Scholarship and Criticism

SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM IGeorge Whalley Somebody has suggested that scholarship is to criticism what engineering is to architecture. At first sight this is an attractive analogy. Without some appreciation of engineering principles the architect's building may collapse. Perhaps that was the main point in making the analogy. However, the figure carries disturbing overtones, in the hint that criticism not only stands upon the shoulders of humble scholarship, but also may have something -as architecture does-to do with designing things. Without an architect 's design an engineer may be expected to produce a structure useful and durable enough but probably inducing no sense of delight. But what does a critic design? and if he does produce a plan of some structure to be built to, is it as a critic that he does so? and who would be the builder? It may simply be that the apparently gnileless analogy is heavy with latent clouds of glory, for Vitruvius has it that An Architect ought to understand Languages, to be skillful of Painting, wellinstructed in Geometrie, DOt ignorant of Perspective, furnished with Arithmeticke , have knowledge of many histories, and diligently have heard Philosophers, have skill of Musicke, not ignorant of Physicke, know the answeres of Lawyers, and have Astronomie, and the courses Celestia1, in good knowledge. Leo Baptista Albertus, in a similar vein of transcendent rhapsody, asserts that the Architect is that man, who hath the skill, (by a certaine and meruailous meanes and way,) both in minde and Imagination to determine ... what works so euer, by motion of weight, and cuppling and framyng together of bodyes, may most aptly be Commodious for the wortbiest Uses of Man.... Wberupon he is neither Smith, nor Builder: nor, separately, any Artificer; but the Hed, the Provost, the Directer and Judge of all Artificiall workes, and all Artificers. : So much for architects. If scholars be to such demigods mere hodcarriers , their relation to criticism may warrant examination. 34 GEORGE WHALLEY The traditional and vulgar views of the scholar ar~ne must confess -heavily weighted with a sense of comedy, particularly on the score of his minuteness and his detachment. They have as much need of hellebore as others [Burton tells us]. They have a worm as well as others. You shall find a phantastical strain, a fustian, a bombast, a vain-glorious humour, an affected style . . . run parallel throughout their works.... They bewray aod daub a company of books aod good authors with their absurd comments .. . and shew their wit in censuring others, a company of foolish note~makers, bumble bees, dors or beetles. ... Yet if any man dare oppose or contradict, they are mad, up in anus on a sudden, how many sheets are written in defence, how bitter invectives, what apologies? Cervantes and Sterne give us different versions-hilarious but poignant -of the learned mind alienated from the real world; and Rabelais makes excellent use of a cumbersome grotesque erudition grown carcinomatous . Virgilius Mara, the grammarian of Toulouse, who flourished -if flourish is the correct word-round about the seventh century, tells a story of two scholars of his time who for IS days and nights, without food or sleep, argned about the frequentative of the verb to be, and nearly ended the discussion at sword-point. Virgil of Toulouse might himself have been one of these: at least his choice of a name is some measure of his conceit. Yeats's lines, written when he was living in Oxford in 1914-15, shape a familiar portrait of the scholars: Bald heads forgetful of their sios, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter beauty's ignorant ear. Yet there is something splendid about Virgil of Toulouse arguing whether there can be a vocative of ego while ancient empires crashed and dissolved about his ears. And we hesitate to dismiss even him out of hand as a mere pedant, recalling that it was he who first traced the transition of Latin into Proven~al, and the transition of quantitative Latin verse into the accentual vernacular line. We may also recall that the labours of...