15 - The Critic

Summary

Thomas Parnell characterises the critic as a ‘Book-Worm’ (1714), a cankerous creature who lives off and in the paper texts of the works the poet loves; he must be hunted out and destroyed if art is to thrive:

On ev’ry corner fix thine eye,

Or ten to one he slips thee by.

See where his teeth a passage eat:

We’ll rouse him from the deep retreat.

The critic has no creative genius himself (he may never have produced a creative work or may have been disappointed in his attempts to succeed doing so) and can only apply the words of others to works that he has not – in the main – even read. His presence is, unlike that of the female mimic, not flamboyant but insidious. It is marked by traces that slowly eat into the texts he lives off. Indeed, it is arguable that the critic's presence is only found, is only there, in the signs of destruction left with the works he has handled (or attended). In this way the critic's ‘presence-effects’ are both more elusive than those of the author and more impactful. In any case they are always out of time with the artwork he feeds off: either belated (the signs of their effect show up after the event) or anticipated (earlier principles of literature are applied to a present work inappropriately).

The female novel reader and the male theatre critic were both ‘new’ species of the eighteenth century, albeit forged from earlier ‘types’: the romance reader or the ancient satirist. The ‘type’ of the modern critic was Zoilus, envious antagonist of Homer, whose literal-minded commentary on the Iliad and the Odyssey survived only in fragments. Despite that ancient lineage, eighteenth-century writers tended to see critics as symptomatic irritants of the modern culture industry, deformed beings made by media phenomena that played to the lowest tastes and understanding. If the female novel reader happily imitated the heroines she met on the page, the male theatre critic refused to recognise himself in the follies that were mocked on stage. Both figures cannot match the creativity they respond to. If the female novel reader blindly imitates the work she admires, the male critic as myopically disparages it.