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On a Recent Piece of Criticism
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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It is often said that the standards of literary criticism are lower than they used to be. I think that criticism, like poetry, is healthier at the top than it was a generation ago, but that there is a wider gap between the best and the second-best. If the standards of the best are higher, those of the second-best – week-to-week journalism – have sunk. Whispers often circulate about the lack of disinterestedness on the part of reviewers, about cabals and private motives, about the pliancy of periodicals in the interest of advertising revenue, and so on. Such scandals, if and when they are justified, are serious enough: but to my mind they present the less depressing aspect. If we could maintain that the trouble with journalistic criticism was simply that it is all in the wrong hands, that would imply at least that we had only to turn the rascals out, and replace them with honest men, and all would be well. But what if the honest men are incompetent critics too? What if they are not so much “bad critics,” as frequently people who do not know what the function of criticism is, and who, whether they praise or condemn, do so without relevance? The menace is not so much public immorality, as a relaxation of intelligence on the part of the half-educated, writing hurriedly for the quarter-educated. The danger of debilitated criticism does not come from any one direction: it is all about us, with the decline of the standards of higher education in the background; and it is something which we have all consciously to resist, if we are not to be guilty of writing the kind of criticism I have in mind.
Such considerations are given immediate point by a short essay by Mr. G. W. Stonier in the last number of
Mr. Stonier begins by asking, in effect, what has happened to Pound between 1908 and 1937?