The Winter Critic
A nationally known critic who wrote studies of Eliot, James, Dreiser, and the New England renaissance, I’. O. M VTTHIESSKN taught at Harvard from 1929 to 1950. This essay is from his posthumous volume, The Responsibilities of the Critic, edited by John Rackliffe and published by Oxford.
by F. O. MATTHIESSEN
I GO on the assumption that a review is simply a short piece of criticism, and that it should be as good criticism as its writer can make it. This means a declaration of war on all literary supplements in which you can’t tell the reviews from the advertisements, except that the reviewers are a slightly inferior type of publisher’s agent. As a reviewer, I think that we ought to pay attention to the kind of letter I received recently from a younger creative writer. “In books we have dignity enough,”he said, “but the incalculable force of a Sunday Review is the soft drip that drives a man to the wall.”
Edgar Allan Poe had a similar perception a century ago, and I believe that Poe, who had to support himself by his pen in a very unfavorable market, is still our best model for a reviewer. He protested against what he called the “cant of generalization,” and excoriated those who used the book nominally under review merely as an excuse for a diffuse essay on what they liked. He was equally astringent against those who went to the other extreme and substituted for the labor of analysis and judgment an easy “compendium of the work noticed, with copious extracts.”
Challenged by the ghost of Poe, I would submit that what he called “a critical notice” should at the minimum do three things. It should furnish exposition and description; it should enable you to feel concretely what is being described; and it should give you in the process an evaluation. The first of these three functions cannot be satisfactorily discharged by, say, making a digest of the plot of a novel or the chapter headings of a book of history. That will use up all your space and leave you with the compendium without judgment against, which Poe so rightly objected. Instead you must interweave your three functions. If the book at hand is a piece of literature, you can best suggest its quality by concentrating your exposition upon a few significant episodes, and by letting your reader feel for himself that quality, not through some illustrative quotations tacked on mechanically at the end, but through the force of a few deftly foreshortened examples woven into your exposition. And if that weaving has been really skillful, you won’t be faced with the necessity of a heavyhanded summary for your evaluation. You will have pointed if out lightly, by analytical insights, as you went along.
Beyond that blueprint for the dream review of my future, I should like to dwell on one further responsibility. It is the responsibility of “placing” the book at hand in relation to what has been previously accomplished in the same field; and our hurried methods of production and changing fashions of the moment make that responsibility the one that we are fulfilling least well. If you are reviewing a novel or a play or a book of poems, you should suggest, however briefly, how that book measures up to the current state of its art, whether it makes a fresh contribution, or whether it is simply more of the same. And if a good new book about Samuel Johnson or Matthew Arnold has appeared, you shouldn’t undertake to comment on it unless you are willing to glance back over the already existing work done on the subject, so that you can estimate precisely what has been added.
To anyone concerned with the free play of ideas or with the importance of new works of art, the most depressing feature of our present cultural scene is the continual overpraise of mediocrity. That makes the soft incessant drip which the young artist or thinker feels threatening him with engulfment. Even the destructive “cutting and slashing” of the old quarterlies was less damaging, for there at least vigorous men were speaking their own minds. Some reviewers may object that Poe’s standards are too high for daily use when he insists that the critical practitioner must be concerned with the first principles of art, that, indeed, as he said in his Marginalia, “It is the business of the critic so to soar that he shall see the sun.”
Matthew Arnold would have agreed that the realm of the critic is light, but I will settle for a more homely and a more timely metaphor. Give the winter critic a shovel, and let him get rid of the slush. Demand of him only that he doesn’t pretend that what he is dealing with is pure as the driven snow on yonder mountain top. And let him remember that his chief aid is the light of the sun, even if he only feels it on his back.