In literature, vulgarity is preferable to nullity, just as grocer's port is preferable to distilled water.
Good taste is much more a matter of discrimination than of exclusion, and when good taste feels compelled to exclude, it is with regret, not with pleasure.
Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a litde more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, "I know what I like," he is really saying "I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu," because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.
Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else's. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes. So long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dream of Eden is his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments. Accordingly, I must now give my answers to a questionnaire I once made up which provides the kind of information I should like to have myself when reading other critics.
eden
Landscape
Limestone uplands like the Pennines plus a small region of igneous rocks with at least one extinct volcano. A precipitous and indented sea-coast.
Climate British.
Ethnic origin of inhabitants
Highly varied as in the United States, but with a slight nordic predominance.
Language
Of mixed origins like English, but highly inflected.
Weights & Measures
Irregular and complicated. No decimal system.
Religion
Roman Catholic in an easygoing Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of local saints.
Size of Capital
Plato's ideal figure, 5004, about right.
Form of Government
Absolute monarchy, elected for life by lot.
Sources of Natural Power
Wind, water, peat, coal. No oil.
Economic activities
Lead mining, coal mining, chemical factories, paper mills, sheep farming, truck farming, greenhouse horticulture.
Means of transport
Horses and horse-drawn vehicles, canal barges, balloons. No automobiles or airplanes.
Architecture
State: Baroque. Ecclesiasticaclass="underline" Romanesque or Byzantine. Domestic: Eighteenth Century British or American Colonial.
Domestic Furniture and Equipment
Victorian except for kitchens and bathrooms which are as full of modern gadgets as possible.
Formal Dress
The fashions of Paris in the 1830's and '40's.
Sources of Public Information
Gossip. Technical and learned periodicals but no newspapers.
Public Statues
Confined to famous defunct chefs.
Public Entertainments
Religious Processions, Brass Bands, Opera, Classical Ballet. No movies, radio or television.
If I were to attempt to write down the names of all the poets and novelists for whose work I am really grateful because I know that if I had not read them my life would be poorer, the list would take up pages. But when I try to think of all the critics for whom I am really grateful, I find myself with a list of thirty-four names. Of these, twelve are German and only two French. Does this indicate a conscious bias? It does.
If good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say—"Life is more important than anything I can say about it"—than to say—"Mr. A's work is more important than anything I can say about it."
There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics.
Authors can be stupid enough, God knows, but they are not always quite so stupid as a certain kind of critic seems to think. The kind of critic, I mean, to whom, when he condemns a work or a passage, the possibility never occurs that its author may have foreseen exactly what he is going to say.
What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:
O Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2O Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
Give a "reading" of a work which increases my understanding of it.
Throw light upon the process of artistic "Making."
6} Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.
The first three of these services demand scholarship. A scholar is not merely someone whose knowledge is extensive; the knowledge must be of value to others. One would not call a man who knew the Manhattan Telephone Directory by heart a scholar, because one cannot imagine circumstances in which he would acquire a pupil. Since scholarship implies a relation between one who knows more and one who knows less, it may be temporary; in relation to the public, every reviewer is, temporarily, a scholar, because he has read the book he is reviewing and the public have not. Though the knowledge a scholar possesses must be potentially valuable, it is not necessary that he recognize its value himself; it is always possible that the pupil to whom he imparts his knowledge has a better sense of its value than he. In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.