September 14, 2003

The writer or artist’s reputation stands helplessly at the mercy of the ‘critic’ who can, by the stroke of a pen, make or mar an established name

BEN JONSON said: “Critics are a kind of tinkers that make more faults than they mend ordinarily.”

Dryden asserted: “The corruption of a poet is the generation of a critic.”

J.P. Sartre complained: “They read quickly, badly and pass judgment before they understood.”

And that’s not the end.

In his almost classical book, The Making of Literature, R.A. Scott-James wrote: “To the criticism of the arts, and especially literature, custom has given an independent place. In this respect it differs from all other kinds of criticism. When we want a judgment upon the soundness of Waterloo Bridge, we call in an engineer or a practical architect — a man whose business is the making of bridges. But when we want a judgment upon the soundness of a poem, often it is not a maker of poems whom we consult, but a ‘critic’. Whilst we should distrust a book upon gardening by one who was not himself a gardener, we are willing to respect a ‘criticism’ of a play or a novel by one who is neither playwright nor novelist.”

Hence the saying: “Those who can do go it, and those who cannot, they either teach or criticize.”

The writer or artist’s reputation stands helplessly at the mercy of the ‘critic’ who can, by the stroke of a pen, make or mar an established name. And yet the creative talent is compelled to submit itself to the ‘critic’ if the creative person wants to reach his or her audiences.

All this tempts me to say what I know about criticism and about what, in established opinion, is expected of the critic.

Let us agree, at the beginning, that all art activity keeps moving forward from the fertilizing sources of knowledge and the freeplay of criticism. The creative person and the critic both bear a great responsibility to the society. The creative flame will die when it is deprived of the fresh air of free and fair criticism.

We are often told, and reminded, that the true function of criticism is to establish the best values cherished by man and not to pass judgment. A true critic must, therefore, judge in the same spirit in which the artist or the writer produced or ought to produce an object. The critic, we are told again, is essentially a many-sided humanist and connoisseur, unbiased and unfaltering, to be able ‘to give a correct, balanced opinion’.

True criticism thus expects the practitioner of criticism to judge in the same spirit in which the writer or the artist produced the thing. Matthew Arnold emphasized: “To propagate the best that is known or thought in the world, to establish a current of fresh and true ideas, to learn and understand and, by seeing things as they really are, to make the best ideas prevail, and to promote culture are the duties of a critic’.

A critic is, therefore, expected to be a man or a woman of culture concerned with all aspects of life and living. The critic cannot be accepted as the arbiter-general-at-large.

For clarity’s sake, let us look again into Sartre’s annoyance: “They read quickly, badly and pass judgment before they understood.” What he really wanted to say was that the critic should appreciate that creativity is always and essentially the outcome of intellectual curiosity which must never be treated cursorily and desultorily, that criticism means intelligent, sustained and discreet discussion with an effort to see an object as it really is in itself, the way it represents life and living at a particular time and place.

Best examples of such genuine and standard criticism are to be freely found in Aristophanes, Horace, Dante, Ben Jonson, Goethe, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold. They repeatedly stress that all genuine criticism begins with deep observation, that all deep observation begins with simultaneous concentration of all senses and sensibilities. A new bearing, a reconstruction, the act of deeper understanding and appreciation must always come first without which criticism becomes fatuous, empty and often silly. The critic becomes an enemy and not a friend of the arts as a source of cultural refinement. The critic must appear as a friend and not the master of the arts, remembering that a writer has a tremendous responsibility as a writer, a critic as a critic. They must know that half-truths can be more dangerous and damaging than falsehoods. The critic must clearly see his/her relation to the art and the writer/artist, as much his/her relations with the society in which he or she lives and works. Otherwise, criticism can easily fall victim to commercialism where artificialities rule supreme.

I conclude with a meaningful remark by R.A. Scott-James which presents a view of criticism in vogue: “It would be difficult to say when this separate title to exist was accorded to critics. That their letters patent today are in good order we all know — there is an accredited tribe of penmen whose function it is to praise or denounce works of art, and make or modify literary reputations; and the excellence with which these critics fulfil their functions is held to be a quite different excellence from that of the creative artists whom they judge. Like poets, novelists and painters, they may have attained their reputation by talent and study, or by luck; but they need not themselves be poets, novelists or painters — they are just critics. It is not necessary that they should have been successful practitioners in any art, except the art of criticism. Nor unsuccessful practitioners, for we may pass over the rude suggestion that they are those who have tried elsewhere and failed.”

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