'To Badness I Always Turned with Relief'

I’m no critic and have never claimed to be one, despite what a reader alleges. In general, literary criticism is boring. Few critics can write respectably, and the parasitic nature of the enterprise has always made me uneasy. Criticism is seldom autonomous, though there are exceptions. We read Johnson, Hazlitt and their heirs not because they tell us who we ought to read, but for the pleasure their thoughts and prose give us. Otherwise, criticism tends to be either ingrown bloviating or a gussied-up version of Consumer Reports. The idea of a reader who can’t write and has no taste telling us what is worth reading is amusing but hardly worthy of refutation.

I’m pleased to learn that Max Beerbohm shared a version of my thinking on the subject. In 1942, he wrote a brief “prefatory letter” for Alan Dent’s collection of theater reviews, Preludes and Studies. Dent was a Scottish critic, secretary to James Agate (whom Jacques Barzun called “the Supreme Diarist”) and friend of Beerbohm’s. Unlike Dent, Beerbohm tells us, he never cultivated “the art of modesty”:

“You never push yourself forward. You merge yourself in your theme. You wish that your reader shall share your pleasure in good work that you admire, and shall incidentally learn from you just why it is admirable. My own wish was that the reader should admire me. And it served me right that, so far as I am aware, he didn't.”

   

Beerbohm is having some fun. His weapons-grade sense of irony enables him to be at once gracious, self-deprecating and vain. Then he turns “modest”:

“The only excuse I can find for myself is that I was never, in the true sense, a critic; never an enlightening judge of excellence. I knew what was good, but I was apt to be puzzled as to the constituents of its goodness, and was a foggy eulogist. Badness is easy game, and to badness I always turned with relief. Badness is auspicious to the shower-off. Its only drawback is that it isn’t worth writing about.”

Beerbohm reveals a trade secret: writing a pan is more fun than a plaudit. It’s easier to be funny. “But I find no depreciations included in your book,” he writes, “and am glad of this absence -- though I have no doubt that you are as good a depreciator as I deemed myself.”