FAMOUSLY, MEMORABLY, Randall Jarrell, in “Poets, Critics, and Readers” (1959) said: “A good critic – we cannot help seeing, when we look back at any other age – is a much rarer thing than a good poet or a good novelist.”
Jarrell had written about Housman’s poetry in 1939, twenty years earlier in the Kenyon Review, an exercise in New Critical haruspication, as diligent as worming a dog. But his striking generalization about the good critic is surely indebted rather to Housman’s prose, his Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge (1911):
Whether the faculty of literary criticism is the best gift that heaven has in its treasuries I cannot say, but heaven seems to think so, for assuredly it is the gift most charily bestowed. Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are yet commoner than the appearance of Halley’s comet; literary critics are less common. And when, once in a century, or once in two centuries, the literary critic does appear – will someone in this home of mathematics tell me what are the chances that his appearance will be made among that small number of people who possess a considerable knowledge of the Latin language?
The Jarrell is pithier, but the Housman is first. They are agreed, though, about the special status of the great critic and his “superiority” to the artist. The seeds of this counter-intuitive proposition go further back still – to Oscar Wilde and yet further to Matthew Arnold.
Arnold and Wilde, frowning mentor and wilful epigone, Victorian prophet and enfant terrible – high seriousness versus sustained, willed flirtation with ideas. An unlikely alliance. In “The Critic as Artist”, Wilde alludes to “Thyrsis”, Arnold’s elegy for Clough:
It has been said by one whose gracious memory we all revere, and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her Sicilian fields, and those white feet stir, and not in vain, the Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is. But this is a very serious error, and takes no cognizance of Criticism’s most perfect form, which is in its essence purely subjective … So, respectful but divergent. Where is the concord? The thesis of Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” – the notion that criticism is creative – comes from the end of Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”: “it [criticism] may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible”. Wilde takes this idea, this theme, and produces a series of extravagant, inventive, virtuoso, increasingly improbable, striking variations. The Wilde-Tempered Clavier.
Our pleasure is watc
