-finding The reply to that obvious fallacy

per-is the childper-ishly obvious reminder that cally, and in what is still its soundest usage, it means

etymologi-12

C R I T I C I S M ' S R I G H T TO EXIST

merely to judge, that is to say, to appraise; and thismeaning includes appreciation

Young Didn't Swinburne once define criticism

as the noble pleasure of praising? And isn't that,after all, what most reviewing nowadays consists of?

Ah, these writers are an ungrateful lot We poorreviewers spend our nights in reading and our days

in ballyhooing for them 5 we exhaust our latives j we create their reputations 3 and then we get

super-a kick in the belly for our psuper-ains

Arthur I have not noticed that reviewers

squan-der much of their energies in admiration An authormay pour his heart's blood into a book; he maywork ten years on it; and a reviewer comes alongand condemns it in an hour Your typical reviewer,

as old Longfellow said, is like a boy with a gun¿

he often fires at every living thing he sees 5 hethinks only of his own skill, not of the pain he isgiving

Young The reviewer cannot concern himself

with the feelings of the author ¡ his only duty is to

render an honest report to the reading public Itdoes not make a bad book any better to know thatthe author's intentions were earnest 5 and it is cer-tainly not the reviewer's fault if the writer haswasted ten years of his life Do you expect the

reviewer to lie to the public just to spare the author's

feelings?

Middleton It wouldn't do the author any good,

13

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

in the long run, even if a few of the first reviewersdid lie As Richard Bentley remarked, "No manwas ever written out of reputation but by himself."

Arthur But that overlooks the immediate and

sometimes irreparable harm that the first reviewersmay do They practically murdered poor Keats

Young Not on any evidence that you could put

into a coroner's verdict It is time that ancient mythwas buried, and it is hardly a compliment to Keatshimself to assume that he was such a delicate flower.The evidence shows that he died of tuberculosis,and not of unflattering remarks And why is it thatwhen a handful of critics write asinine reviews of

a book, all critics are forthwith condemned? No one

dreams of damning all authors, even though thereare thousands of asinine books

Elder As a matter of fact, the general tone of

American reviewing is exactly the contrary of whatArthur asserts it to be The American reviewer seeks

to make his reputation today not by "savaging"somebody, but by "discovering" somebody As LouisBromfield has remarked, there is a kind of nervousanxiety for someone new on the horizon, someonewho can be seized and quickly decorated with the

"best writer" badge The situation is even worse thanthat In a wild and shameless scramble to get theirnames quoted in publishers' advertisements, re-viewers do not hesitate to lavish on a new bookencomiums so appallingly extravagant that even ablurb writer would blush to pen them

H

CRITICISM'S RIGHT TO EXIST

Arthur, Your remarks are true only o£ some of

the smaller fry In the so-called upper levels o£ hisprofession, the critic seeks to acquire his reputationand his ranking not by his enthusiasms and admira-tions, but by his aversions and disdains When acritic likes very little, it is accepted as a sign that

he must be a highly superior person The generouscritic is never as respected in his own fold as thesarcastic and condescending one

Elder Well, I am not sure that it isn't better so.

As Schopenhauer has pointed out, most books arebad and ought to have remained unwritten Conse-quently praise should be as rare as is now the casewith blame, which is withheld under the influence

of personal considerations Politeness, which has itssource in social relations, is, as Schopenhauer added,

in literature an alien and often injurious element,because it exacts that bad work shall be called good.And we should not forget Coleridge's remark thatpraises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds asrobberies of the deserving

Arthur Well, if we are to have criticism, and

if it is to consist mainly of blame, let it at least comefrom practitioners of the art criticized, and not fromprofessional critics, who are necessarily incompetent.What a presumptuous and impudent crew they are,these parasites who make their living by writingtheir opinion of the work of other people! Leglessmen who teach dancing! Eunuchs who talk aboutwhat they can't do!

15

Young Old and stupid taunts! I am

half-tempted to quote Oscar Wilde, who replied that it

is much more difficult to talk about a thing than

to do it Anyone, he pointed out, can make history,but only a great man can write it Seriously, how-ever, it is obvious that inability to do a thing in noway implies inability to criticize that thing whendone As even Bernard Shaw has conceded, it doesnot follow that the right to criticize Shakespeare in-volves the power of writing better plays I can't lay

an egg y but I can tell a good one from a bad onewhen I taste it

Arthur A hoary answer.

Young For old objections, the old answers are

good enough

Arthur But that isn't an answer at all Anyone

can tell a good egg from a bad one: we don't have

to hire professional critics to tell us which is which

Young Suppose for the moment that you were

right j there would still be a not unimportant tion left for the reviewer H e is the first one toopen the new eggs that the novelists lay If one ofthem smells bad, then even if the reviewer's sense

func-of smell is no better than anyone else's, he can atleast warn others The reviewer, in brief, is theguinea pig of literature

Arthur Unfortunately, the reviewer seldom

takes enough of the novelist's egg to know anythingabout it I happen to know that you almost neverread through the books you pretend to criticize

16

CRITICISM'S RIGHT TO EXIST

Young Why should I? One doesn't have to eat

all of an egg to know whether it's bad

Arthur Let's drop this stupid analogy We come

back after all to my original contention—that thecritics are simply the fellows who sit in the grand-stand and tell the players what to do, though theyhave never mastered the players' technical skill

Young Even if your comparison were accepted,

I do not see that it would be so very damaging Thespectators at a tennis match can at least see that thelosing player is not as good as the winning player jthey can even see some of the reasons why oneplayer won and the other lost The trained spec-tators, such as the sport writers, who correspond tosome extent to the critics of literature, can oftenmake a very shrewd analysis of the good and badpoints of a player's game, without in the least im-plying that they could get out on the court and dobetter

Arthur But the only analysis that I would

re-gard as worth anything would be that of anothertennis player, preferably of someone who playedbetter than the man whose game he was criticizing

In other words, only artists should write about art

Young That is merely a way of saying that a

dentist cannot cure a toothache unless he has one.But as Aristotle has pointed out, the proper judge

of the tiller is not the carpenter but the helmsman

Arthur Suppose we drop all these pernicious

analogies, and look at the problem honestly I don't

17

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

see how anyone can deny that the critic of art who

is himself a painter is a better critic than one who

is not H e alone knows precisely what technicalproblems the artist has had to surmount 5 he alonecan give the artist any advice that will be of theslightest use to him

Young I think you confuse the function of

criti-cism with the function of instruction, but we shalllet that pass for the moment Your assumption thatthe artist is necessarily the best critic of his fellow-artists is surely without historical support The bit-terest resentment evoked by the innovator anywherecomes from those working in the same line Mutualjealousies alone may make judicial estimates impos-sible Apart from this, the very concentration ofvision that makes a man an artist, as Oscar Wildehas pointed out, limits by its sheer intensity hisfaculty of fine appreciation

Suppose we glance at the actual record of theartist as critic Sophocles hated the realism of Euri-pides, and Aristophanes derided it Ronsard abusedRabelais Corneille never understood Racine Balzaccompared "Monk" Lewis's novels with "La Char-treuse de Parme." Victor Hugo was contemptuous

of nearly all the French classics Voltaire thoughtShakespeare a barbarian Richardson and Fieldingridiculed each other Keats thought Pope and hisschool mistook a rocking horse for Pegasus Words-worth called "Candide" "a dull product of a scof-fer's pen." Wordsworth and Shelley could see little

18

CRITICISM'S RIGHT TO EXIST

in each other, and Byron never fully appreciatedWordsworth, Shelley, or Keats Goethe enormouslyover-estimated Byron, thought him the greatestwriter of his century, and comparable with Shakes-peare Carlyle dismissed Herbert Spencer as a

"never-ending ass"; Nietzsche damned both Carlyleand Spencer Schopenhauer had nothing but abusefor Hegel George Meredith, as a reader for Chap-man and Hall, turned down "The Way of AllFlesh." Dostoevsky and Turgenev were repelled

by each other's methods, Tolstoy denounced

Shake-speare, and praised "Uncle Tom's Cabin." NeitherHawthorne nor any of his contemporaries recognizedthe real importance of Melville When Whittierreceived a copy of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" heburned it Thackeray and Dickens had little respectfor each other as novelists Anatole France neverunderstood all this fuss about Proust Shaw bally-hooed for a blank cartridge like Brieux

Arthur Come, come; the evening is short Even

the best of us make mistakes of judgment, but yourlist doesn't alter the truth of Disraeli's remark—thatcritics are merely those who have failed at creativework

Elder One could say with much more justice

that Disraeli went into politics because he failed as

a novelist But it will take more than the authority

of that gentleman to dispose of men of the caliber

of Aristotle, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Lessing Andtwo minutes' reflection ought to remind you that

19

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

most of the great critics have also been great tors Goethe's criticism could hardly be attributed

crea-to the fact that "Faust" was a creative failure Torecall Dante, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Coleridge, Car-lyle, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, Dryden, is to re-call men who were great in both fields

Young And may I add that I am fed up with

this impudent distinction between critical and tive" writing? Today every little poetaster, everyhack who turns out a trashy novel, every man whodaubs at a canvas, fancies he is doing "creative work,"and the phrase gives him an excuse for a ludicrouslyswelled head

"crea-Arthur But creative work is any work that

re-quires the use of the creative imagination: it includespoetry, fiction, drama, music, painting, sculpture,architecture Non-creative work is work that does notrequire the use of the creative imagination, butmerely records facts, opinions or ideas: it includeshistory, biography, science, philosophy, essays andcriticism

Young What a tissue of absurdities that

distinc-tion would lead to! It would deny that Gibbon's

"Decline and Fall" was creative j or Boswell's

"John-son" 5 or "The Origin of Species"; or "The Wealth

of Nations" 5 or the revolutionary discoveries of aNewton, a Pasteur, or an Einstein; or Plato's dia-logues j or Kant's "Critique" j or Montaigne's orEmerson's essays j or Taine's "History of EnglishLiterature" j or Sainte-Beuve's gallery of portraits

20

But it would stick the creative label on everyverse by Eddie Guest, every novel by Rex Beach,every play by Sam Shipman God save us all!

Arthur This discussion, it seems to me, might

be conducted in a less emotional atmosphere The ject of each of us, after all, is not supposed to bevictory, but truth

ob-Middleton Quite Allow me to resume it in a

quieter vein Coming out on the train this evening,

I took with me one of John Watson's lectures onbehaviorism, and by a curious coincidence, I cameupon a footnote that is directly relevant to our pres-ent topic While I do not believe that his argument

is tenable, it has none the less worried me May Iread it to you?

Elder By all means.

Middleton {fulling a small fam†hlet from his focket and reading) "There ought not to be any

such person as an art or dramatic critic"

Arthur A Daniel! A Daniel! O wise and learned

man! (The others look at him reprovingly; he

sub-sides.)

Middleton (resuming) "Our visceral reactions—

the final touchstone of our artistic judgments—areour own They are all we have left in the way ofresponse that hasn't been under the steam-rollerprocess of society My criticism of a picture, poem,

or the playing of a piece of music, is as good asanybody else's If I had to pass a critical judgmentupon a work of art, a picture for example, I would

21

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

do it experimentally I would arrange to let crowds

of people from all walks of life wander one at atime into a well-lighted room I would have rivalstimuli about, such as magazines, knickknacks of onekind or another, two or three pictures on the wall,including the one I wanted to have judged If theindividual under observation spent time at this pic-ture, if he showed some emotional reaction, grief,joy, rage, then I would put him down as reactingpositively to it At the end of the day I would beable to say, 'The so-called art critics will say yourpicture is rotten, the children will not look at it, thewomen are shocked by it, but the traveling salesmenchuckle with glee over it It will be a failure if youexhibit it; I would advise you to send it to somesales manager and let him hang it over his desk!What I am trying to say is that there is a vastamount of charlatanism both in the making of artobjects and in their so-called appreciation Assumingthat you are a real journeyman at the job, that is,that you have passed your apprenticeship at the trade,whether you are a good artist or not depends largelyupon whether Mr and Mrs X have discovered you(and you may have been dead a hundred years ormore before they do it) and made a hero of you

If the memory of every artist and every man andwoman of the Sistine Madonna, 'Parsifal', and 'TheRing and the Book' were suddenly lost tonight, andthose artistic creations had to be discovered anewtomorrow with no background and no history, all

22

C R I T I C I S M ' S R I G H T TO EXIST

three would be allowed to journey to the ash can

without regret." {Looking up) Well?

Elder Why, the man's an ass!

Arthur On the contrary, he is very shrewd; and

I think what he says substantially true

Young Colossal inconsistency means nothing to

our friend here A little while ago he was arguingthat criticism required so much knowledge and skillthat only artists were qualified to criticize other art-ists; now he is prepared to defend Watson's propo-sition that one man's opinion of a work of art is asgood as another's

Middleton For that matter, Arthur committed

an even greater inconsistency at the beginning when

he criticized criticism, for by that very act he sarily conceded criticism's right to exist

neces-Arthur My position is thoroughly consistent.

I maintain that the only opinion that will do theartist himself any good is that of another artist who

is his superior or at least his equal But so far asliking or disliking a painting is concerned, everyman is entitled to determine that for himself What

I object to is merely the professional critic, who hasnever mastered the technical skill of the artist, andyet presumes to tell other people what they shouldand shouldn't like

Elder Coming back to Watson, I don't see how

argument with such a man is possible One can onlysay that anyone capable of believing that the SistineMadonna, if it were a new discovery, would quickly

23

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

be consigned to the ash can, must be pitied for hiscomplete anaesthesia It is true that the first estimatesassigned by critics to a newly discovered Sistine Ma-donna, "Parsifal", or "The Ring and the Book" might

be different from what they now are 5 such estimates,

in fact, are constantly shifting to a certain extent.But the important point is that the change in theseestimates is always confined within certain definitelimits No man of any intelligence or sensibilitycould fail to recognize that the Sistine Madonna was

a masterpiece and not a chromo; differences ofopinion would arise only in considering its preciserank among masterpieces

Young And may I add that Mr Watson does

not see fit to follow his own advice? I recently read

an article by him called "Feed Me on Facts" (whichshows that a man may still be a Gradgrind andproud of it), and in that article he did not hesitate

to criticize adversely two novels and a play I didnot see the play nor read one of the novels, a detec-tive story, as I remember 5 but the other novel wasJulien Green's "The Closed Garden", which I hadread His comments sufficed to show that when Mr.Watson sets up as a critic, a being which he declaresought not to exist, he reveals himself to be a remark-ably bad one His critical canons are singularly nar-row j he condemned "The Closed Garden" on psy-chological grounds, though he did not deign topoint out wherein its psychology was false My ownopinion, after a reading of "The Closed Garden"

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C R I T I C I S M ' S R I G H T TO EXIST

and a careful study of Mr Watson's lectures onbehaviorism, is that Julien Green is a far more pro-found psychologist than Watson will ever be

Middleton But may I point out that all these

arguments are merely arguments ad hominem?

Merely to declare that Watson is anaesthetic, or toshow that he is inconsistent, does not lessen the force

of his attack upon criticism What we want are

con-vincing arguments ad rem.

Elder, You are right: our object is not to make

a fool of Watson—he doubtless takes care of thatwell enough for himself—but to arrive at the truth,and to do that we must answer the arguments heputs forward

Middleton, Of course, certain points are clear

immediately To say, for example, that one man'sopinion of a work of art is just as good as another'sbecause our visceral processes are "our own" isplainly nonsense Our brains—or as Watson wouldput it, our laryngeal processes—are our own too; but

I have never known anybody to put that fact ward to justify an error of reasoning or of fact Weadmit that for a person who is color-blind the dif-ference between red and green does not exist, but

for-that is not to deny for-that there is a difference between

red and green For a blind man the whole visibleuniverse does not exist as such, but we do not admitthat the blind man's view of the universe is as com-plete as ours, or even that his view of it is as goodfor him as ours is for us There is aesthetic and

25

spiritual blindness as well as merely physiologicalblindness Some good people can look at a Cezannefor an hour without ever really seeing it When ourbrains—or laryngeal processes—are not infallible,and even our eyes and ears are not infallible, whyshould Watson be so superstitious as to regard ourvisceral reactions as infallible? What is so particu-larly sacred about them? As a matter of fact, it isnotorious that our visceral reactions deceive us moreoften than our eyes and ears and brains put together.

Elder In brief, if I understand you correctly,

the fact that our visceral reactions are "our own" nomore validates their responses than the fact that ourbrains are our own proves that the conclusions thosebrains come to on scientific questions are correct?

Middleton Exactly.

Arthur But you check up a scientific theory by

showing either that it does or does not accord withcertain observations or established facts What factsare there to check my aesthetic judgments against?What facts are there to check my enjoyment against?

Middleton The error that you and Watson fall

into is the rather widespread one of supposing thatthe sole function of art is to give the individualspectator a sort of aesthetic "kick." Now art doesnot exist in a vacuum 5 it is a reflection of life and

a part of life Novels, dramas and poems have ences to alleged facts, and imply conclusions, or atleast attitudes, on the part of their authors Ourreaction to a novel or a drama depends very largely

refer-26

C R I T I C I S M ' S R I G H T TO EXIST

upon whether we believe that the episodes or thecharacters in it reflect or illuminate "life" or experi-ence When Watson condemns "The Closed Gar-den" for its psychology, his criticism is precisely ofthis kind Representative art, such as painting orsculpture, has similar references to actuality

Arthur Paintings are no longer judged by such

standards Your modern art critic calls upon us toadmire nudes that are all out of proportion, orchaotic "abstractions" that do not represent anything

in nature

Middleton Still, it does make a difference

whether a bungler draws a misshapen neck because

he does not know how to draw at all, or whether

a master like El Greco deliberately elongates a neck

in order to reveal "the inclination of the soul"

Arthur Well, just what relation to facts has

decorative design, or music?

Middleton The relation is elusive, but it exists.

We certainly recognize the relation of music to lifewhen we apply to it such adjectives as "noble",

"serene", "sentimental", or "vulgar" Decorative sign depends for its attractiveness partly on an agree-able stylization of something in nature, like leaves

de-or flowers, de-or on satisfactions connected with metric balance or ingenuity

geo-Elder I am not sure that it is necessary to

estab-lish a connection between art and objective fact inorder to prove that one person's aesthetic opinion isnot as good as another's After all, the consensus of

27

THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

qualified opinion ought to be enough to assure usthat certain works of art are definitely superior toothers

Arthur "Qualified opinion" begs the question.

Each of us regards that opinion as "qualified" whichagrees with his own We do not appeal to "qualifiedopinion" to settle a scientific question, but to hardobjective facts

Middleton No, perhaps Elder is right Possibly

what we call "facts" themselves rest merely onqualified opinion Verification, as Charles HortonCooley has remarked, is the assent of competentminds When you get beyond precise and easilyrepeated experiment it involves interpretation and

is never unquestionable A R Wallace got intoserious trouble by attempting to prove, on a bet, thatthe surface of the earth was curved The refereeapparently gave him the money, but the other manwas never convinced It all comes back, as Cooleyremarks, to the verdict of the expert group, which

is the best guide we have, but not infallible

Elder Watson, it seems to me, becomes most

absurd when he argues that he can determine thevalue of a work of art "experimentally"—that is tosay, by counting noses Such a method may do wellenough in politics, where the mob has to be humored,but it is wholly out of place in the domain of beautyand truth To determine how many persons like apicture is not to determine how much it is aestheti-cally worth, any more than to learn how many per-

28

sons hold an opinion indicates anything about thetruth of that opinion No one suggests, not evenWatson, that a scientific question can be settled bytaking a vote on it The opinion of scientists, like theopinion of authorities on art, is often a minorityopinion Indeed, when Copernicus announced thatthe earth was round and revolved about the sun, hewas initially in a minority of one.

Middleton And Watson, who is still in a

minor-ity on the subject of behaviorism, and likely to remain

in one, ought to appreciate the force of that ment Watson is a democrat and an egalitarian inthe field of art for no other reason than that he is

argu-an ignoramus in the field of art But in the field ofpsychology, in which he has specialized, he is anaristocrat, even a snob and a despot Here he notonly doesn't believe that one person's opinion is as

good as another's · y he doesn't seem to believe thatnovelists are entitled to think about the subject ofpsychology at all

Arthur But it is senseless to talk as if aesthetic

questions could be settled by the same methods asscientific questions To go back to Elder's illustra-tion: Copernicus began by being in a minority ofone, but he convinced the world by pointing out thatothers could make observations that were the samefor everybody, and draw deductions that were thesame for everybody There is no such universality,

no such objective means of corroboration, in aestheticjudgments It still remains true that a street-sweeper's

29

response to a painting by Cezanne is as good for him

as yours is for you His own honest response, indeed,

is better for him than yours would be Why shouldyou seek to impose your opinion on him?

Elder It is true that his opinion ought to be

honest, and that it is better for him to have his ownresponse than to be intimidated into professing aresponse that he does not really feel But the trainedcritic's opinion, if expressed, may legitimately in-fluence the street-sweeper's opinion The critic mayanalyze the work and call attention to merits andbeauties that the street-sweeper (whom I am takingthroughout to mean the general untrained public)might otherwise have overlooked The critic may, inbrief, interpret the painting for the street-sweeper,enrich his response, enable him to derive a pleasurefrom the painting that he would not otherwise havederived

Arthur I have not observed that most criticism

has that aim On the contrary, most critics are fond

of giving reasons why the street-sweeper shoulddespise the things he really does admire The street-sweeper derives real pleasure from jazz and themovies, and the critic seeks to make the street-sweeper ashamed of this pleasure, and holds up forhis admiration unintelligible paintings and unintel-ligible poetry and unintelligible music that can nevergive the street-sweeper any real joy

Elder It is true that until his taste has been

educated, jazz will give him more pleasure than

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C R I T I C I S M ' S R I G H T TO EXIST

Brahms, and Zane Grey more than Henry James,and Edgar Guest more than Wordsworth, and thephilosophy of Arthur Brisbane more than that ofPlato, and superstition more than science But I feelthat in each case education from these lower to thesehigher tastes would make his life fuller and richer,and open to him avenues of delight that he does notnow even dimly suspect

Arthur Well, I am sure of this, that criticism

will never change the street-sweeper's fundamentaltastes To begin with, he will never read the criti-cism

Middle ton Arthur is right, and I think you have

both devoted too much time to this aspect of thequestion already After all, I hardly think that criti-cism's main effort, even if there were any chance ofsuccess, should be directed to uplifting the aestheticappreciation of street-sweepers

Elder Of course you understand that in talking

of street-sweepers I—and I assume Arthur also—was talking merely of Philistines generally, who mayexist at any economic level of society For all Iknow, there may be individual street-sweepers who,when they get home in the evening, find consolation

in Proust and Chopin

Middleton Even so, it seems to me that

criti-cism has other and higher aims than the rather less one of trying to educate Philistines

hope-Elder You are right On a mere pleasure

the-ory—pleasure in the material or pig-sty sense—I