Sta,—To judge by the .amount of agonised .mooing it has
elicited, Mr. Kingsley Amis's bull-like charge into the Sacred Cow Enclosure of Eng. Lit. has had precisely the effect he intended. 'If Pindar bores us, we admit it,' Mr. Elia Wrote;'but if Milton, Spenser ' or Beowulf bore us, we are expected to keep reverent silence. (Pindar would probably be in the canon, too;' if the new-style Eng. Lit. don could read any Greek.) , There is not one single arkudient in the four letters ' you print criticising Mr. Amis for daring to have a mind of his own : merely emotional outrage, crystal- lised in Mr. Burns Singer's ren*ks a•botit • blindness. Does he expect 'Mr. -'Ainis to 'contrite, tertiary syphilis before daring to criticise Baudelaire? This cry of procul, o procul este, profani! has nothing to do with criticism proper. It is prompted partly by literary herd-instinct, partly by fear. Mr. Amis, it is implied, is not only a cad but a blackleg: he is happily kicking down the whole carefully con- structed academic card-castle of literary taste. He is revealing to the world that there are no rules, only opinions. It may—horrid thought—occur to the reader that the market (as in the case of diamonds) is an artificial one, based on tacit agreement between the professionals.
Such a condition paralyses the critical faculties in a quite extraordinary way; and even when it does not, the literary don (who tends to be acutely sensitive about his standing with his colleagues) takes care not to offend current shibboleths. In 1946 my wife, dining on Newnham High Table, ventured to ask her neighbour, a distinguished Lecturer in English, whether she did not find Kipling's short storks grossly underrated. The lady looked round like a startled rabbit, and then, making sure she was not overheard, whispered: 'Yes, I do—but don't quote me as having said so!' Today, I suspect, she would admit her predilection more openly. Official shares in Kipling have risen.—Yours faithfully, PETER GREEN
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