Virginia Woolf, “An Essay in Criticism,” The New York Herald Tribune, October 9,
1927.
HUMAN credulity is indeed won-
derful. There may be good rea-
sons for believing in a King or
a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we
see them go sweeping by in their robes
and their wigs, with their heralds and
their outriders, our knees begin to shake
and our looks to falter. But what
reason there is for believing in critics it
is impossible to say. They have neither
wigs nor outriders. They differ in no
way from other people if one sees them
in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fel-
low creatures have only to shut them-
selves up in a room, dip a pen in the
ink, and call themselves “we” for the
rest of us to believe that they are some-
how exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs
grow on their heads. Robes cover their
limbs. No greater miracle was ever per-
formed by the power of human credulity.
And, like most miracles, this one, too, has
had a weakening effect upon the mind
of the believer. He begins to think that
critics, because they call themselves so,
must be right. He begins to suppose that
something actually happens to a book
when it has been praised or denounced
in print. He begins to doubt and con-
ceal his own sensitive, hesitating appre-
hensions when they conflict with the
critics' decrees.
And yet, barring the learned (and
learning is chiefly useful in judging the
work of the dead), the critic is rather
more fallible than the rest of us. He
has to give us his opinion of a book that
has been published two days, perhaps,
with the shell still sticking to its head.
He has to get outside that cloud of fer-
tile, but unrealized, sensation which
hangs about a reader, to solidify it, to
sum it up. The chances are that he
does this before the time is ripe; he does
it too rapidly and too definitely. He says
that it is a great book or a bad book.
Yet, as he knows, when he is content
to read only, it is neither. He is driven
by force of circumstances and some
human vanity to hide those hesitations
which beset him as he reads, to smooth
out all traces of that crab-like and
crooked path by which he has reached
what he chooses to call “a conclusion.”
So the crude trumpet blasts of critical
opinion blow loud and shrill, and we,
humble readers that we are, bow our
submissive heads.
But let us see whether we can do
away with these pretenses for a season
and pull down the imposing curtain
which hides the critical process until it
is complete. Let us give the mind a new
book, as one drops a lump of fish into
a cage of fringed and eager sea
anemones, and watch it pausing, pon-
dering, considering its attack. Let us
see what prejudices affect it; what in-
fluences tell upon it. And if the con-
clusion becomes in the process a little
less conclusive it may, for that very
reason, approach nearer to the truth.
The first thing that the mind desires
is some foothold of fact upon which it
can lodge before it takes flight upon its
speculative career. Vague rumors attach
themselves to people's names. Of Mr.
[new column]
Hemingway, we know that he is an Amer-
ican living in France, an “advanced”
writer, we suspect, connected with what
is called a movement, though which of
the many we own that we do not know.
It will be well to make a little more cer-
tain of these matters by reading first Mr.
Hemingway's earlier book, “The Sun Also
Rises,” and it soon
becomes clear from
this that if Mr.
Hemingway is “ad-
vanced” it is not in
the way that is to
us most interesting.
A prejudice of which
the reader would do
well to take account
is here exposed; the
critic is a modern-
ist. Yes, the excuse
would be because
the moderns make
us aware of what
we feel subcon-
sciously; they are
truer to our own
experience, they
even anticipate it,
and this gives us a
particular excite-
ment. But nothing
new is revealed
about any of the
characters in “The
Sun Also Rises.”
[new column]
They come before us shaped, propor-
tioned, weighed, exactly as the char-
acters of Maupassant are shaped and
proportioned. They are seen from the old
angle; the old reticences, the old rela-
tions between author and character are
observed.
But the critic has the grace to re-
flect that this de-
mand for new as-
pects and new per-
spectives may well
be overdone. It may
become whimsical.
It may become fool-
ish. For why should
not art be trade-
tional as well as
original? Are we
not attaching too
much importance to
an excitement
which, though
agreeable, may not
be valuable in it-
self, so that we are
led to make the
fatal mistake of
overriding the writer's gift?
At any rate, Mr.
Hemingway is not
modern in the sense
given; and it would
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