The Sceptre and the Torch--Criticism & Theory
Notes by Dr. S. Sree Kumar
Helen Louise Gardner
(1908 – 1986) was an English
literary critic and academic. She was best known for her work on John Donne and
T. S. Eliot. 'The Profession of a Critic', is a lecture delivered in the University of London in the spring of 1953. This essay
constitutes a part of the lecture.
Criticism has increasingly in
this century become professionalized. The tone in literary criticism is only
professional. The notion that anybody with natural taste, some experience of
life, a decent grounding in the classics, and the habit of wide reading can
talk profitably on English Literature is highly unfashionable. The cynic might
point to other more sinister signs of professionalism: the esoteric and almost
unintelligible vocabulary of some critics; the appearance of a Dictionary of
Critical Terms, comparable to a legal or medical dictionary and the embittered
quarrels of rival sects. the fact that so many contributions to critical
journals consist not of studies of a writer or his works, but of considerations
of Mr. X's modifications of Mr. Y's criticism of Mr. Z's article on — shall we
say Measure for Measure, or Marvell's 'The Garden?' The ordinary cultured
reader, picking up such a journal, feels like someone entering a cinema in the
middle of a gangster film, baffled about the antecedents of the battle which is
raging, and uncertain who is fighting on whose side.
