Works of Art Must Be Judged by Tod~y's Critic in Relation to Other Times as Well as to Our Own THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CRITIC* By F. O. MATTHIEssEN y deliberately grave title is in the instigated, if one may use such a violent tradition from Matthew Arnold, word as revolution in the field of the arts, M.. my first critical enthusiasm as an where all victories fortunately are blood­ undergraduate thirty years ago. But at that less, and where what was overthrown re­ very time a new critical movement was ris­ mains undestroyed and capable of being ing, the critical movement in which we are rediscovered at the next turn of the wheel living today. T. S. Eliot's first important es­ of taste. When Eliot was growing up, the say, Tradition and the Indi'Uidual Talent, tastes and standards of Arnold were still was written in 1917, when he was twenty­ prevailing; and Eliot found himself wholly nine; and 1. A. Richards' first independent dissatisfied with Arnold's preoccupation and most influential book, The Principles of with the spirit of poetry rather than with Literary Criticism, came out in 1924, when its form. The form of Eliot's own first he was in his early thirties. The talents and poems was deceptively radical, since he was principles of those two then young men have really rejecting the easily flowing forms been the most pervasive forces upon the of the romantics and the Elizabethans for criticism of the past quarter-century. the more intricately weighted forms of the We know now what a revolution they symbolists and the metaphysicals. When Richards, as a psychologist who Throughout his whole career FllANCIS OTro MAT­ THIESSEN has been a teacher and critic, and his repu­ believed in the basic importance of the tation in his chosen field led to his being selected to words with which men try to fathom their give the annual Hopwood Lecture on May z6, 1949. meanings, began to read Eliot's poems, he The accompanying article is his address to the student writers on that occasion. Professor Matthiessen was encountered the kind of language that graduated from Yale University in 19Z3, and after proved most compelling to readers just two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he took up after the First World War. The immense graduate studies at Harvard, receivine- his doctorate in 19Z7. Two years' teaching at Yale were followed loosening of speech that had accompanied by a returl'l to Harvard, where he is now Professor of the rapid expansions in mass education and History and Literature. The liberal views evidenced in mass communication had reached the point his article are also indicated by his membership on the Executive Board of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties where, if the artist was again to communi­ Union and his activity in the Harvard Teachers Union. cate the richness and denseness of real He iJ also a senior fellow of the Kenyon School of Eng­ experience, he must use a language that lish. Professor Matthiessen has written a number of books, including critical essays on T. S. Eliot, Emerson, compelled the reader to slow down, to be Whitman, Russell Cheney, and several on Henry James. concerned once more with the trip rather His most recent book is entitled From th~ Hearl of than with the arrival. As the young English Europe, a travel journal of the six months he spent abroad, mainly at Salzburg and Prague, in 1947. He critic T. E. Hulme had been arguing, is now editing the Oxford Book of Amer;can Verse and writing a critical biography of Theodore Dreiser for * Copyright 1949 Board of Regents of the Univer­ the new "American Men of Letters Series." sity of Michigan. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW before he was killed in battle in 1915, poetry As a result both teachers and students are must always endeavor thus "to arrest you more capable of close analysis and lively ... to make you continuously see a physical appreciation than they were a generation thing, to prevent you gliding through an ago. abstract process." But by now we have reached the stage What resulted from the joint influence where revolt has begotten its own set of of Eliot and Richards was a criticism that conventions, to use the terms of one of aimed to give the closest possible attention Harvard's great former teachers, John to the text at hand, to both the structure Livingston Lowes. As we watch our own and texture of the language. You are all generation producing whole anthologies of familiar with the names of its practitioners criticism devoted to single contemporary who, if we confine ourselves to America authors and more and more detailed books alone, have already produced a more seri­ of criticism of criticism, we should realize ous and exacting body of work than we that we have come to the unnatural point had previously witnessed in this country. where textual analysis seems to be an end To be sure, Richards' most gifted follower in itself. The so-called little magazines was one of his own students at Cambridge, have been essential and valiant outposts England. William Empson, in his preco­ of revolt in our time when the magazines cious Seven Types of Ambiguity (1929), of wide circulation, in decline from their begun when he was still an undergraduate, standards in the nineteenth century, have pushed to its subtle extreme Richards' kind abandoned serious discussion of literature of linguistic analysis. Empson in turn has almost entirely. had a particular vogue here among the But the little magazines seem now to be critics whom we now associate with the giving rise to the conventions and vocabu­ newly founded Kenyon School of Criticism, lary of a new scholasticism and to be not most notably with John Crowe Ransom, always distinguishable from the philologi­ Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. cal journals which they abhor. The names Others whose names are linked with that of the authors may be modern, but the school, Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, smell is old. The trouble is that the terms Allen Tate, Austin Warren, and Yvor of the new criticism, its devices and strate­ Winters, however divergent their methods gies and semantic exercises, can become as and emphases, reveal throughout their pedantic as any other set of terms if they work how they have had to reckon with are not handled as the means to fresh dis­ Eliot and Richards, whether in concord or coveries but as counters in a stale game. belligerence. In too many recent articles literature seems to be regarded merely as a puzzle to be HE EFFECT of this new movement solved. T upon the study of literature in our This is not to underestimate the great universities has been by now considerable. and continuing service performed by the Although opposed by both the old guards few quarterlies devoted to criticism, or by of philologists and literary historians, most those even littler magazines that often last of the critics I have mentioned now hold only long enough to introduce one or two academic appointments, which mayor may new talents in poetry or fiction. The im­ not have been good for their work. But portant experimental work of our time has their work has thereby become instrumental again and again been able to secure its first in the revolt against concentrating exclu­ publication only through their pages. This sively on the past, and against concentrating is one of the consequences of what on literary history instead of on literature. F. R. Leavis, the editor of Scrutiny, has THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CRITIC called the split between "mass civilization" between past and present: that the past is and "minority culture." But to recognize not what is dead, but what is already living; that phenomenon in our democracy should and that the present is continually modify­ only be to combat it. ing the past, as the past conditions the There is potentially a much greater audi­ present. If one avails himself of the full ence in America for the art of literature resources latent in that preception, one is than the blurb-writers, who often pass for aware that it is not possible to be a good reviewers in the Sunday supplements, would critic of Goethe today without knowing seem to suspect. The effectiveness of the Mann, or of Stendhal or Balzac without critics in the little magazines in having by knowing Proust, or of Donne or Dryden now prepared a wider public for, say, Joyce without knowing Eliot. or Kafka or Eliot, amply testifies to that. The converse is equally true, if less But the dilemma for the serious critic in necessary to be argued in the academy. But our dangerously split society is that, feeling once outside, particularly in the rapid and isolated, he will become serious in the rootless life of our cities, the tendency wrong sense, aloof and finally taking an even for practitioners in the arts is to be inverted superiority in his isolation. At immersed wholly in the immediate. This is that point criticism becomes a kind of not what James foresaw, since he took for closed garden. granted the constant meeting-point between what was already known and what was still y VIEWS are based on the conviction to be known. But today we can take no M that the land beyond the garden's tradition for granted, we must keep repos­ walls is more fertile, and that the responsi­ sessing the past for ourselves if we are not bilities of the critic lie in making renewed to lose it altogether.