• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 821 0

Masefield as the league’s president, was a celebrated jurist—a defense lawyer of note who had been a British judge at the Nuremberg war trials and later became a lord justice of appeal. Reading was a sign of class and culture, and the outreach activities of the league (“The Book Exhibitions, the Lectures, the discussions, the Book Information Bureau, the Reader’s Guides and Book Lists”) were all genially supported by the luminaries who offered these annual lectures, from historians R. H. Taney and G. M. Trevelyan to poet John Masefield and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Birkett addressed the group as an amateur, a “lover of books,” and a member of the legal profession, and his lecture was ornamented with references to and quotations from works he clearly regarded as in the common possession of his hearers: from Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy to the poetry of Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, George Meredith, A. E. Housman, and Walter Scott. Toward the end of his talk, Birkett acknowledged that he had little appreciation for “what is sometimes termed modern poetry,” and proved it by reading aloud the first verse of a poem by e. e. cummings.31 Of “abuse,” he had little to say: one abuse was to spend the limited time one has for reading “on the worthless and the inferior when the best is available—the reader should be selective”; another was “to read too much”—it was better to know a few authors well than many imperfectly; finally, “the wise reader will never make his reading a substitute for living. To do so is to abuse reading and to make it a drug or a narcotic.” The “true use” of reading was “to enrich the actual life of the reader,” “to refine in gladness and to console in sorrow,” and to “stamp the life with high quality and with purpose.”32 To underscore his final points, he quoted, as many have done, a famous passage from Francis Bacon:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.33

Nowhere in this learned and amiable talk did Birkett mention literary criticism or scholarship, although many of the authors he cited also wrote essays and offered pertinent maxims. “Use and abuse” to him referred to the practice, and the life, of the reader.

The Use and Abuse of Criticism

A look at a twentieth-century public lecture on literary studies, one that would seem to be at the most genteel edge of discourse, far away from troublemaking, will provide us some evidence about the permeable borderline between use and abuse.

The author of this 1974 lecture, entitled “The Use and Abuse of Literary Criticism,” was the eminent Shakespeare editor and literary critic Harold F. Brooks, and the occasion his appointment to a personal chair of English literature at Birkbeck College, London. The title of his talk suggests an urbane approach to pleasures and dangers, well suited to a celebratory event. Birkbeck, an institution committed to offering parttime undergraduate instruction for working people, was far away from the “theory revolutions” then under way at places like Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Paris VIII. (Today’s Birkbeck is another story, the theory revolution having come home to roost there, with the establishment of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities under the International Directorship of Slavoj Žižek.)

Brooks began with what he clearly regarded as some matter-of-fact statements about the role of criticism:

“Literary criticism is meant to help us, either in writing literature; or in reading it with more enjoyment and discrimination; or in understanding, through the literature, the civilization it belongs to.”34

A good critic would help to provide a “known and sound text”35 and “notes” to keep us from misunderstanding the words and context, especially if the work were of an earlier historical period.36

The critic could also help the reader by “undermin[ing] your prejudices,” developing a “fresh