To Criticize the Critic1

Of what use, or uses, is literary criticism, is a question worth asking again

and again, even if we find no answer satisfactory. Criticism may be, what
F. H. Bradley said of metaphysics, “the finding of bad reasons for what we
believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.”2 But
as I propose to talk about my own criticism my choice of subject needs to
be further defended. In casting an eye over my own literary criticism of the
last forty-odd years, I hope that I may be able to draw some conclusions,
some plausible generalizations of wider validity, or – what is still more worth
while – stimulate other minds to do so;3 also I hope I may provoke other
critics to make similar confessions. My justification must be that there is no
other critic, living or dead, about whose work I am so well informed as I am
about my own. I know more about the genesis of my essays and reviews than
about those of any other critic; I know the chronology, the circumstances
under which each essay was written and the motive for writing it, and about
all those changes of attitude, taste, interest and belief which the years bring
to pass.4 For the work of those masters of English criticism whom I regard
with most reverence such full information is not available to me. I am think-
ing especially of Samuel Johnson and of Coleridge, and not ignoring
Dryden or Arnold.5 But at this point I should distinguish between the sev-
eral types of literary critic, in order to remind you that generalizations drawn
from the study of the work of a critic of one type may not be applicable to
that of others.
First of all among those types of critics other than mine, I should put
down the Professional Critic – the writer whose literary criticism is his chief,
perhaps his only title to fame. This critic might also be called the Super-
Reviewer, for he has often been the official critic for some magazine or news-
paper, and the occasion for each of his contributions the publication of
some new book. The exemplar of this kind of criticism is of course the
French critic Sainte-Beuve, who was the author of two important books,
Port-Royal and Chateaubriand et ses amis, but the bulk of whose work con-
sists of volume after volume of collected essays which had previously appeared
week by week in the feuilleton of a newspaper.6 The Professional Critic may
be, as Sainte-Beuve certainly was, a failed creative writer; and in the case of

456 ]
 To Criticize the Critic [ 457

Sainte-Beuve it is certainly worth while to look at his poems, if one can come
by them, as an aid to understanding why he wrote better about authors of
the past than about his contemporaries. The Professional Critic however is
not necessarily a failed poet, dramatist or novelist: so far as I know, my old
friend in America, Paul Elmer More, whose Shelburne Essays have something
of the monumental appearance of the Causeries du lundi, attempted no cre-
ative writing.7 Another old friend of mine who was a Professional Critic, of
both books and theatre, Desmond MacCarthy, confined his literary activ-
ity to his weekly article or review and employed his leisure in delightful con-
versation instead of devoting it to the books he never wrote.8 And Edmund
Gosse – a different case again: for it is not his industry as a critic, but one
book of autobiography which is already a classic – Father and Son – that
will perpetuate his name.9
Second, I name the Critic with Gusto. This critic is not called to the seat
of judgment; he is rather the advocate of the authors whose work he
expounds, authors who are sometimes the forgotten or unduly despised.
He calls our attention to such writers, helps us to see merit which we had
overlooked and to find charm where we had expected only boredom. Of
such was George Saintsbury, an erudite and genial man with an insatiable
appetite for the second-rate, and a flair for discovering the excellence which
is often to be found in the second-rate. Who but Saintsbury, in writing a
book on the French Novel, would give far more pages to Paul de Kock than
to Flaubert?10 There was also my old friend Charles Whibley: for example,
read him on Sir Thomas Urquhart or on Petronius.11 There was also
Quiller-Couch, who must have taught many of those who attended his lec-
tures at Cambridge, to find fresh sources of delight in English literature.12
Third, the Academic and the Theoretical. I mention these two together,
as they can overlap; but this category is perhaps too comprehensive, since
it ranges from the purely scholarly, like W. P. Ker, who could illuminate an
author of one age or language by an unexpected parallel with some author
of another age or another language,13 to the philosophical critic, such as
I. A. Richards and his disciple the philosophical critic William Empson.
Mr. Richards and Mr. Empson are also poets, but I do not regard their
work as a by-product of their poetry.14 And where are we to place other
contemporaries, such as L. C. Knights or Wilson Knight, except as men who
have combined teaching with original critical work?15 And another critic of
importance, Dr. F. R. Leavis, who may be called the Critic as Moralist?16
The critic who is also tenant of an academic post is likely to have made a
458 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961

special study of one period or one author but to call him a Specialist Critic
would seem a kind of abridgment of his right to examine whatever litera-
ture he pleases.
And finally we come to the critic whose criticism may be said to be a by-
product of his creative activity. Particularly, the critic who is also a poet. Shall
we say, the poet who has written some literary criticism? The condition of
entrance into this category is that the candidate should be known primarily
for his poetry, but that his criticism should be distinguished for its own sake,
and not merely for any light it may throw upon its author’s verse. And here
I put Samuel Johnson, and Coleridge; and Dryden and Racine in their pref-
aces; and Matthew Arnold with reservations; and it is into this company
that I must shyly intrude. I hope you need by now no further assurance that
it was not laziness that impelled me to turn to my own writings for my mate-
rial. It most certainly was not vanity: for when I first applied myself to the
required reading for this address, it was so long since I had read many of my
essays that I approached them with apprehension rather than with hopeful
expectations.
I am happy to say that I did not find quite so much to be ashamed of as
I had feared. There are, to be sure, statements with which I no longer agree;
there are views which I maintain with less firmness of conviction than when
I first expressed them, or which I maintain only with important reservations;
there are statements the meaning of which I no longer understand. There
may be areas in which my knowledge has increased; there are areas in which
my knowledge has evaporated. On re-reading my essay on Pascal, for instance,
I was astonished at the extent of the information I seem to have possessed
when I wrote it.17 And there are some matters in which I have simply lost
interest, so that, if asked whether I still hold the same belief, I could only
say “I don’t know” or “I don’t care.” There are errors of judgment, and, what
I regret more, there are errors of tone: the occasional note of arrogance,
of vehemence, of cocksureness or rudeness, the braggadocio of the mild-
mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter. Yet I must acknowl-
edge my relationship to the man who made those statements, and in spite
of all these exceptions, I continue to identity myself with the author.
Even in saying that, however, I think of a qualification. I find myself con-
stantly irritated by having my words, perhaps written thirty or forty years
ago, quoted as if I had uttered them yesterday. One very intelligent exposi-
tor of my work, who regarded it, furthermore, with a very favourable eye,
discussed my critical writings some years ago as if I had, at the outset of my
 To Criticize the Critic [ 459

career as a literary critic, sketched out the design for a massive critical
structure, and spent the rest of my life filling in the details. When I publish
a collection of essays, or whenever I allow an essay to be re-published else-
where, I make a point of indicating the original date of publication, as a
reminder to the reader of the distance of time that separates the author
when he wrote it from the author as he is today. But rare is the writer who,
quoting me, says “this is what Mr. Eliot thought (or felt) in 1933” (or what-
ever the date was). Every writer is accustomed to seeing his words quoted
out of context, in such a way as to put an unintended construction upon
them, by not over-scrupulous controversialists. But the quotation of pro-
nouncements of many years ago, as if they had been made yesterday, is still
more frequent, because it is most often wholly without malice. I will give
one instance of a statement which has continued to dog its author long
after it has ceased, in his opinion, to be a satisfactory statement of his
beliefs. It is a sentence from the preface to a small collection of essays enti-
tled For Lancelot Andrewes, to the effect that I was a classicist in literature,
a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.18 I ought to have
foreseen that so quotable a sentence would follow me through life as Shelley
tells us his thoughts followed him:
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.19
The sentence in question was provoked by a personal experience. My old
teacher and master, Irving Babbitt, to whom I owe so much, stopped in
London on his way back to Harvard from Paris, where he had been lectur-
ing, and he and Mrs. Babbitt dined with me. I had not seen Babbitt for some
years, and I felt obliged to acquaint him with a fact as yet unknown to my
small circle of readers (for this was I think in the year 1927) that I had recently
been baptized and confirmed into the Church of England. I knew that it
would come as a shock to him to learn that any disciple of his had so turned
his coat, though he had already had what must have been a much greater
shock when his close friend and ally Paul Elmer More defected from
Humanism to Christianity. But all Babbitt said was: “I think you should
come out into the open.” I may have been a little nettled by this remark; the
quotable sentence turned up in the preface to the book of essays I had in
preparation, swung into orbit, and has been circling my little world ever
since. Well, my religious beliefs are unchanged, and I am strongly in
favour of the maintenance of the monarchy in all countries which have a
460 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961

monarchy; as for Classicism and Romanticism, I find that the terms have
no longer the importance to me that they once had. But even if my state-
ment of belief needed no qualification at all after the passage of the years,
I should not be inclined to express it in quite this way.
So far as I can judge, from references, quotations and reprints in anthol-
ogies, it is my earlier essays which have made the deeper impression. I attri-
bute this to two causes. The first is the dogmatism of youth. When we are
young we see issues sharply defined: as we age we tend to make more reser-
vations, to qualify our positive assertions, to introduce more parentheses.
We see objections to our own views, we regard the enemy with greater
tolerance and even sometimes with sympathy. When we are young, we are
confident in our opinions, sure that we possess the whole truth; we are enthu-
siastic, or indignant. And readers, even mature readers, are attracted to a
writer who is quite sure of himself. The second reason for the enduring
popularity of some of my early criticism is less easily apprehended, especially
by readers of a younger generation. It is that in my earlier criticism, both in
my general affirmations about poetry and in writing about authors who had
influenced me, I was implicitly defending the sort of poetry that I and my
friends wrote.20 This gave my essays a kind of urgency, the warmth of appeal
of the advocate, which my later, more detached and I hope more judicial
essays cannot claim. I was in reaction, not only against Georgian poetry, but
against Georgian criticism; I was writing in a context which the reader of
today has either forgotten, or has never experienced.
In a lecture on Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, published in one of my collec-
tions of essays and addresses,21* I made the point that in appraising the judg-
ments of any critic of a past age, one needed to see him in the context of
that age, to try to place oneself at his point of view. This is a difficult effort
for the imagination; one, indeed, in which we cannot hope for more than
partial success. We cannot discount the influence upon our formation of the
creative writing and the critical writing of the intervening generations, or
the inevitable modifications of taste, or our greater knowledge and under-
standing of the literature preceding that of the age which we are trying to
understand. Yet merely to make that effort of imagination, and to have these
difficulties in mind, is worth our while. In reviewing my own early criticism,
I am struck by the degree to which it was conditioned by the state of litera-
ture at the time at which it was written, as well as by the stage of maturity
at which I had arrived, by the influences to which I had been exposed, and
by the occasion of each essay. I cannot myself bring to mind all these
 To Criticize the Critic [ 461

circumstances, reconstruct all the conditions under which I wrote: how

much less can any future critic of my work have knowledge of them, or, if
he has knowledge have understanding, or if he has both knowledge and
understanding, find my essays of the same interest that they had for those
who read them sympathetically when they first appeared? No literary criti-
cism can for a future generation excite more than curiosity, unless it contin-
ues to be of use in itself to future generations to have intrinsic value out of
its historical context. But if any part of it does have this timeless value, then
we shall appreciate that value all the more precisely if we also attempt to
put ourselves at the point of view of the writer and his first readers. To
study the criticism of Johnson or of Coleridge in this way is undoubtedly
rewarding.
I can divide my own critical writing roughly into three periods. There
was first the period of The Egoist, that remarkable bi-weekly edited and pub-
lished by Miss Harriet Weaver. Richard Aldington had been sub-editor,
and when he was called up for military service in the First World War Ezra
Pound nominated me to Miss Weaver to fill his place.22 In The Egoist
appeared an essay called “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which still
enjoys immense popularity among those editors who prepare anthological
text-books for American college students. There were then two influences
which are not so incongruous as might at first sight appear: that of Irving
Babbitt and that of Ezra Pound. The influence of Pound at that time may
be detected in references to Remy de Gourmont, in my papers on Henry
James, an author whom Pound much admired, but for whom my own enthu-
siasm has somewhat flagged, and sundry allusions to authors, such as Gavin
Douglas, whose work I hardly knew.23 The influence of Babbitt (with an infu-
sion later of T. E. Hulme and of the more literary essays of Charles Maurras)
is apparent in my recurrent theme of Classicism versus Romanticism.24 In
my second period, after 1918, when The Egoist had come to an end, I was
writing essays and reviews for two editors in whom I was fortunate, for they
both gave me always the right books to review: Middleton Murry in the
short-lived Athenaeum, and Bruce Richmond in The Times Literary Sup-
plement.25 Most of my contributions remain buried in the files of these two
papers, but the best, and they are among the best of my essays, are reprinted
in my collections. My third period has been, for one reason or another, one
of public lectures and addresses rather than of articles and reviews.
And here I wish to draw what seems to me an important line of demar-
cation between the essays of generalization (such as “Tradition and the
462 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961

Individual Talent”) and appreciations of individual authors. It is those in

the latter category which seem to me to have the best chance of retaining
some value for future readers: and I wonder whether this assertion does not
itself imply a generalization applicable to other critics of my type. But I must
draw a distinction here too. Several years ago my New York publishers
brought out a paper-back selection of my essays on Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama. I made the selection myself, and wrote a preface explaining my
choice.26 I found that the essays with which I was still pleased were those on
the contemporaries of Shakespeare, not those on Shakespeare himself. It was
from these minor dramatists that I, in my own poetic formation, had learned
my lessons; it was by them, and not by Shakespeare, that my imagination
had been stimulated, my sense of rhythm trained, and my emotions fed. I had
read them at the age at which they were best suited to my temperament and
stage of development, and had read them with passionate delight long
before I had any thought, or any opportunity of writing about them. At the
period in which the stirrings of desire to write verse were becoming insis-
tent, these were the men whom I took as my tutors. Just as the modern poet
who influenced me was not Baudelaire but Jules Laforgue, so the dramatic
poets were Marlowe and Webster and Tourneur and Middleton and Ford,
not Shakespeare.27 A poet of the supreme greatness of Shakespeare can hardly
influence, he can only be imitated: and the difference between influence and
imitation is that influence can fecundate, whereas imitation – especially
unconscious imitation – can only sterilize. (But when I came to attempt one
brief imitation of Dante I was fifty-five years old and knew exactly what I
was doing.)28 Besides, imitation of a writer in a foreign language can often
be profitable – because we cannot succeed.
So much for those of my essays in literary criticism which I think have
the best chance of survival, in the sense that they are those which have, I
believe, the best chance of giving pleasure, and possibly enlarging the under-
standing, on the part of future readers, of the authors criticized. Now what
of the generalizations, and the phrases which have flourished, such as “dis-
sociation of sensibility” and “objective correlative”?29 I think also of an arti-
cle on “The Function of Criticism” written for The Criterion. I am not
sure, at this distance of time, how valid are the two phrases I have just cited:
I am always at a loss what to say, when earnest scholars, or schoolchildren,
write to ask me for an explanation. The term “objective correlative” occurs
in an essay on “Hamlet and his Problems” in which I was perhaps not alto-
gether guiltless of trailing my coat: I was at that time hand-in-glove with
 To Criticize the Critic [ 463

that gallant controversialist, J. M. Robertson, in his critical studies of Tudor

and Stuart drama.30 But whatever the future of these phrases, and even if I
am unable to defend them now with any forensic plausibility, I think they
have been useful in their time. They have been accepted, they have been
rejected, they may soon go out of fashion completely: but they have served
their turn as stimuli to the critical thinking of others. And literary criticism,
as I hinted at the beginning, is an instinctive activity of the civilized mind.
But I prophesy that if my phrases are given consideration, a century hence,
it will be only in their historical context, by scholars interested in the mind
of my generation.
What I wish to suggest, however, is that these phrases may be accounted
for as being conceptual symbols for emotional preferences. Thus, the empha-
sis on tradition came about, I believe, as a result of my reaction against the
poetry, in the English language, of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, and my passion for the poetry, both dramatic and lyric, of the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The “objective correlative” in the
essay on Hamlet may stand for my bias towards the more mature plays of
Shakespeare – Timon, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus notably – and
towards those late plays of Shakespeare about which Mr. Wilson Knight has
written illuminatingly.31 And the “dissociation of sensibility” may represent
my devotion to Donne and the metaphysical poets, and my reaction against
Milton.
It seems to me, in fact, that these concepts, these generalizations, had their
origin in my sensibility. They arise from my feeling of kinship with one poet
or with one kind of poetry rather than another. I ought not to claim that
what I am now saying holds good of other types of critic than mine, or even
of other critics of the type to which I myself belong – that is, of poets who
have also written critical essays. But about any writer in the field of aesthet-
ics I always incline to ask: “what literary works, paintings, sculpture, archi-
tecture and music does this theorist really enjoy?” We can, of course – and
this is a danger to which the philosophical critic of art may be exposed –
adopt a theory and then persuade ourselves that we like the works of art that
fit into that theory. But I am sure that my own theorizing has been epiphe-
nomenal of my tastes, and that in so far as it is valid, it springs from direct
experience of those authors who have profoundly influenced my own writ-
ing. I am aware, of course, that my “objective correlative” and my “disso-
ciation of sensibility” must be attacked or defended on their own level of
abstraction, and that I have done no more than indicate what I believe to
464 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961

have been their genesis. I am also aware that in accounting for them in
this way I am now making a generalization about my generalizations. But I
am certain of one thing: that I have written best about writers who have
influenced my own poetry. And I say “writers” and not only “poets”, because
I include F. H. Bradley, whose works – I might say whose personality as
manifested in his works – affected me profoundly; and Bishop Lancelot
Andrewes, from one of whose sermons on the Nativity I lifted several lines
of my “Journey of the Magi” and of whose prose there may be a faint reflec-
tion in the sermon in Murder in the Cathedral.32 I include, in fact, any writ-
ers whether of verse or prose, whose style has strongly affected my own. I
have hope that such essays of mine on individual writers who have influ-
enced me, may retain some value even for a future generation which will
reject or ridicule my theories. I spent three years, when young, in the study
of philosophy. What remains to me of these studies? The style of three phi-
losophers: Bradley’s English, Spinoza’s Latin and Plato’s Greek.33
It is in relation to essays on individual poets that I come to consider the
question: how far can the critic alter public taste for one or another poet or
one or another period of literature of the past? Have I myself, for example,
been to any degree responsible for arousing interest and promoting appre-
ciation of the early dramatists or of the metaphysical poets? I should say,
hardly at all – as critic. We must distinguish of course between taste and
fashion. Fashion, the love of change for its own sake, the desire for some-
thing new, is very transient; taste is something that springs from a deeper
source. In a language in which great poetry has been written for many gen-
erations, as it has in ours, each generation will vary in its preferences among
the classics of that language. Some writers of the past will respond to the
taste of the living generations more nearly than others; some periods of the
past may have closer affinity to our own age than others. To a young reader,
or a critic of crude taste, the authors whom his generation favours may seem
to be better than those fancied by the previous generation; the more con-
scious critic may recognize that they are simply more congenial, but not
necessarily of greater merit. It is one function of the critic to assist the liter-
ate public of his day to recognize its affinity with one poet, or with one
type of poetry, or one age of poetry, rather than with another.
The critic, however, cannot create a taste. I have sometimes been cred-
ited with starting the vogue for Donne and other metaphysical poets, as
well as for the minor Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. But I did not
discover any of these poets. Coleridge, and Browning in turn, admired
 To Criticize the Critic [ 465

Donne; and as for the early dramatists, there is Lamb, and the enthusiastic
tributes of Swinburne are by no means without critical merit. In our own
time, John Donne has lacked no publicity: Gosse’s Life and Letters, in two
volumes, appeared in 1899.34 I remember being introduced to Donne’s
poetry when I was a Freshman at Harvard by Professor Briggs, an ardent
admirer;35 Grierson’s edition of the Poems, in two volumes, was published
in 1912; and it was Grierson’s Metaphysical Poetry, sent me to review, that
gave me my first occasion to write about Donne.36 I think that if I wrote
well about the metaphysical poets, it was because they were poets who had
inspired me. And if I can be said to have had any influence whatever in pro-
moting a wider interest in them, it was simply because no previous poet
who had praised these poets had been so deeply influenced by them as I had
been. As the taste for my own poetry spread, so did the taste for the poets
to whom I owed the greatest debt and about whom I had written. Their
poetry, and mine, were congenial to that age. I sometimes wonder whether
that age is not coming to an end.
It is true that I owed, and have always acknowledged, an equally great debt
to certain French poets of the late nineteenth century, about whom I have
never written. I have written about Baudelaire, but nothing about Jules
Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language, or
about Tristan Corbière, to whom I owe something also.37 The reason, I
believe, is that no one commissioned me to do so. For these early essays were
all written for money, which I needed, and the occasion was always a new
book about an author, a new edition of his works, or an anniversary.
The question of the extent to which a critic may influence the taste of
his time I have answered, speaking for myself alone, by saying that I do not
believe that my own criticism has had, or could have had, any influence what-
ever apart from my own poems. Let me turn now to the question: how far,
and in what ways do the critic’s own tastes and views alter in the course of
his lifetime? To what extent do such changes indicate greater maturity, when
do they indicate decay, and when must we consider them merely as changes
– neither for better nor for worse? For myself, again, I find that my opinion
of poets whose work influenced me in my formative stage remains unchanged,
and I abate nothing of the praise I have given them. True, they do not now
give me that intense excitement and sense of enlargement and liberation
which comes from a discovery which is also a discovery of oneself: but that
is an experience which can only happen once. And indeed it is to other poets
than these that I am likely to turn now for pure delight. I turn more often
466 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961

the pages of Mallarmé than those of Laforgue, those of George Herbert

than those of Donne, of Shakespeare than of his contemporaries and epi-
goni.38 This does not necessarily involve a judgment of relative greatness:
it is merely that what has best responded to my need in middle and later
age is different from the nourishment I needed in my youth. So great is
Shakespeare, however, that a lifetime is hardly enough for growing up to
appreciate him. There is one poet, however, who impressed me profoundly
when I was twenty-two and with only a rudimentary acquaintance with his
language started to puzzle out his lines, one poet who remains the comfort
and amazement of my age, although my knowledge of his language remains
rudimentary. I was never more than an inferior classical scholar: the poet I
speak of is Dante. In my youth, I think that Dante’s astonishing economy
and directness of language – his arrow that goes unerringly to the centre of
the target – provided for me a wholesome corrective to the extravagances of
the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline authors in whom I also delighted.
Perhaps what I want to say now is true of all literary criticism. I am sure
that it is true of mine, that it is at its best when I have been writing of authors
whom I have wholeheartedly admired. And my next best are of authors
whom I greatly admire, but only with qualifications with which other crit-
ics may disagree. I do not ask to be reassured about my essays on minor
Elizabethan dramatists, but am always interested to hear what other critics
of poetry think, for instance, about what I have written on Tennyson or
Byron. As for criticism of negligible authors, it can hardly be of permanent
interest, because people will cease to be interested in the writers criticized.
And censure of a great writer – or a writer whose works have had the test of
time – is likely to be influenced by other than literary considerations. The
personality of Milton, as well as some of his politics and theology, was obvi-
ously antipathetic to Samuel Johnson, as it is to me. (But when I wrote my
first essay on Milton, I was considering his poetry as poetry and in relation
to what I conceived to be the needs of my own time; and when I wrote my
second essay on Milton I did not intend it to be, what Desmond MacCarthy
and others took it to be, a recantation of my earlier opinion, but a develop-
ment in view of the fact that there was no longer any likelihood of his being
imitated, and that therefore he could profitably be studied.39 This reference
to Milton is parenthetical.) I do not regret what I have written about Milton:
but when an author’s mind is so antipathetic to my own as was that of
Thomas Hardy, I wonder whether it might not have been better never to
have written about him at all.40
 To Criticize the Critic [ 467

Perhaps my judgment is less assured about writers who are contempo-

rary or nearly so, than about writers of the past. Yet my valuation of the work
of those poets contemporary with me, and of those poets younger than
myself with whom I feel an affinity, remains unchanged. There is however
one contemporary figure about whom my mind will, I fear, always waver
between dislike, exasperation, boredom and admiration. That is D. H.
Lawrence.
My opinions of D. H. Lawrence seem to form a tissue of praise and exe-
cration. The more vehement of my ejaculations of dislike are preserved, like
flies in amber, or like wasps in honey, by the diligence of Dr. Leavis; but
between two passages which he quotes, one published in 1927 and the other
in 1933, I find that in 1931 I was wagging my finger rather pompously at the
bishops who had assembled at the Lambeth Conference, and reproaching
them for missing an opportunity for dissociating themselves from the con-
demnation of two very serious and improving writers – namely, Mr. James
Joyce and Mr. D. H. Lawrence.41 I cannot account for such apparent con-
tradictions. Last year, in the Lady Chatterley case, I expressed my readiness
to appear as a witness for the defence. Perhaps the counsel for the defence
were well advised not to put me into the witness box, as it might have been
rather difficult to make my views clear to a jury by that form of inquisition,
and a really wily prosecutor might have tied me up in knots. I felt then, as I
feel now, that the prosecution of such a book – a book of most serious and
highly moral intention – was a deplorable blunder, the consequences of
which would be most unfortunate whatever the verdict, and give the book
a kind of vogue which would have been abhorrent to the author.42 But my
antipathy to the author remains, on the ground of what seems to me ego-
tism, a strain of cruelty, and a failing in common with Thomas Hardy – the
lack of a sense of humour.
My particular reason for referring to my response to the work of Lawrence
is that it is well to remind ourselves, in discussing the subject of literary criti-
cism, that we cannot escape personal bias, and that there are other stan-
dards besides that of “literary merit,” which cannot be excluded. It was
noticeable, in the Chatterley case, that some witnesses for the defence
defended the book for the moral intentions of the author rather than on
the ground of its being important as a work of literature.
In most of what I have been saying today, however, I have endeavoured
to confine myself to that part of my own critical prose which is most nearly
definable as “literary criticism.” May I sum up the conclusions to which I
468 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961

have come, after re-reading all of my writing which can be covered by that
designation? I have found that my best work falls within rather narrow lim-
its, my best essays being, in my opinion, those concerned with writers who
had influenced me in my poetry; naturally the majority of these writers were
poets. And it is that part of my criticism concerned with writers towards
whom I felt gratitude and whom I could praise wholeheartedly, which is
the part in which I continue to feel most confidence as the years pass. And
as for the phrases of generalization which have been so often quoted, I am
convinced that their force comes from the fact that they are attempts to sum-
marize, in conceptual form, direct and intense experience of the poetry
that I have found most congenial.
It is risky, and perhaps presumptuous, for me to generalize from my own
experience, even about critics of my own type – that is, writers who are pri-
marily creative but reflect upon their own vocation and upon the work of
other practitioners. I am, I admit, much more interested in what other poets
have written about poetry than in what critics who are not poets have said
about it. I have suggested also that it is impossible to fence off literary criti-
cism from criticism on other grounds, and that moral, religious and social
judgments cannot be wholly excluded. That they can, and that literary merit
can be estimated in complete isolation, is the illusion of those who believe
that literary merit alone can justify the publication of a book which could
otherwise be condemned on moral grounds. But the nearest we get to pure
literary criticism is the criticism of artists writing about their own art; and
for this I turn to Johnson, and Wordsworth and Coleridge. (Paul Valéry’s is
a special case.)43 In other types of criticism the historian, the philosopher, the
moralist, the sociologist, the grammarian may play a large part; but in so far
as literary criticism is purely literary, I believe that the criticism of artists writ-
ing about their own art is of greater intensity, and carries more authority,
though the area of the artist’s competence may be much narrower. I feel that
I myself have spoken with authority (if the phrase itself does not suggest arro-
gance) only about those authors – poets and a very few prose writers – who
have influenced me; that on poets who have not influenced me I still deserve
serious consideration; and that on authors whose work I dislike my views
may – to say the least – be highly disputable. And I should remind you
again, in closing, that I have directed attention on my literary criticism qua
literary, and that a study in respect of my religious, social, political or moral
beliefs, and of that large part of my prose writing which is directly concerned
with these beliefs would be quite another exercise in self-examination. But I
 To Criticize the Critic [ 469

hope that what I have said today may suggest reasons why, as the critic grows
older, his critical writings may be less fired by enthusiasm, but informed by
wider interest and, one hopes, by greater wisdom and humility.

Notes
1. As printed in TCC. “To Criticize the Critic” originated as the sixth Convocation Lecture
at the University of Leeds, given on 1 July 1961. It is the title piece of TSE’s last collection of essays,
To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, published posthumously by Faber & Faber on 11 Nov
1965. His widow, Valerie, included a prefatory note, signed with her initials “V.E.”: “Illness
prevented my husband from revising ‘To Criticize the Critic’ and ‘The Aims of Education’ which
are printed here exactly as he left them. Had he lived he would have incorporated further reflections
into the former and written a similar review of his sociological writings. After delivering the
Education lectures in Chicago he put them aside with the intention of expanding them into a
book when the opportunity arose, but it never did. // In response to many requests he promised
that ‘Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry’ and ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ should be included in
this collection” (TCC [7]).
The title essay is the only piece that had not been previously published.
Contents:
To Criticize the Critic (1961)
From Poe to Valéry (1948) (7.290)
American Literature and the American Language (1953) (7.792)
The Aims of Education (1950) (7.563, n.1)
1. Can ‘Education’ be Defined? (7.511)
2. The Interrelation of Aims (7.524)
3. The Conflict between Aims (7.537)
4. The Issue of Religion (7.550)
What Dante Means to Me (1950) (7.482)
The Literature of Politics (1955) (8.85)
The Classics and the Man of Letters (1942) (6.295)
Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917) (1.626)
Reflections on “Vers Libre” (1917) (1.511)
2. In the preface to Appearance and Reality, Bradley quotes several sentences from his
notebooks, the first of which is “Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe
upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct” (x).
3. TSE’s preliminary thoughts about the Leeds lecture are revealed in a letter to Wolfgang
Clemen on 24 Nov 1960. “We shall be going to Jamaica in January and February and when I
come back I shall have to devote all my time to preparing a lecture to deliver at the Leeds University
on the 1st of July. . . . it will be a rather personal one consisting of a review and reappraisal of my
own literary criticism over the years. It will, I hope, lead to some possible generalisations about
criticism which may give it a value over and above the purely autobiographical.” On 27 July 1961,
in conversation with Robert Giroux about repeating the lecture in the United States, TSE said
“The title of my lecture is To Criticize the Critic, and there was a sub-title A Retrospective View of
My Own Literary Criticism.”
470 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961
4. On 24 Oct 1960, TSE told his cousin Eleanor Hinkley that one goal of his lecture
would be an understanding of “where my opinions have altered and whether any general truths
can be elicited from studying in retrospect the critic I know most about (but I have avoided for
so many years re-reading my criticism that I may get some rude jolts).” In “The Music of Poetry”
(1942), he said “I can never re-read any of my own prose writings without acute embarrassment:
I shirk the task and consequently may not take account of all the assertions to which I have at
one time or another committed myself ” (6.310).
5. Dryden, Arnold, and Coleridge are recurring reference points in TSE’s early criticism, and
each is given a chapter in UPUC (1933): “The Age of Dryden” (4.614), “Wordsworth and
Coleridge” (4.625), and “Matthew Arnold” (4.668). TSE’s in-depth consideration of Johnson
occurs in his 1944 lectures in Wales on The Lives of the Poets (8.185).
6. feuilleton: serial writings. TSE discovered Sainte-Beuve in 1909 at Harvard in Babbitt’s
course in French literary criticism. In the Leeds retrospective, as in earlier references to Sainte-
Beuve, TSE associates the French critic with an American counterpart, Paul Elmer More. More’s
Shelburne Essays, most written in his capacity as literary editor for the Nation, invite comparison
with Sainte-Beuve’s feuilleton, published weekly as Causeries du lundi (Monday chats) (1.408,
n.2). In 1931, TSE said that “Sainte-Beuve . . . had a devouring and insatiable interest in human
nature in books, and was forever brooding over problems which are perhaps insoluble” (3.308).
He mentions Sainte-Beuve’s “method” in Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l’Empire
(1.598) and discusses Port-Royal in his introduction to Pascal’s Pensées (4.341) and in a
contemporaneous piece in the Criterion (4.308).
7. Several volumes of More’s Shelburne Essays were reviewed by TSE, the first in 1916 (1.406).
See “Mr. P. E. More’s Essays” (3.585), a review of Selected Shelburne Essays (5.320, n.1), and a 1937
overview of More’s writing, “Paul Elmer More” (5.418).
8. In the 1920s, MacCarthy worked for the New Statesman and from 1928 for the Sunday
Times. Over the years, he and TSE had literary scrimmages on Machiavelli, Shaw, Milton, and
others. See note 39.
9. Sir Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) is an autobiographical account of the struggle
between generations portrayed in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). In 1931, TSE opined that
“Sir Edmund . . . was interested in literature for literature’s sake; and I think that people whose
interests are so strictly limited, people who are not gifted with any restless curiosity and not
tormented by the demon of thought, somehow miss the keener emotions which literature can
give” (4.308).
10. Saintsbury was the author of major tomes on English and French literature and the editor
of the forty-volume edition of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. In “Beyle and Balzac,” a review of
vol 2 of Saintsbury’s history of the French novel (1919), TSE praised his erudition and charm
while noting that he “has assigned a short chapter to Flaubert, run Stendhal and Balzac together
into one, and devoted the greater part of a long one to Paul de Kock” (2.49). TSE was pleased
when Saintsbury agreed to contribute the first essay (“Dullness”) to the inaugural issue of the
Criterion, and in a letter of Feb 1923, wrote to thank him for giving “the Criterion such a triumphant
start” (L2 18).
11. In “The Local Flavour,” TSE describes Whibley as a man who “convinces us that if we
read the books he has read we should find them delightful . . . and if we read them we can form
 To Criticize the Critic [ 471
our own opinions” (2.176). Whibley edited the translation of Rabelais by the seventeenth-century
Scot Sir Thomas Urquhart. TSE read his edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel (2.96, n.5).
Whibley’s essays on Petronius appeared in Studies in Frankness (1898).
12. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse (first published in
1900), was the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge
from 1912 until his death in 1944.
13. The scholarship of Oxford Professor of Poetry W. P. Ker ranged from medieval to modern
in several languages. Tolkien and Auden are among the modern writers who have said that Ker’s
work on Anglo-Saxon literature was a formative influence. On 17 July 1923, while hiking in the
Italian Piedmont, Professor Ker died suddenly of a heart ailment. Before leaving for Italy, he
submitted a promised essay to TSE for the Criterion. Ker’s “Byron: An Oxford Lecture” appeared
in the Oct 1923 issue (1-15) and, in the same issue, an obituary by Whibley (103). Ker’s Collected
Essays, edited by Whibley, appeared in 1925.
14. In the Clark Lectures, TSE discusses the “psychologism” underlying Richards’s analysis of
emotion in The Principles of Literary Criticism (2.636, 640-41). Like his teacher and mentor, Empson
in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and other works anchored his criticism in the social sciences.
15. L. C. Knights, a Professor of Literature at Sheffield and the King Edward VII Professor
of Literature at Cambridge, was an influential Shakespearean and a founding editor of Scrutiny.
G. Wilson Knight was also a noted Shakespearean. TSE praised his Myth and Miracle (1929), a
study of the mystical pattern in Shakespeare’s late comedies, and contributed the introduction
to The Wheel of Fire (1930) (4.145; 153, n.20). He observed that Knight, who was an actor and a
director, took “Shakespeare’s work as a whole,” and in so doing, he was able to perceive patterns
“below the level of ‘plot’ and ‘character’” (4.149-50). Knight was at the University of Leeds
from 1946 to 1962 and thus may have been in the audience for TSE’s lecture.
16. According to René Wellek, Leavis “constantly returns to the moral . . . implications of
literature. While he rejects ordinary didacticism, he emphasizes that the critical act implies moral
discrimination and judgment. . . . [Leavis] even asserts that the critic will be compelled to become
a moralist” (English Criticism: 1900-1950. Vol 5 of A History of Modern Criticism. [New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1986], 248).
17. “The Pensées of Pascal” (4.338)
18. Regarding the essays collected in For Lancelot Andrewes, TSE says, “The general point of
view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.
I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am
aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is
almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with
me to define” (3.513).
19. Lines 278-79 of “Adonais,” Shelley’s elegy for Keats
20. In 1942, TSE remarked that “the poet, at the back of his mind, . . . is always trying to defend
the kind of poetry he is writing” (6.310).
21*. TSE’s note: “On Poetry and Poets (Faber & Faber, 1957).” (8.221)
22. TSE was appointed assistant editor of the Egoist in June 1917, and, by the end of 1918, he
had contributed twenty-three items, more than he wrote for any other little magazine (1.lviii).
In 1917, the Egoist Press also published Prufrock and Other Observations.
472 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961
23. Pound, who was translating Gourmont’s aphorisms, called TSE’s attention to the
French writer’s criticism (2.210, n.7). In “The Perfect Critic,” TSE uses a quotation from
Gourmont’s Le Problème du style for the epigraph and says that “of all modern critics, he had
most of the general intelligence of Aristotle” (2.262, 269). TSE published several pieces on
James in the Egoist, including “In Memory of Henry James” (1.648) and “The Hawthorne
Aspect” (1.736). Gavin Douglas was a fifteenth-century Scottish bishop and poet (2.96, n.4)
admired by Pound.
24. As a student in Babbitt’s course on French literary criticism, TSE absorbed views his
teacher was to publish in Rousseau and Romanticism (1919). In comments on Hulme’s Speculations
(1924), a collection that contains the landmark “Romanticism and Classicism” (1914), he says
that Hulme is “the forerunner of . . . the twentieth-century mind. . . . classical, reactionary, and
revolutionary” (2.521). In a letter to the editor of the TLS regarding Basil de Sélincourt’s
characterization of Maurras as a “French Romantic,” TSE objects to “mutually exclusive”
definitions of “romantic” and “classic” (2.275-76).
25. TSE began writing for Murry’s Athenaeum in 1919 and continued to contribute occasional
pieces after it was absorbed by the Nation in 1921. Between Apr 1919 and Aug 1920, he contributed
thirty reviews, several of which are among his finest work (2.xv-xvi). In Sept 1919, TSE was invited
to write for Bruce Richmond, editor of the TLS, and published his first piece, “Ben Jonson,” in
Nov and one of his last and most important, “Lancelot Andrewes,” in 1926 (2.160, n.1).
26. Elizabethan Essays, published by Harcourt, Brace as a Harvest paperback in 1956, is a
reprint of the 1934 Faber edition, with an added dedication (“In memoriam Donald Brace”) and
a preface by TSE (vii-x). This reprint omitted three essays – “Four Elizabethan Dramatists,”
“Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” and “Hamlet” – and added one, “Seneca in Elizabethan
Translation.”
27. TSE clarifies his relative indebtedness to Laforgue and Baudelaire in “What Dante Means
to Me” (7.482-83) and to the lesser Elizabethans in such essays as “Christopher Marlowe” (2.97),
“John Webster” (3.326), “Cyril Tourneur” (4.197), and “Thomas Middleton” (3.122). In regard to
Shakespeare, he adds, “When I was young I felt much more at ease with the lesser Elizabethan
dramatists than with Shakespeare: the former were, so to speak, playmates nearer my own
size” (4.484).
28. In his 1950 talk to the Italian Institute in London, TSE discussed his attempt in Little
Gidding II (ll. 25-96) to imitate Dantean terza rima. “Twenty years after writing The Waste Land,
I wrote, in Little Gidding, a passage which is intended to be the nearest equivalent to a canto of
the Inferno or the Purgatorio . . . that I could achieve” (7.484).
29. TSE’s formulation of the “dissociation of sensibility” occurs in his 1921 essay on the
metaphysical poets (2.380); his formulation of the “objective correlative” is in his 1919 essay on
Hamlet (2.125).
30. Robertson’s The Problems of Hamlet (1919) influenced TSE’s understanding of the
objectification of emotion in drama and poetry (2.xvi).
31. In Myth and Miracle: An Essay on the Mystic Symbolism of Shakespeare (1929), Knight argues
that Shakespeare’s last plays, both individually and as a whole, reveal a pattern that is essentially
religious and mystical.
32. The first five lines of “Journey of the Magi” incorporate lines from Andrewes’s 1622
Christmas Sermon (CPP 103 / Poems1 761).
 To Criticize the Critic [ 473
33. As a graduate student in the Harvard Philosophy Department from 1911 to 1914, TSE read
Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, Spinoza’s Ethics, and Plato’s Dialogues (1.xxxiv). As a student
at Merton College in 1914 and 1915, he had weekly tutorials on Bradley and Plato, primarily with
H. H. Joachim (1.xliii).
34. In 1906-07, TSE was a student in the English Literature survey course (Eng 28f ) taught
by Professors LeBaron Russell Briggs, George Lyman Kittredge, and two others. In 1923, TSE
remarked that “Donne’s popularity is neither recent nor limited; he has been approved, for many
years, by Mr. Edmund Gosse and Professor Le Roy Barron Briggs” (2.442). In 1931, TSE recalled
how “Professor Briggs used to read, with great persuasiveness and charm, verses of Donne to the
Freshmen assembled at Harvard” (4.369). Briggs was also the Harvard dean to whom TSE
reported while completing his studies at Merton College (I.xliii). Briggs was usually referred to
as L. B. R. Briggs, an appellation TSE consistently misremembers as Le Roy Barron Briggs.
35. Gosse’s two-volume biography, The Life and Letters of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s,
was published in 1899.
36. Grierson’s critical edition of The Poems of John Donne (vol 1, texts; vol 2, introductions
and commentary) was published in 1912. His Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth
Century: Donne to Butler, was published in 1921, and the same year, TSE’s review appeared in
the TLS (2.375).
37. TSE wrote three essays on Baudelaire: “The Lesson of Baudelaire” (1921; 2.306), “Baudelaire
in our Time” (1927; 3.71), and “Baudelaire” (1930; 4.155). In 1950, TSE said that Corbière was an
important early influence and that Laforgue “was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me
the poetic possibilities of my own idiom” (7.482).
38. TSE’s long interest in Herbert would culminate in George Herbert, an essay published
separately as a pamphlet by the British Council in its “Writers and their Work Series” in 1962
(8.498).
39. In 1947, MacCarthy suggested in the Sunday Times that TSE had repudiated his early
criticism of Milton, a claim that provoked TSE to protest in a letter to the editor (7.65).
40. In “Poetry and Propaganda” (1930), TSE asks of Hardy: “has he not exploited determinism
to extract his esthetic values from the contemplation of a world in which values do not count?”
(4.22). In a 1933 lecture at Harvard, he refers to Hardy as “a Sadist” (4.790), a charge he elaborates
in his Page-Barbour Lectures: “What again and again introduces a note of falsity into Hardy’s
novels is that he will leave nothing to nature, but will always be giving one last turn of the screw
himself . . . . the author seems to be deliberately relieving some emotion of his own at the expense
of the reader. It is a refined form of torture on the part of the writer, and a refined form of self-
torture on the part of the reader” (5.41).
41. F. R. Leavis’s initial praise of TSE’s criticism began to shift after reading TSE’s passage on
Lawrence in the Nouvelle Revue française of May 1927, which Leavis quoted with contempt in
“D. H. Lawrence & Professor Irving Babbitt” (1932): “When his characters make love . . . they
not only lose all the amenities, refinements and graces which many centuries have built up in
order to make love-making tolerable; they seem to reascend the metamorphoses of evolution,
passing backward . . . to some hideous coition of protoplasm” (3.90). Leavis’s essay, originally
in Scrutiny, was reprinted in his For Continuity (Cambridge, 1933), 149-59; here 156.
In “Mr. Eliot and Lawrence,” a review of D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (1951) by
Father William Tiverton (pseudonym of Martin Jarrett-Kerr), Leavis focuses on TSE’s foreword
474 ] Essays, Reviews, Addresses, and Public Letters: 1961
(7.583). Decrying the negative criticism of Lawrence, Leavis underscores his case by quoting TSE’s
characterization in 1933 (ASG, 1934) of Lawrence as a man controlled by “violent prejudices and
passions, and lack of intellectual and social training. . . . It would seem that for Lawrence any
spiritual force was good, and that evil resides only in the absence of spirituality. . . . In some respects,
he may have progressed . . . But I cannot see much development in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. . . .
The author of that book seems to me to have been a very sick man indeed” (5.43-44). Writing
to Jarrett-Kerr on 8 Dec 1960, TSE admitted that some of his earlier opinions of Lawrence “were
expressed with too much violence. That, however, doesn’t to my mind excuse Dr. Leavis for
printing a supposed review of your book which was merely an attack on myself.” Leavis had
included his review of Jarrett-Kerr’s book as an appendix to his D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955).
TSE defended the “recognised ability and position” of Joyce and Lawrence against the
disapproval of bishops in “Thoughts after Lambeth” (4.225).
42. On 12 Aug 1960, Sir William Emrys Williams, a director of Penguin Books, wrote to TSE
to inform him that the firm would be publishing the unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s
Lover on 25 Aug and that he anticipated prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959:
“If you feel that the book is innocent of any obscene element or intention, I wonder whether
you would be willing to give me a few sentences of comment in that sense?” TSE replied on 19
Aug: “I do not regard LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER as obscene, and I should regard its
suppression as deplorable. . . . The book is in no particular pornographic. It is on the ground of
the author’s serious intention as evinced in this and in all of his works, that I should object to its
suppression.” He agreed to sit for a deposition on 16 Sept under the firm’s counselor, Michael B.
Rubinstein, whom he had supplied with copies of his previous criticism of Lawrence, and to testify
in answer to that criticism – “Perhaps I now understand better,” he said, “that Lawrence’s vision
concerned a spiritual morality for men and women which he regarded as so important that it
entitled him to disregard ordinary social morality.” TSE asserted that the merit of the novel
“outweighs by far any desire to protect from shock or dismay readers for whom sex has long been
a subject which arouses guilty feelings. . . . This attitude towards sex Lawrence called the ‘dirty
little secret.’ I believe,” he concluded, “that from the publication of this book good should come,
and I am certain that its suppression fixing in the minds of an ignorant public the impression
that it is obscene would do great harm.”
TSE appeared in court at the Old Bailey on 28 Oct but was not called to testify. “I felt that
it would have been a duty to go into the witness box for the Defence had I been called,” he wrote
on 15 Dec to Father Martin Jarrett-Kerr: “One of my strong reasons . . . was my conviction that
what seemed to me definitely immoral literature passed by without question, whereas Lawrence
at least had a very serious and laudable intention.” A copy of TSE’s full deposition is in the
Lawrence Collection at the University of Nottingham.
43. TSE’s comments on the “special case” of Valéry’s literary criticism in his introduction to
The Art of Poetry, the 1958 Bollingen edition of the French poet’s essays on poetry (8.263-64).