The Nineteenth Century has left a hedge of critical literature about every great writer of antiquity. By the time a student has bored his way through the treatises, he is old, and he is dull. He cannot taste the honey, for he has exhausted himself in cutting down the tree. Let us climb and sip. Three generations of modern scholars have befogged and begoggled their wits over Aeschylus and Horace. Let us never read the learning of these investigators. Let us be ignorant, nimble, and enthusiastic. Let us never drink of that cup of delusion, critical knowledge ... Must the novice read those forty pages of Williamowitz–Mollendorff which cover each dialogue of Plato like the grease on a Strasbourg pâté? ... Accurate scholarship, when it prevails, is the epilogue to literature.”
John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), American writer and essayist
Well! I have italicised the last sentence because it is so blatantly absurd — a complete reversal of the truth, in fact. And yet, when I first read it — in the 1960s, and before I had read any critical works — I was very inspired by Chapman’s sentiments, and I even felt that English Literature was suspect as a subject for study. After all, I had read Tom Sawyer, Lucky Jim, A Kind of Loving, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, The Day of the Sardine, The L–Shaped Room, Lucky Jim, and other novels without a thought in my head of ‘critical placement’ or analysis. Moreover, I am glad that I was not, at the time, ‘bothered’ with such considerations. How though, did such an intelligent and lively writer as Chapman come to these conclusions? In the absence of any certain knowledge, I would imagine that the ‘hedge of critical literature’ available to Chapman in his formative years was in all likelihood — for the most part, at least — tedious in the extreme. And perhaps some of it did not fall far short of what might have been termed the ‘Gradgrind School of Criticism’, in which — as per Bitzer’s definition of a horse — the ‘facts’ about Aeschylus, or whoever, lay in a heap of lifeless pieces at the reader’s feet. This is not to say that good criticism was entirely absent from the shelves during Chapman’s lifetime. To take but one example, Gissing’s Charles Dickens: a Critical Study was published in 1898 when Chapman was 36 — and it remains a very readable study to this day. My feeling is that Chapman’s criticism was aimed at a class of academics who had become so careful — as in ‘stultifying’ — that the blood had drained from their being. After all, Chapman was himself a critic. Here is a piece on the Transcendentalists from his essay on Emerson:
“There is something distressing about their letters, their talk, their memoirs, their interminable diaries. They worry and contort and introspect. They rave and dream. They peep and theorise. They cut open the bellows of life to see where the wind comes from. Margaret Fuller analyses Emerson, and Emerson, Margaret Fuller. It is not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. It is a nightmare, in which the emotions, the terror, the agony, the rapture, are unreal, and have no vital content, no consequence in the world outside. It is positively wonderful that so much excitement and so much suffering should have left behind nothing in the field of art which is valuable.”
Well, this is — as we say — ‘great stuff’. What further do we need than criticism of this vigour and liveliness? As answer to this, I will take a single piece from the chapter entitled ‘Voice’ in Bennett and Royle’s Introduction to Literature and Criticism (Pearson Education Ltd. 3rd edition 2004):“Literature...might be defined as being the space in which, more than anywhere else, the power, beauty and strangeness of the voice is both evoked or bodied forth and described, talked about, analyzed. In this respect, reading literary texts involves attending to extraordinary voices.”
Such an observation could scarcely have been made by anyone of Chapman’s generation. It results from a century of critical study, and raises our insight to a new level.
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