Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/475

Rh especially adapted to the explanation of shortcomings and "taboos" in the artist's subject matter.

The third of the categories, judgement, involves the statement of a corpus juris, the clarification and justification of certain criteria whereby whole tons of art can be either admitted or rejected. Obviously, this is the most far-reaching aspect of criticism, and has always been the one which has proved the most disastrous to its devotees. It requires the critic to assert some clear relationship between art and life, entangling him in ethics, and even metaphysics.

Looking up, we discovered that a great deal of contemporary criticism simply could not be fitted into these categories. But a word was to hand which avoided the necessity of enlarging the categories—"colyumism." By colyumism we refer to that practice of writing about art which is based on the principle that just as one might be interested in hearing what President Coolidge felt about a certain book, so one might be interested in hearing what any one felt about a certain book. And so one might; but we question whether it is a branch of criticism proper. Colyumism is the outcome of the nineteenth century's search for individual freedom, a search which extended even to criticism, normally the most restrictive of pursuits. It is the sad end of impressionism, practised by epigones who have inherited their method of improvizing from an earlier generation which at least had enough vitality to invent the method. The colyumist (nor do we refer to those honest souls who have their columns and fill them: they perform their function in society, and we are not discriminating against such people when properly labelled; we are complaining rather against colyumism when it masks as portentous and portly criticism) the colyumist aims, by the "human touch" in his writing, to avoid the "aridity of dogmatism." Which would be sweet enough if it were at all possible to judge a work of art without relying on some implied principle of judgement. The formal critic attempts to hold such a principle up to the light of day, so that in time it may be disciplined and tempered; but the colyumist's basis of judgement remains as a latent assumption which, not being overtly expressed, is hardly likely to undergo much discipline in its formation. Thus, whereas one may square off to an authentic critic like Matthew Arnold in all awareness as to the issues involved, there are hundreds of critics to-day writing colyumistically whom it is much easier to forget than refute.