Critics in Baltimore

At Johns Hopkins University last week the weather outside was rainy; indoors it was heavy. Some of America's highest browed literary critics had gathered to discuss just what a critic's job is. Scholars and professors from 30 colleges, professional critics and a handful of writers were there.

The biggest crowd of the conference turned out to hear Princeton's R. P. Black-mur. Said he:

"There is a great deal of obscurity in modern writing which could be cleared up if writers could be forced (only by criticism) to develop a skill in making positive statement . . . whether in verse or in prose. Statement may make art great and ought not to be subject to fashion . .

"We have also a decay of the power of conviction or mastery; we permit ourselves everywhere to be overwhelmed by the accidents of our massive ignorance and by the apparent subjectivity of our individual processes ... It is a world alive and moving but which does not understand itself . . . Shaw is as difficult as Joyce, Mann as Kafka, if you really look into them. The difficulties arise . . . partly because of the conditions of society . . . The audience is able to bring less to the work of art than under the conditions of the old culture, and the artist is required to bring more . . . almost the whole job of culture has been dumped into the artist's hands . . . The burden of criticism in our time is ... to make bridges between the society and the arts: to prepare the audience for its art and to prepare the arts for their artists."

Absent from the Great Critics sessions was the sage of Baltimore, Critic H. L. Mencken. But over a beer, Mencken peppered the visitors with a shakerful of critical opinions. Sample: "The thing about Theodore Dreiser always was his enormous unintelligence. He reached heights of unintelligence as great as any of the heights of intelligence that Aristotle achieved."

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