The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal Read Free Page B

obscurantism (
Blackwood’s Magazine
, 1817): “Mr. Coleridge conceives himself to be a far greater man than the public is likely to admit; and we wish to waken him from what seems to us a most ludicrous delusion. He seems to believe that every tongue is wagging in his praise…. The truth is that Mr. Coleridgeis but an obscure name in English literature.” [Coleridge was forty-five years old at this time and his major work was long since done.] “In London he is well known in literary society for his extraordinary loquacity…” And there follows a prolix attack upon the
Biographia Literaria
.
    Or this excerpt from an 1848
Quarterly Review
, deploring the pagan, the sexual, and the vicious:

    At all events there can be no interest attached to the writer of
Wuthering Heights
—a novel succeeding
Jane Eyre
and purporting to be written by Ellis Bell—unless it were for the sake of more individual reprobation. For though there is a decided resemblance between the two, yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state, as Catherine and Heatfield
[sic],
is too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers. With all the unscrupulousness of the French school of novels it combines that repulsive vulgarity in the choice of its vice which supplies its own antidote.

    Differently worded, these complaints still sound in our press. The Luce editors who cry for an “affirmative” literature echo voices once raised against George Eliot. When middlebrow reviewers deplore “morbidity” in our best writers, they only paraphrase the outrage of those who found the Brontës repellent. And the twitterings of an Orville Prescott when he has discovered a nice and busy book echo the same homely song of those long-dead reviewers who found in the three-volume novels of forgotten lady writers so much warm comfort.
    As the essential problems of life remain the same from generation to generation, despite altered conditions, so the problems of literary recognition remain, for contemporaries, peculiarly difficult. Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
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    To consider the writing of any period, including the present, it is perhaps of some importance to examine the climate in which the work is done, to chart if possible the prevailing winds, the weather of the day.
    Today there is a significant distinction between the reviewers for popular newspapers and magazines, whom no one interested in literature reads, and the serious critics of the Academy, who write for one another in the quarterlies and, occasionally, for the public in the Sunday supplements. The reviewers are not sufficiently relevant or important to be considered in any but a social sense: they reflect the commonest prejudices and aspirations of the middle class for whom they write, and they need not concern us here.
    The critics, however, are significant. They are dedicated men; they are serious; their learning is often respectable. They have turned to the analysis of literature with the same intensity that, born in an earlier time, they might have brought to formal philosophy, to the law, to the ministry. They tend, generically and inevitably, to be absolutists. They believe that by a close examination of “the text,” the laws and the crafty “strategies” of its composition will be made clear and the findings will provide “touchstones” for a comparative criticism of other works. So far so good. They have constructed some ingenious and perhaps valuable analyses of metaphysical verse whose order is often precise and whose most disparate images proceed with a calculable wit and logic.
    Unfortunately, the novel is not so easily explicated. It is a loose form, and although there is an inherent logic