The Critical Essay

IN literary criticism there survives to-day the polished and precise essay. In the magazines and in the hands of our publicists the essay has been replaced by the more aggressive-minded ‘article.’ But one can grow weary of articles: the essay lasts.

HERE are three collections of essays which may all be classified as literary criticism although they represent three markedly different approaches to that craft. In The Second Common Reader (Harcourt, Brace, $3,00), Virginia Woolf simply regards herself as the common reader with whom Dr. Johnson rejoiced to concur, since he believed that ‘by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtility and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours.’ Mrs. Woolf is certainly free from the corruption of both prejudice and dogmatism; she will never be solemn about any literary theory, nor much impressed by any bibliography. She doubts ‘if we had by heart the history of the origin, rise, growth, decline, and fall of the English novel from its conception (say) in Egypt to its decease in the wilds (perhaps) of Paraguay,’whether it would after all enable us to understand Robinson Crusoe any better, or to derive more pleasure than if we had

turned to the book itself at once. Her own direct impressions of some of her reading are what she has recorded here, reflections ranging from the time of the Elizabethans to the novels of Meredith and Hardy, impressions of a refined and subtle taste (despite the definition of the common reader!) that she has conveyed with enthusiasm and tact, which, both being present in equal measure, unite to form great charm.

Some of her subjects are exactly made for her hand — Dorothy Osborne’s Letters and Christina Rossetti, for example. Such a one as John Donne reveals her limitations: his robust virility is not to be caught by her graceful intuitions. She gives a sensitive picture, but it is not the whole man. Her relative failure here, put beside her skillful suggestion of the faint but pervasive attraction of Sidney’s Arcadia, would indicate that she is not so much writing criticism of books as re-creating the life front which they sprang. That is her method in her sequence of four figures from the late eighteenth century — Cowper, Beau Brummell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Dorothy Wordsworth. By reading between the lines of their lives as well as of their writing and talk, she is able to evoke in swift flashes something of the very nature of that changing time. It is the method which she used with such exciting skill in Orlando, a method owing something to her historical imagination, and more to her poetic sensibility, but most of all to the novelist’s ability to create a sense of life.

If Mrs. Woolf’s essays are essentially the work of a novelist, those of Van Wyck Brooks, Sketches in Criticism (Dutton, $3,50), are the work of a social rather than a literary critic. Although Mr. Brooks has always been primarily occupied with literature, his forte has lain not so much in the rounded estimate of individual authors (indeed his studies of Mark Twain and Henry James have been found increasingly wanting in this respect) as in a persistent analysis of the conditions of society that encourage or weaken the creative life. It has ever been his concern, as here in his brief ‘Thoughts on History,’ to point out that the real history of America is not to be read in the facts about the tariff, the growth of industry, or the winning of the West, but in the affirmations of the human spirit. As a result of his steady emphasis on values, ever since the appearance of America’s Coming-of-Age in 1915 his work has had a quickening effect upon others; indeed there is scarcely any younger critic of American literature who has not been in some way indebted to him. But, at the same time, this volume of essays written over a period of years shows the growingly evident flaw in all his work. He is too one-sided in his approach to American life to grasp its complexity; as a social critic he does not know enough history; often in his despair at our spiritual frustration he forces the facts to fit that despair. It really will not do to lament, as Mr. Brooks does in ‘The Critical Movement in America,’that America had no Ruskin to stigmatize the emptiness of its aims, and thus overlook the existence of Thoreau; nor, after praising the vigorous doubt that animated mid-nineteenthcentury English literature, to state that ‘meanwhile the writers of America chanted a unanimous hymn to progress.’ It would be better for Mr. Brooks to reread Hawthorne, or Melville’s Pierre, or even Whitman’s Democratic Vistas.

What Mr. Brooks’s work is lacking is what T. S. Eliot considers, in ‘The Function of Criticism,’ one of his Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50), to be the most important qualification for the critic — ‘a very highly developed sense of fact.’ As is nearly always the case with Mr. Eliot’s words, a great deal of thought is compressed into this seemingly quiet statement. Comparison and analysis are ‘the chief tools of the critic,’but in order to handle them he must bring to bear not only knowledge and generalizing power, but also the trained intuitions of a highly sensitive intelligence. I am in part paraphrasing the qualifications that Mr. Eliot listed in an earlier essay on “The Perfect Critic’; and it is not too high praise to state that he possesses these to a greater degree than anyone else writing in English to-day. His work may be sometimes lacking in logical consistency, but it gains ample compensation by being the criticism of a poet — that is to say, the work of a craftsman speaking directly and intimately of the art that he has mastered and understands. As a result his essays mark the first fresh evaluation of the nature of poetry since those of Matthew Arnold, and he takes his place in the direct succession of poet-critics that includes Sidney, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, and Coleridge.

These Selected Essays embrace the principal objects of his interest, and in their recurrence to the similar elements of passionate thought that can be found in Dante and Baudelaire, the late Elizabethan dramatists and John Donne, they reveal not only his acute penetration, but the main contours of his own theory of poetry. It is in his essay on the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets that he states why he believes that poetry in a complex age should be ‘difficult.’ When he develops his remark that ‘Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry,’ the sentences could fit The Waste Land; ‘Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion, have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labor of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul.’ And, in like manner, his analysis of the intensity of Baudelaire throws great light on his own. Such harmony between the aims of the poet and the critic indicates a remarkably unified nature; and indeed it is Mr. Eliot’s sincerity, his wholeness within the limits of his temperament, that is his most impressive quality.
F. O. MATTHIESSEN