Scholarship and Criticism
Somebody has suggested that scholarship is to criticism what engineering is to architecture. At first sight this is an attractive analogy. Without some appreciation of engineering principles the architect’s building may collapse. Perhaps that was the main point in making the analogy. However, the figure carries disturbing overtones, in the hint that criticism not only stands upon the shoulders of humble scholarship, but also may have something – as architecture does – to do with designing things. Without an architect’s design an engineer may be expected to produce a structure useful and durable enough to but probably inducing no sense of delight. But what does a critic design? and if he does produce a plan of some structure to be built to, is it as a critic that he does so? and who would be the builder? It may simply be that the apparently guileless analogy is heavy with latent clouds of glory, for Vitruvius has it that
An Architect ought to understand Languages, to be skillful of Painting, well-instructed in Geometrie, not ignorant of Perspective, furnished with Arithmeticke, have knowledge of many histories, and diligently have heard Philosophers, have skill of Musicke, not ignorant of Physicke, know the answeres of Lawyers, and have Astronomie, and the courses Celestial, in good knowledge.
Leo Baptista Albertus, in a similar vein of transcendent rhapsody, assets that the Architect is
that man, who hath the skill, (by a certaine and meruailous meanes and way,) both in minde and Imagination to determine ... what works so euer, by motion of weight, and cuppling and framyng together of bodyes, may most aptly be Commodious for the worthiest Uses of Man ... Wherupon he is neither Smith, nor Builder: nor, separately, any Artificer; but the Hed, the Provost, the Directer and Judge of all Artificiall workes, and all Artificers.
So much for architects. If scholars be to such demigods mere hod-carriers, their relation to criticism may warrant examination.
The traditional and vulgar views of the scholar are – one must confess – heavily weighted with a sense of comedy, particularly on the score of his minuteness and his detachment.
They have as much need of hellebore as others [Burton tells us]. They have a worm as well as others. You shall find a phantastical strain, a fustian, a bombast, a vain-glorious humour, an affected style ... run parallel throughout their works. ... They bewray and daub a company of books and good authors with their absurd comments ... and shew their wit in censuring others, a company of foolish note-makers, humble bees, dors or beetles. ... Yet if any man dare oppose or contradict, they are mad, up in arms on a sudden, how many sheets are written in defence, how bitter invectives, what apologies?
Cervantes and Sterne give us different versions – hilarious but poignant – of the learned mind alienated from the real world; and Rabelais makes excellent use of a cumbersome grotesque erudition grown carcinomatous. Virgilius Maro, the grammarian of Toulouse, who flourished – if flourish is the correct word – round about the seventh century, tells a story of two scholars of his time who for 15 days and nights, without food or sleep, argued about the frequentative of the verb to be, and nearly ended the discussion at sword-point. Virgil of Toulouse might himself have been one of these: at least his choice of a name is some measure of his conceit. Yeats’s lines, written when he was living in Oxford in 1914-15, shape a familiar portrait of the scholars:
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
Yet there is something splendid about Virgil of Toulouse arguing whether there can be a vocative of ego while ancient empires crashed and dissolved about his ears. And we hesitate to dismiss even him out of hand as a mere pedant, recalling that it was he who first traced the transition of Latin into Provençal, and the transition of quantitative Latin verse into the accentual vernacular line. We may also recall that the labours of the mediaeval and humanist grammarians and editors resulted in the formation of what we now call style, evolved painfully out of the struggle between the ordered resonance of the classical tongues and the fluid recalcitrance of vulgar living speech.
The mediaeval and humanist scholar’s concern – after grammar and rhetoric – was to establish a pure text when the text (if it existed) was illegible, fragmentary, or corrupt; he wished to preserve the ipsissima verba of texts made sacred by time, or worship, or delight. After the text, his concern was for understanding the text. This was not criticism perhaps in the present meaning of the word, but an activity of unfolding and interpreting in the light of all that was known; the cumulative shedding of light upon writings too adamantine to alter, too powerful to ignore, too fugitive in spirit to dominate. The resources of mediaeval commentary and exposition, regarded simply as pedagogic technique, were not inconsiderable. And the exploitation of contrary principles and methods provoked the wars of the schools and fostered the invention of heresies. The truculent and murderous behaviour of some scholars to some other scholars is strangely at variance with the detachment and humility that seem more proper to the recondite arts. Yet to see a learned throat slit with skill and relish, to witness the neat impaling of an opponent’s absurdity on the pin of an epigram – these are among the inexhaustible delights of classical scholarship. It is like a decorous ritual of mutilation, deadly but without essential malice. For the point at issue, one feels, is not really the conflict of opinion but the integrity of early scholar. A scholar scornfully exposes a fellow pundit’s folly, it knowledge, the integrity of language – the two prime concerns of the would seem, not simply because the miscreant has been ignorant, obtuse, or barbarous (though that would be reason enough), but because this man had the means of discovering something that could be set down for all time, and at the crucial moment had fumbled it. Scholarship, like watch-making, requires a good eye and a delicate touch. To see some detail of factual truth slip through the clumsy fingers of another scholar is to suffer an excruciating shock of annoyance, a surge of futile rage. For in scholarship, once a fact is caught, it is caught for good and all. But once a false fact or conclusion has been set down it may be fruitful and multiply, perpetuating itself in mis-shapen offspring.
A fully annotated classical text, in which to the unappreciative eye the notes crowd the text to death, is an impressive – even moving – performance: it brings into single compass a great store of miscellaneous relevancies drawn (it may be) from many centuries and many sources, all sifted and arranged by some final editor, who ideally is learned, urbane, and tactful. We seem here to see the noble army of scholars, their marginal squabbles at last forgotten, marching with a proud and pettifogging detachment behind their text. For the quarrelsomeness of scholars – the intolerable vanity in some and the total lack of discrimination in others – points in one direction: to the fact that scholarship is cumulative and co-operative, that it deals with facts to do with specific texts and contexts, and that the scholar is the accumulator and guardian of the monuments of civilization, and of all knowledge that illuminates them.
A provisional sketch may be attempted. The ideal scholar is often by habit or necessity a teacher; but he will never cease to be a learner. To a great extent he will be obliged to live in the past; but his constant aim will be to perpetuate the past for the benefit of the present and the future. His concern with fact leads him into minuteness; but it also tends to expand his interpretative attention – still in search of accurate detail and analogy – outward into custom, art, ritual, belief, philosophy, law, society, until the field of literary scholarship becomes rather like Wolf’s view of philology arranged in its 24 orders to encompass the whole documentary evidence for the history and antiquities of the ancient world.
Satiric accounts of scholarship usually make fun of the scholar’s minuteness; but when scholars talk about each other they tend rather to esteem comprehensiveness. Scaliger said of Casaubon that he was “the most learned of all men living today”; and Casaubon of Scaliger that “there’s nothing anybody could want to learn that he couldn’t teach; and there was nothing he had read – and what hadn’t the man read – that he couldn’t instantly recall.” No scholar would happily be content to know less than everything; and this is the talk of giants about giants. Not all learned men are accomplished scholars; but any accomplished scholar may, if he decides to give time to the necessary studies, become a learned man. “It is not knowledge but a discipline, that is required,” Mark Pattison said a century ago; “not science, but the scientific habit; not erudition but scholarship.”
It is refreshing to revert, if only momentarily, to a time when science still meant knowledge and wasn’t an emotive signal to fall to secular adoration. It is curious also to remark that scientists are not commonly spoken of as scholars – for all their devotion, their withdrawal from the world, their concern with minutiae; nor have I ever heard a scientist called a pedant, though that on the face of it is surprising enough. All of which suggests that scholarship may have an irreducibly humanistic character.
Scholarly monuments of industry and erudition may seem a modern achievement. But it is well to restore to honour the assiduity and chaste industry of the early scholars – even of the pedants – who secured the make and muscle of the European languages, and preserved those monuments of imagination and thought which are the roots of our literature and civilization. One thinks not only of Petrarch and Erasmus and Scaliger and Casaubon, but also of the ingenious and affectionate searchers out of manuscripts – the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini, and Gerardo Landriani, and Sir Robert Cotton. One would like to remember even Janus Gruter, who after prodigious labours (not all of them undistinguished) lived to see his private collection of books, and the Palatine Library of which he was curator, despoiled; and Richard Porson whose beautiful handwriting has graced most of the Greek texts printed in England for more than a century. Then there was all the devoted work done at press by Aldus Manutius and Johan Froben and by Schweighaüser and Brunck – and the long sedulous nightmare business of hunting down all the woe of reduplicative error that printing brought into the world with its blessings.
Boethius, “mightiest observer of mighty things,” once went (as Helen Waddell has it) “to gather violets in a spring wood, and watched with a sore heart a bird in a cage that had caught a glimpse of waving trees and now grieved its heart out, scattering its seed with small impotent claws.” The pedants are perhaps the caged birds, crazy with impotence in the blaze of a knowledge that just eludes their grasp. Scholars for their industry or an air of prodigious but futile effort are often called ants: but I think of them as bees engaged – if I may change the figure – in controlled wool-gathering. For myself, the clearest image of a scholar is set down in a little poem found in a commonplace book at the abbey of Reichenau – written it may be by one of those who, afflicted by accidia or the spring weather, drew mice and daffodils in the margins of the manuscript they copied, or wrote out in the secular rhythm verses to celebrate the beauty of some girl’s body.
I and Pangur Bán my cat,
’Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
’Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
’Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my listen wisdom try.
So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat and I;
In our arts and we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
This is the scholar’s supreme detachment. His pot-valiant conceit and exquisite touchiness may well be only a necessary protection for it. The detachment is essential. Moreover, it places the scholar on the side of the poets, marking him off from mankind at large. So minutely focused upon the task in hand are his concern and affection – his compassion even – that he seems to have none left over for the world; and so he becomes an inexhaustible subject for merriment.
Scholarship, though it requires a scientific habit, is not itself a science. Yet it is too factual, and has too large a responsibility to the past and to a cumulative future, ever to become much unlike a science. It cannot allow conjecture to go far beyond the legitimate establishment of matters of fact; whatever it interprets afresh must be based upon demonstrable evidence rather than upon the self-consistency of plausible speculation or suggestive analogy. Yet no true scholar could conduct his work without an acute critical sense, an exact sense of literary values; he needs a sense of rightness, a flair for judging what fits, what can fit, what belongs, what makes sense in a whole context. His criticism may tend to be fixed upon a comparatively limited field of primary material; but the very minuteness of his inquiry draws him towards the deepest and widest resources of information available, towards different kinds of judgment, a most subtle sense of the relatedness of things. Given a text he will probably assume that the author was neither an idiot nor a clown; he will trust first his eyes and his reading of the original; he will not proceed to conjectural alterations until he is forced to do so, taking due account of his own possible ignorance. In the end his labours will come ideally to rest in something definitive: in an unimpeachable text and a commentary that has grown out of the cool sifting and fitting together of all the scholarship can bring to bear in the way to cognate knowledge. “Definitive” suggests a work of such stupendous ingenuity and crushing completeness that nobody need ever in future feel impelled to make such an effort again. One thinks perhaps of the Casaubon Persuis that Coleridge owned: “There are 616 pages in this volume, of which 22 are text; and 594 commentary and introductory matter.” But not all definitive editions are quite so indiscriminately encyclopaedic. In 1912 the Oxford University Press published in two volumes H. J. C. Grierson’s edition of Donne’s Poetical Works, a book of rigorous scholarship in the traditional manner. The text is a type facsimile of the 1633 folio – long s’s, ampersands, ligatures, and all; and those who recognize the types will recall how John Fell’s arthritic labours in the Sheldonian Theatre founded the tradition of English scholarly printing: “Whereby this Royal Island stands particularly obliged to your Generous and Publick spirits.” Grierson in his commentaries speaks with plangent but unassertive authority, taking on himself no more the colour of ostentation than a mason does in setting the capstone on a wall that has been long building. Grierson sent a copy to Yeats. Yeats’s reply is preserved.
I write to thank you for your edition of Donne. ... I have been using it constantly and find that at last I can understanding Donne. Your notes tell me exactly what I want to know. Poems that I could not understand or could but understand are now clear and I notice that the more precise and learned the thought the greater the beauty, the passion; the intricacy and subtleties of his imagination are the length and depths of the furrow made by his passion. His pedantry and his obscenity – the rock and the loam of his Eden – but make me the more certain that one who is but a man like us all has seen God.
One wonders whether Grierson recognized the poetic flowering of his scholarship in the first work of Yeats’s maturity when it appeared in 1914 under the title of Responsibilities.
The classical scholarship of the Middle Ages and Renaissance set the pattern that Western scholars in the dreamy sort of way still follow. There have been a few improvements on the fringes of scholarship – machines for collating first folios of Shakespeare, microfilm to ensure a crabbed and myopic ubiquity, stringent procedural rules that inhibit flamboyance but fail to guarantee brilliance. But the touchiness continues, the ant-like industry, the ferocious zeal for fact and accuracy. Indeed, since the invention of printing from movable types, the most ominous change to occur in the pattern of scholarship has been the sudden collapse of classical studies as the central humanistic discipline. This seems to have happened, quite rapidly, about 25 years ago. Suddenly there was a painful academic vacuum, into which the study of English Language and Literature leaked – tentatively at first, and then, since there was no serious discouragement, in full spate. Previously the study of English in the great universities had been a scholarly discipline in linguistics, in grammar, in textural methods. Cultivated people read the corpus of English literature in the dog-watches, a tradition to be seen in the work of such non-professionals as Sherrington, Whitehead, Toynbee, and Trevelyan. As the study of English began to assume – almost by default – the rôle of the main humanistic discipline, professors of English had less the air of gay anti-barbarian champions of the unfettered intellect than of grave gentlemen running in an egg and spoon race. The study of English became the study of “criticism,” not as an upsurge of vitality in the body of critical endeavour, but as a condition of survival, as a responsive mutation in the face of the almost impossible task it had inherited.
Dryden introduced the word criticism; Coleridge used it seldom; Arnold canonized it; this century has tried to deify it. Mr. I. A. Richards’ early work can be seen as a first strong attempt to stake out the limits and correct dignity for the new intellectual empire, even though his impulse was more clearly psychological and scientific than scholarly and aesthetic. The New Criticism can be seen as one of the first successful attempts (based on Richards) to establish a pedagogic technique that would work in a practical way – in the lecture room. Viewed in this historical perspective, certain subtle and original critics can be seen as consolidating positions held only tentatively by raiding parties and establishing the fact that there were still wider fields to be conquered by “criticism.” The advance to literary studies has been immense, and the advantages to scholarship (as also to journalism) not inconsiderable. But criticism, like any prosperous and aggressive financial concern, has not been innocent of imperial longings. In the general hubbub of empire-building there has been, as one might expect, a certain amount of encroachment, some obliteration of borders. But a much more serious erosion occurred as criticism moved into the position of a world power – the submerging of internal boundaries. At present there is an air of stability, as though people were getting out of the practice of walking away with each other’s boundary stones; but that is partly a symptom of exhaustion, and partly a sign that criticism may have forgotten what its empire was meant to do – it may, like other empires one can think of, have slipped into the habit of supposing that empire exists in order to exercise and enjoy the fruits of power. Scholarship has become fustian: criticism is cloth-of-gold. Yet to establish the just limits of a discipline is the first step in commanding that area. In this matter scholarship is the army of occupation. It remains to be seen whether the job of criticism is to provide a ruling caste. Perhaps the figure was not in the first place a happy one. Perhaps what criticism needs is a decent set of working clothes.
Between scholarship and criticism there are some obvious relations. No true scholar can lack critical acumen; and the scholar’s eye is rather like the poet’s – not, to be sure, “in a fine frenzy rolling,” but at least looking for something as yet unknown which it knows it will find, with perceptions heightened and modified by the act of looking. For knowing is qualitative and is profoundly affected by the reason for wanting to know. Again, it is clear that no critic can afford not to be a scholar – even a scholar in a pretty impressive degree – if his work is to go much beyond delicate impressionism, penumbral rhetoric, or marginal schematism. Without scholarship every synoptic view will be cursory, every attempt at a synthesis a wind-egg; without scholarship the criticism of a poem may easily become a free fantasia on a non-existent theme. Yet scholarship invading the field of criticism can hamstring and bird-lime heuristic activity, and frustrate the apprehension of literature by intellectual barbarity and emotional pedantry. It would be a pity to regard scholarship as no more than a mounting-block for the Icarus-flights of criticism; for scholarship represents a contrary and essential moment in the larger rhythmic process of criticism. Criticism and scholarship, though not mutually exclusive, are as different as positive and negative, fiction and fact, theory and myth.
Coleridge in one of his notebooks observed that
In all processes of the Understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last, and this perhaps while it constitutes the great advantage of having a Teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension – in as much as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what, if left to myself on starting the thought, I should have thought next. – The shortest way gives the knowledge best; the longest way makes me more knowing.
If the word knowing be taken as a noun rather than as an adjective, it forms an important contrast to knowledge: knowledge is terminal, knowing is processive and continuous. If knowledge is taken to indicate the whole cumulus of things known, propositions formulated about events, conclusions reached, what was said about something, about relations actual, hypothetical, or suggestive, then knowing is no more like knowledge than thinking is like a conclusion. There is a terror and fatigue and desolation about sustained thinking that makes one understand why some societies prefer to kill the instigators of thought rather than submit to the solitary humiliation of thinking. Still, thinking can, with luck, application, and practice, be brought to a point; and then it has delights well worth the rigours of the onset. But the elation one feels at reaching a conclusion of any sort or of solving a problem should not be allowed to run over into one’s judgment of the value of the conclusion. For in education – in civilization – one is constantly looking for fruitful questions and warily skirting around answers, because an answer brings everything to a halt. The value of a conclusion rests in the indications it gives of fruitful directions for further thinking.
Coleridge in another place says admirably that “there is a period of orderliness, of circumspection, of discipline, in which we purify, separate, define, select, arrange.” Both these phases of heuristic thinking apply to scholarship and to criticism. Since the second phase can easily be regarded as an end, associated with knowledge, it comes to be regarded as the scholar’s end. But the business of criticism is to bring the critic – and with luck others – into an initial reflective phase, and to sustain that phase until it is capable of passing over into something more orderly tough still circumspect. Criticism, unlike scholarship however, does not come to a halt in the phase of knowledge; it uses each successive phase of knowledge as the beginning of a further reflective phase, a fresh activity of knowing in the presence of the poem. The end of criticism is knowing: the end of scholarship is knowledge. The unpardonable sin in scholarship is to be wrong: one could say that in criticism the unpardonable sin is to be right.
I cannot bring myself to think of criticism as a self-enclosed activity that needs literature only as something to grip its chariot-wheels. It is literature, not criticism, that is apocalyptic; and criticism cannot be driven far beyond the irreducible element of judgment that is to be found in any cognitive process. Criticism is a humble and ancillary occupation, guided, commanded, and humiliated by literature. Its character is functional. Its worth depends upon its usefulness. At the least it is a means of inducing and sustaining reflection; at best it is a mode of illumination, a means of heightening one’s awareness of literature so that literature may illuminate. The critic’s job is – at the mundane level – sacramental: to establish a direct contact with works of literature, to partake of the life those works encompass and disclose. The critic will talk about that contact, and about what – through that contact – he takes single works of art, and then perhaps groups of works of art, to be. Not least important is it to talk about these things in such a way as to bring others into direct contact with works of literature, with their capacity for astonishment heightened, their perceptions sharpened, their power of discovery unimpaired. I should like to keep this simple function of criticism clear by splitting off from the term at one end everything that belongs in the abstract and speculative domains of poetics and aesthetic theory, and at the other end everything that belongs to scholarship – matters of history, biography, linguistics, psychology, philosophy. So regarded, the critic’s position is clearer. He will be less likely, under the pressure of professional importunity, to walk in front of the work of art with a banner flying.
In narrowing the term criticism in this way I am not thinking that criticism should be limited to what Professor Frye has called “public criticism” – the more or less persuasive communication of the “feel” of a poem by a perceptive reader to the public at large. I am thinking of the activity that, in the mind of a “critic,” brings a work of literature into a reflective or discursive or imaginative field which is at first in some way related to the work of literature and will in the end be dominated by the work of literature. If the term criticism is allowed to expand indefinitely it comes to include the whole field of mental activity in which may occur any discussion whatsoever of anything even remotely to do with works of literature. In such a dilated and attenuated area the landmarks vanish. Yet one needs constantly to know whether what is thought or said in the name of criticism is illuminating the poem and is controlled by the poem, or whether it is part of an excursus into history, theory of semantics, metaphysics, poetics, psychoanalysis, biography, or even – as when Johnson writes a first-rate essay on a third-rate poem – into imaginative writing.
For the health of literature – and criticism – the most fruitful critical activity is reflective: throwing the mind forward, after withdrawal, refreshed and informed, upon the poem, willing to be dominated by the poem. This movement of mind is rhythmic, passing steadily in and out of resonance with the poem, the need to return to the poem becoming stronger the farther the mind moves away from the poem. The other activities – though legitimate enough, as indeed all modes of knowledge are legitimate – are refractive; they start from a poem but proceed into something else, fostering an allegiance not to the poem – and sometimes not even to literature – but to ideas which were first suggested by contact with the poem and ideas now considered worthy of exploration for their own sake without further reference to the poem. The rhythmic critical activity is capable of being continuously heuristic; it is a process of knowing perpetually destroyed and renovated by contact with the poem. The refractive critical activity terminates in knowledge which may not even be knowledge about the poem, a knowledge in which the mind gratefully comes to rest because it preferred not to come to rest in the poem.
Criticism in this narrow sense is then the functional relation between a reader and a poem; or the functional relation in the mind between the poem and another look at the poem; or the relation between the poem and some other field of interest or activity. So limited, it is a way of mind that could be clearly described both in its functional and its psychological aspects. Since it is an activity without which no recreative or discursive activity in the field of a poem can relevantly proceed, there would seem to be some advantage in defining it and giving it a name. If we call this perceptive-functional relation criticism we shall be at a loss for a general term to do the work now done by the generic term critical, and much of the present content of what is fashionably called criticism would be found to belong in the sphere of poetics. Probably it is too late to reverse a linguistic process started long ago and conveniently fortified by collusive erosion of meaning. If a new and strict meaning for an old term cannot be established, a new term may have to be found and set on course between the rock of habit and the whirlpool of jargon. The word hapsis might tentatively be suggested. It is not in N.E.D. but was not unknown to Aristotle and Plato. The verb from which the noun is formed means to touch, grasp, begin, set to work, perceive, have intercourse with, be in contact with; it can also mean to kindle, to set on fire. Unfortunately the adjective haptic is already used by psychiatrists to indicate a kind of distortion that occurs in drawings as an expression of a psychopathic condition; but this may only help to clarify the singular and ambiguous activity in which critics engage.
If a critic is to foster and inhabit the life of literature rather than expend his energies in founding totalitarian states, he will need to be flexible, resourceful, and modest. He might discover that criticism, like art, finds its most trenchant directness not in certainty but in obliquity. He will and must feel free to use a variety of methods, approaches, even techniques – provided he can use these with some air of appropriateness. He will need a full armoury of methods if he is in any way to transcend the limits of his own taste, sympathy, and ignorance. A critic must feel free to change his analogies, his illustrations, his images, his terms; he must even be prepared to change his mind, recalling that only a work of art has a face worth saving.
One of the few things which emerge clearly from the troublesome history of twentieth-century criticism is than any critic who approaches a work of literature with anything less than everything that might be relevant to his inquiry does so at his own peril. At this point the distinction between knowledge and knowing becomes crucial. Knowing is processive: knowledge is terminal. The intrusion of knowledge can easily obscure and arrest the activity of knowing; for it can easily distract attention from what one seeks to know and bring it to fatal rest in the null desert of things known. In the field of scholarship knowledge is paramount: knowledge factual, definitive, cumulative, fully tested on evidence. In the field of criticism, on the contrary, knowing is paramount, and ignorance assumes a positive value; and as long as ignorance does not imply complete insensibility, a positive rejection of decisive knowledge becomes a guiding principle. Since a poem is not an encyclopaedic statement of fact, but a symbolic entity, it is ringed about and even shaped by what is not said; by not-knowing, by ignorance, in the same way that the sound and rhythm of a poem is ringed about with silence. It is as important for a critic to be sure what not to know in the presence of a particular poem as it is to know what facts are critically relevant; and even the relevant facts must not, in criticism, be entertained as knowledge, but turned loose to be shaped and controlled or annihilated by the poem. A critic – like a poet – needs not only a method of bringing to bear all knowledge upon a single point but also a method for getting rid of what is not to the point.
There is correspondingly this great difference between scholarship and criticism. In scholarship anything that can be reliably said about anything is a permanent addition to the store of knowledge – even though it be centuries before anybody wants to use it. In criticism anything that can be said about a poem is tentative; and as soon as it ceases to illuminate the poem it must be thrown away or it will confuse or blind the critic. In criticism encyclopaedic knowledge may not be a virtue – it may even be the ultimate barbarity. In scholarship a little criticism goes a long way because there is a constant appeal to verifiable fact, a constant discipline and purging of fantasy in the way that value-judgments retain their essential character of directness. There is no finer training for a critic than that in scholarship, as long as it does not twist him into pedantry. Once the critic steps forth into his area of controlled wool-gathering he can learn much from the old scholars who, with their baggy eyes and fur neckpieces, gaze quizzically at him from the engraved title-pages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is at least this virtue in the scholar: he walks behind his text, processionally, knowing that the text is the only thing worth preserving. The scholar-critic needs to overcome the impulse to march like a drum-major in front of his text. A man can enjoy literature, he can by grace experience it, he can even make it his own; but try as he will he cannot devour literature, and if he plays his cards right the most he can expect is that poems will have their will of him in the end. If he is to induce knowing he will need wisdom, a light touch, nimble foot-work. The critic can learn at least this from a scholar: that he might do worse than conduct himself with the truculent evasiveness of a lover engaged in a hard courtship; for he has everything to win and only himself to lose.