'The First Requisite of Literary Criticism'

In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein celebrated one of the major publishing events of the twenty-first century, the eight-volume Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot. The parting sentence in Epstein’s review suggests its significance and the poignance of its appearance at this time: “Reading in it, one longs for the time to return when the detritus of the digital age disappears and literature once again occupies a central place in our culture.” I first read Eliot’s poetry shortly after his death in 1965, and his critical essays several years later, and even my unformed mind recognized the earned authority of his voice. I immediately wanted to memorize some of his lines. You could argue with particulars -- especially his anti-Semitic slurs -- but ignoring Eliot was impossible. 

Recently I reread Eliot’s elegiac essay on Charles Whibley (1859-1930), the English literary journalist and friend to such writers as Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. Eliot is commonsensical and free of snobbery and academic condescension:

 

“The distinction between ‘journalism’ and ‘literature’ is quite futile, unless we are drawing such violent contrast as between Gibbon’s History and tonight’s evening paper; and such a contrast itself is too violent to have meaning. You cannot, that is, draw any useful distinction between journalism and literature merely in a scale of literary values, as a difference between the well-written and the supremely well-written: a second-rate novel is not journalism, but it is certainly not literature.”

 

Eliot examines the notion that a journalist’s work is “of only passing interest, intended to make an immediate strong impression, and destined to eternal oblivion.” Journalism is “ephemeral” when it is written ephemerally. Eliot goes on:

 

“Those persons who are drawn by the powerful attraction of Jonathan Swift read and re-read with enchanted delight The Drapier’s Letters; and these letters are journalism according to my hint of a definition, if anything is. But The Drapier’s Letters are such an important item now in English letters, so essential to any one who would be well read in the literature of England, that we ignore the accident by which we still read them. If Swift had never written Gulliver’s Travels, and if he had not played a striking  and dramatic part in political life, and if this amazing madman had not supplemented these claims to permanence by a most interesting private life, what would be the place of The Drapier’s Letters now? They would be praised now and then by some student of Anglo-Irish history . . .”

 

Epstein, Eliot and Whibley are all, among other things, literary journalists. Today they represent an endangered species, which is a shame. Consider the wit and intelligence with which Whibley writes of Sir Thomas Browne in his Essays in Biography (1913):

 

“Whatever was marvellous lay within his heart and brain. Such adventures as he met with were the adventure of his soul. The castles whose walls he had battered were the castles of error. That he followed Erasmus and Montaigne in marvelling at the miracle of his life suggests that intelligence knows as keen a triumph as political cunning or warlike courage. His victories, like theirs, were books.”

 

Whibley is equally gifted at opprobrium. Here he is on Rousseau in Political Portraits (1923):

 

“The reason why the views of Rousseau are acceptable to the democrats of to-day is that he was the apotheosis of the half-baked. For wit and learning he had a profound contempt. He had read Plutarch and la Calprenède, and little else. . . . His intelligence was warped and scanty. He was almost incapable of reason.”

 

Anyone interested in English prose, critical thought or good books in general can enjoy Eliot’s essay on Whibley, a writer whose name they are unlikely to have otherwise known. I know him thanks only to Eliot (and the late John Gross). His essay could have been a rote recitation of titles, dates and platitudes, as most literary obituaries and tributes are. Instead, Eliot gives us twelve pages (in my copy of Selected Essays 1917-1932) of more history, witty prose and juicy critical judgments than you’ll find in a year’s subscription to the New York Review of Books. Eliot writes of Whibley:

 

“The first requisite of literary criticism, as of every other literary or artistic activity, is that it shall be interesting. And the first condition of being interesting is to have the tact to choose only those subjects in which one is really interested, those that are germane to one’s own temper.”

 

[See also Epstein’s “T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture” in the November 2010 issue of Commentary.]