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15 - The critic and society, 1900–1950

from THE CRITIC AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Morris Dickstein
Edited by
A. Walton Litz ,
Louis Menand  and
Lawrence Rainey
A. Walton Litz
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Louis Menand
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Lawrence Rainey
Affiliation:
University of York
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Summary

Surveying the state of criticism in 1891, Henry James wrote: ‘If literary criticism may be said to flourish among us at all, it certainly flourishes immensely, for it flows through the periodical press like a river that has burst its dikes. The quantity of it is prodigious … Periodical literature is a huge, open mouth which has to be fed – a vessel of immense capacity which has to be filled.’ Filling this maw, James found, was a great deal of uninspired chatter of a generalised, mechanical kind, a deluge of ‘reviewing’ that ‘in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism’: ‘What strikes the observer above all, in such an affluence, is the unexpected proportion the discourse uttered bears to the objects discoursed of – the paucity of examples, of illustrations and productions, and the deluge of doctrine suspended in the void.’

Besides this periodical literature there was also academic scholarship that was either genteel-Arnoldian, concerned with upholding certain moral and social values, or historical-philological, oriented toward establishing literary facts, mainly biographical, and exact texts, some of which – the poems of Donne and other metaphysical poets, for example – would prove essential to the critical revolution that followed. But especially in America, there was little that we today – with our ingrained emphasis on close reading, with our view of literary commentary as professional discourse yet also as a political and social argument – would describe as criticism. Two longtime antagonists, the humanist Paul Elmer More and his iconoclastic opponent, H. L. Mencken, could agree on one thing: the sheer paucity of genuine aesthetic criticism in the first decade of the twentieth century, when each began writing. ‘When I did most of my work’, wrote More, ‘there was almost a critical vacuum in this country and in England … It was something of an achievement – I say it unblushingly – just to keep going in such a desert.’ Mencken said much the same thing. ‘When I began to practice as a critic, in 1908, … it was a time of almost inconceivable complacency and conformity.’

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 322 - 376
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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