Why Critics Don’t Go Mad

It gives me a mild astonishment when I discover that critics of poetry do not really go mad. That seems to be the honorable prerogative of the poets, in whose train the critics follow, though not that far. But the critics have a great and public stake in poetry, and in the fate of those fluent existences, epiphanies, and “levels of meaning” which poets call into being. Especially the modern critic; who thinks he must know the ultimate reality of the poetic visions, and who may say if he likes that his precursor, the Ur-modern, was Coleridge, whose inquiries into the nature of poetry were frankly metaphysical, or religious. So our gifted critic will get himself quickly into the intangibles of the subject, and thence into metaphysics, that universe which it is very hard to traverse, where the treacherous skies seem always about to thin out and clear, and the jostling elements seem about to precipitate their solid substances and assume fixed places. But these are events which do not. readily occur, at least without the benefit of dogma which makes them occur. To the modern critic (who is perhaps among the presentable instances of modern man) the ancient religious establishments may seem to have thought they found their solid ground too easily; it is as if religion took it for granted that it had achieved its form and station once and forever, yet still there had to come a “modern” time when everything was called into question and religion had to start all over again at the speculative level; and the second speculation is bound to be more adventurous than the first. But at any rate the critic in his own speculations is going to have many a moment asking himself if he sees what he thinks he sees, and if this is really the life for him. There is a bad sense of lostness, made the worse because he cannot take his trusting readers into his confidence. And now comes the period when he awakens in the night and tosses on his bed. It is when I think of his pains at this stage that I wonder why madness does not come to his aid. Heaven does not appear to accord so blank and absolute a relief to the critic, but only one that is humanistic and probationary. What happens is very sudden: an explosion of laughter, as the honest critic confesses that he cannot support his great ambitions, let other critics support theirs or not as may be; after which he will turn over and sleep like a babe, to awaken to bird-calls by daylight like a man restored, for the time being. The critic’s happiness is not even contaminated by any need to make a public confession. But his next ensuing essays almost make up by the modesty of their range what they lack, to the surprise of his regular readers, in the old daring and subtlety.

It will be apparent that I think of the critic very certainly as a good man; a man of integrity pursuing an uncertain career. He will not go mad. And parents may be advised, if they ask advice, that they need not fear to entrust the good young men their sons to him at the university, if they can qualify for the courses. They will be made acquainted among other things with the soul of modern man, and that is something which is in store for them anyhow, one time or another.