POETS AND POETRY.
THE FUNCTION OF THE CRITIC.
THE Poetry Bookshop, as fortunately a good many people seem already aware, publishes every month a Chap-book ; that is to say, a small very well-printed paper-covered volume with a cover design which is always amusing and distinguished and sometimes beautiful. Sometimes the Chap-books contain criticism, sometimes original work. They are edited by Mr. Alec Waugh, and such writers as Mr. Aldous Huxley, Mr. T. S. Eliot, and Mr. Flint contribute. They are stimulating little volumes because they have not too wide an appeal. They are addressed to an audience which is assumed to be already more or less in sympathy (the sympathy of comprehension, certainly not of agreement) with the waiters, and as in all productions whose source is a coterie a minimum amount of time is spent beating about the bush, there is a pleasant sense of having " cut the cackle and come to the 'osses."
The March Chap-book is particularly amusing. It calls itself Three Critical Essays on Modern English Poetry ; but the first of the three essays is nothing of the kind. It is a quite enter- taining analysis of the type of criticism which modern poetry has evoked. There are, says the writer, Mr. Eliot, only two legitimate kinds of criticism. Criticism can be written from the point of view of the historian and philosopher; a Foam can be treated, that is, as a kind of symptom of the age in which it was written and of the frame of mind of the community from which it originated. " A historian or a philosopher may use poetry as his data." The second legitimate type is the criticism written by a fellow- craftsman, for example Dryden or Coleridge, men who are qualified to criticize because they are themselves poets. " This sort of critic is interested in technique, technique in the widest sense." " The public ought to learn to distinguish the his- torian and the philosopher from the reviewer and also from the critic of poetry." Mr. Eliot isolates reviewing from criticism proper :—
" Its only proper motive is to call attention to something good and new. And this is exactly the motive which least often animates the reviewer. That it should be so is not wholly the reviewer's fault. For reviewing is, unfortunately, a means of livelihood ; though it is known to be one of the most corrupting, degrading, and badly-paid means of livelihood that a writing man can ply. The reviewers are merely the lowest wage-slaves in the modern literary system. Many intelligent men find themselves in this condition ; it is part of the social organization or disorganization that writers who have honest work of their own to do find that this is the only work for which they can be paid. Consequently, it is hardly to be expected that the reviewer, unless he has become so depraved as to have no other function, should enjoy reviewing. From the point of view of any man of the slightest intellect or taste, there is not enough good verse to occupy a reviewer one week out of the year. There is not enough pernicious work worth attacking to occupy him another week. So that twenty-five twenty-sixths of the reviewer's time must be occupied with books that are perfectly colourless. And the dilemma is this : either a reviewer is a bad writer and bad critic, and he ought not to be allowed to intervene between books and the public ; or he is a good writer and good critic, and therefore ought not to be occupied in writing about inferior books."
Reviewing is only valuable in so far as it is discreet advertise- ment :- " It cannot be too often insisted that the purpose—not of writing poetry but of publishing it—should be primarily to give pleasure ; and that the purpose for which we suppose reviewing
was divinely intended was primarily to indicate such works as can give the best pleasure to the people who otherwise may fail to hear of their existence."
Here Mr. Eliot is beginning to perceive what is the true if humble function of the reviewer. Hitherto, be it noticed, he has spoken entirely from the point of view of the " producer," never from that of the consumer." In the present writer's opinion, the critic has a third function, and this is a function which springs from his use as an advertiser. The reviewer who does the public the best service is he who regards himself as a kind of envoy ; he is not exactly a " fair sample " reader, he is rather a kind of delegate sent by the public to explore the untrodden regions where lie the new volumes of poetry. slim, fat, and medium, good, bad, and indifferent. The present writer would deny hotly the statement that no one could enjoy reviewing were it not that he feared to be accused of having become " so depraved as to have no other function." Let the reviewer regard himself as the elected servant of his readers, as a leader of an expedition fitted out at the public expense to search for a new poet ! What reviewer among 'us does not every week turn over anew the heaps of books on his table in the hope of discovering somebody, of being the first to blow a proclamatory trumpet to enable a waiting public to offer the necessary incense to some hungry growing poet ?
But to return to the advertisement. The modern scientific advertisement-writer intends his paragraphs for the formation of the public taste along certain lines. So, but more disinter- estedly, does the reviewer, and we believe that the poets are apt not to realize how useful a work this is. We believe that in a time of rather rapid development there is a place for the honest showman who will tell the public which hoop the lion is trying to jump through.
We should imagine that Mr. Eliot had given us a pretty representative picture of what the " producer," the poet, asks in his reviewer. What, we wonder, is the point of view of the person for whom the review is really intended, the general reader
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