Category Archives: Readings

Readings: The touch of truth

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In an essay first published in 1864 Matthew Arnold responds to those who’d objected to a ‘proposition’ he’d put forth about the importance of criticism at that time, and its function to enable us ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’ His detractors asserted the ‘inherent superiority of the creative effort of the human spirit over its critical effort.’ He concedes:

Everybody would admit that a false or malicious criticism had better never have been written. Everybody, too, would be willing to admit, as a general proposition, that the critical faculty is lower than the inventive. But is it true that criticism is really, in itself, a baneful and injurious employment; is it true that all time given to writing critiques on the works of others would be much better employed if it were given to original composition, of whatever kind this may be?

Perhaps ‘the critical power’ is ‘of lower rank’ than the creative, he goes on, but although it is ‘undeniable’ that ‘a free creative activity’ is ‘the highest function of man, the source of our ‘happiness’; but it is also undeniable

that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or art; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men. They may have it in well-doing, they may have it in learning, they may have it even in criticising.

Besides, it is not always possible, he suggests, for creative activity to take place if the ‘elements’ and ‘materials’ necessary aren’t present. Those elements consist of ‘the best ideas…current at the time.’ The ‘creative power has, for its happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements are not in its own control’:

Nay, they are more within the control of the critical power…Thus it tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature.

A stirring defence of criticism – that branch or area of literary endeavour which most of us who blog about books (mostly, in my case, at least) are humbly and earnestly – and honestly –  engaged in, searching to find ‘the touch of truth’.

The quotations are taken from my copy of Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy and other writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Stefan Collini (CUP, 1995). My quotations from ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ are at pp. 26-29.

 

 

 

 

John Locke on reading

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Readings: John Locke (1632-1704), ‘Reading’

Those who have read of everything are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment…The memory may be stored, but the judgement is little better, and the stock of knowledge not increased, by being able to repeat what others have said or produce the arguments we have found in them. Such a knowledge as this is but knowledge by hearsay, and the ostentation of it is at best but talking by rote, and very often upon weak and wrong principles.

From Of the Conduct of Understanding, in William Peacock, ed., English Prose, vol. 2 (OWP, 1949; 1st edn 1921), pp. 183-84

Locke portrait

Kit-cat portrait of Locke by Godrey Kneller, in the National Portrait Gallery, London

Salutary thoughts.

I hope from time to time to introduce short ‘readings’ of this kind to supplement the usual reviews, Asides, etc. I hope it might prove of interest.

This particular example reminds us that simply cramming our heads with more and more, well, ‘words, words, words’, we aren’t necessarily making ourselves more knowledgeable, intelligent or judicious. If we don’t ‘ruminate’ on what we read, we simply risk becoming pedants and parrots.

Here’s to more rumination, and less parroting.

Portrait of Locke attribution: By Stephencdickson – Own work, Public Domain

I didn’t know what a ‘Kit-cat portrait’ was, so here’s the (edited) Wikipedia entry on it:

A kit-cat portrait or kit-kat portrait is a particular size of portrait, less than half-length, but including the hands. The name originates from a famous series of portraits which were commissioned from Godfrey Kneller for members of the Kit-Cat Club, a Whig dining club, to be hung in their meeting place at Barn Elms. They are now mostly in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London…Each canvas is thirty-six inches long, and twenty-eight wide. The special Kit-cat portrait size is said to have been determined because the dining-room ceiling of the Kit-cat Club was too low for half-length portraits of the members.

And this explains the name of the club (same source):

The first meetings were held at a tavern in Shire Lane (parallel with Bell Yard and now covered by the Royal Courts of Justice) run by an innkeeper called Christopher Catt. He gave his name to the mutton pies known as “Kit Cats” from which the name of the club is derived.