The Critic as Aphorist

In recent times, criticism has become more and more pedagogic and explicatory and less and less devoted to what Wordsworth called ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure’, the delight that is the true reward of poetry. The university presses, which used to publish books that made their readers think, now specialise in self-help manuals that teach them how to pass an exam or write a thesis, and theses have become preoccupied with how to read rather than with what is being read. A word-perfect banality has been the order of the day: a criticism that is primarily instrumental, reader’s guides that squeeze the life out of art in the cause of scholarship. The last thing such criticism deals in is the aphorism, thought designed to foster further thinking. Yet critics from Dr Johnson to Eliot have relished the epigram that takes us beyond conventional ideas and what we already know to criticism that refuses to settle for mere opinions – Coleridge’s Animae Poetae, say, or Lawrence on American literature. In the present complacent state of our criticism there is therefore scope for less predictable approaches.

My reason for recommending these two short books by the distinguished music critic Christopher Wintle is that they seek to revive criticism as a means of thought and not just as a source of judgements and information. Wintle was a founding editor of Music Analysis (a kind of musical Scrutiny) and he is the general editor of the works of Hans Keller, an authority on opera (Wagner, Verdi, and Britten) and a teacher of musical composition. What is more, he writes too well to speak only to musicians. He also knows a great deal about contemporary literature, cinema, and painting (he is an avid collector) and he is refreshingly ready to include them in his thinking about music. There is no question here of the arts being put away in separate boxes of their own, where musicians talk only of music and poets just of poetry. He can go naturally from Mozart to, say, Ingmar Bergman or Heine. In every case, what he dwells on is how works of art work as art, rather than through doctrines. And he opens up this range for his reader without ever falling into name-dropping, put on to impress us. We have the example of a thinker for whom all the arts belong together and shed light on each other, something rare in criticism since Goethe and Ruskin pursued their idea of art wherever it led them: a perspective seldom found in our atomised universities, locked in their separate, self-enclosed departments and faculties.

At this point, I should explain what is meant here by the word ‘aphorism’, which Wintle defines as ‘thinking about thought’. First, some of his aphorisms about aphorisms themselves: ‘A good aphorism is as good as the thought it provokes is long’; ‘aphorism is the pill that keeps verbosity at bay’. The relevance of this to academic criticism will be clear. So too will the difference of such aphorisms or maxims from flashy epigrams or off-the-peg quotations. Wit, such as we get in writers like Montaigne or Molière, is never glib; it seeks not to dazzle us but to help us to think for ourselves. It entails more than just the instant brilliance we admire in a quip of Oscar Wilde’s, the kind of wit that is absorbed in its own cleverness. Yet, as Erasmus says in The Praise of Folly, ‘the nicest thing of all is that you have someone else’s madness to thank for your enjoyment’. Good criticism, that is, should be exuberant, not just solemn and worthy. Brecht once said that ‘a theatre that cannot be laughed in is a theatre to laugh at...