The critics who illuminate our literature, analyse our public
life and promote contemporary artistic values are part of the life-blood of our
culture. They are inheritors of a long tradition and I will sketch in the
principal players in Britain and America as I see them.
I start with one of the most famous critics in the English
language, Dr Samuel Johnson,
opinionated Tory, authority on Shakespeare and English poetry and masterly writer
on a wide variety of subjects. A formidable controversialist, he was never
neutral; Sir, I tell you the first Whig
was the Devil! Waxing indignant at Bishop Berkeley’s philosophic idealism,
he kicked a stone down the road with some violence, roaring I refute it thus!
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| Dr Samuel Johnson |
Moving on to the 19th Century, influenced by the
French Revolution and hopes for the common man embodied in Napoleon, Regency
England saw the libertarian effusions of William
Hazlitt and the brilliant journalism of William Cobbett, describing in Rural
Rides the blighted lives of the working classes.
England was graced
then by a quartet of critical giants. Thomas
Babington Macaulay, unparalleled Whig historian, popular poet and an
energetic writer of pellucid clarity, blotted his copybook in my mind by his
attack on my hero James Boswell as Impertinent,
shallow and pedantic…a bigot and a sot. But Macaulay’s judgements were
normally of exemplary quality.
Matthew Arnold,
pontificating with high seriousness, laid down the laws of literature, wrote some
arresting poetry and in his Culture and
Anarchy sought to make all men live
in an atmosphere of sweetness and light. Equally influential in the
aesthetic kingdom was social radical John
Ruskin, writing gloriously of the joys of Gothic architecture – When love and skill work together, expect a
masterpiece - of the beauty of Venice
and swooning theatrically on his first sight of the steeple of Grantham parish
church. My final giant is eccentric and difficult Thomas Carlyle, a native of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, but long ensconced
in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Muttering to himself cantankerously, he was an
unrivalled social critic (coining the phrase The Dismal Science to describe economics) and introduced insular
Britain to the merits of German culture via essays on Goethe, Fichte and
Lessing and an adulatory biography of Frederick the Great of Prussia, one of
his cherished Heroes. There were many other redoubtable critics, not least Walter Bagehot who dissected the
British Constitution: The cure for
admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.
From late Victorian times onwards, for at least 60 years (he
lived to age 94) the most celebrated critic was George Bernard Shaw, an irrepressibly garrulous Irishman, a Fabian
Socialist enthusiast, whose many popular plays were prefaced by long essays on
the issues of the day. He wrote with wit and sparkle. His thrusts could be
deadly: All professions are conspiracies
against the laity or The greatest of
evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.
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| George Bernard Shaw |
Soon America joined the critical party: H L Mencken was an enlivening writer with a mordant wit berating
the ignorance of the masses (the booberie)
and ridiculing Puritanism, woolly Wilsonian idealism and the absurdities of
Prohibition. English critical spats were more parochial with traditionalist F L Lucas crossing swords with esteemed
modernist F R Leavis in Cambridge
after Lucas deplored the obscurantist clique around T S Eliot. Lucas went on to
write his masterly Style, an
appreciation of fine writing in English literature. A generation later, English
letters and esoteric knowledge found their champion with fluent
controversialist Hugh Trevor Roper,
a fine but not fecund historian, whose preferred metier was the Sunday newspapers or the heavyweight weeklies. He
came sadly unstuck when he vouched for the genuineness of the forged Hitler’s Diaries.
As America became the pre-eminent world power, much of their
critics’ energy was diverted to political and social rather than purely
literary issues. The most powerful columnist was Walter Lippmann -- who coined the phrase The Cold War
– his informed column was required reading for a generation. By the 1960s, a
group of novelists started to dominate the media and TV chat shows sounding off
about the full range of problems – Norman
Mailer, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal.
Mailer was pugnacious to a fault, coming to blows several times with
unflappable and elegant Vidal while Capote was ridiculed. Vidal described
meeting Capote in a friend’s apartment: I
did not have my glasses on and sat on what I took to be a colourful ottoman. It
squealed and it turned out to be Truman! All three were significant
commentators, Mailer with his The White
Negro, Capote with In Cold Blood
and Vidal with his US historical series including Burr and latterly dismissive reaction to the Kennedy clan.
An Englishman, iconoclastic Christopher Hitchens, barged onto the scene in England from
Balliol, Oxford, and later spent the last 30 years of his life in the USA.
Starting off as a Trotskyite, he moved right ending up supporting the Iraq war
but he was a doughty enemy of Kissinger, Clinton, Mother Teresa and the
Christian religion. A born contrarian, the collections of his essays are
unmissable.
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| Christopher Hitchens |
I end with three critics who are still with us (just!). Clive James, born in Australia, has
delighted his British audience with his Unreliable
Memoirs, caustic reviews of other TV channels and a wide range of
literature. Stricken with leukaemia, he professes embarrassment at still being
alive, but long may he give us pleasure. The US is criss-crossed by The Man in the White Suit Tom Wolfe, an energetic 84,
bringing us penetrating reports from Silicon Valley and points West. He
supported George W Bush, derided the radical Left and praised astronauts
unfashionably. His 1987 novel The Bonfire
of the Vanities mercilessly
satirised Wall Street, black-white race relations and macho attitudes. My final
great critic is Leeds-born Alan Bennett,
prolific playwright, diarist and literary master, now 81. His anthologies Writing Home and Untold Tales are deservedly best-sellers; his essays on Philip
Larkin and W H Auden could not be bettered.
The above writers cannot be described as “only critics, not
do-ers”. They all have the arsenal of their own original work and a profound
intellectual hinterland. Their criticism is informed by their own experience
and achievements and we learn much from them.
SMD
27.11.15
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2015
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