# The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Comment (October 1923)

COMMENT
IN looking about us to discover what is wrong with the world for October, we decided that the most poignant ailment is a general vagueness as to the function of criticism. We hungered after some irreducible minimum, something of the nature of a cogito, ergo sum, which might serve at least as the opportunity for someone to come forth with a better one. And we felt safe in examining Aristotle, on the hypothesis that Aristotle is the formal literary critic whose work has stood the test of time most substantially.
The irreducible minimum seemed to be this: That the contribution which the Poetics makes to Greek literature is nothing other than the Poetics itself. That is, Aristotle’s criticism did not serve to improve Greek poetry; it was simply the parallel, in ideological values, to the emotional values of Greek poetry, the translation of one set of terms into another set of terms. And criticism becomes an independent activity, the beauty of which consists purely in the power and subtlety of its formulations.
Next, we found tentatively three phases in which such formulations might conceivably manifest themselves, and these for convenience we called interpretation, orientation, and judgement.
By interpretation is meant the critic's function of seeing more deeply into the work of art than is to be expected of the layman. His programme here is to understand the author's purpose and the means utilized for effecting that purpose. This phase of criticism tends towards the technical approach, and is usually done best by critics who are themselves poets.
Orientation is the examination into the origin of the work of art. As such it is quite aside from the high road of criticism, but is probably justified in that it does throw new lights upon the art work itself. Under orientation come those various attempts to approach art through sociology, biology, ethnology, biography, politics, geography, economics—in short, the approach through history, the explanation of the art work as a result, as the miniature reflection of some larger condition. This method is not very valuable in accounting for excellence—which remains pretty much of an accident—but it has proved very useful in giving us further insight into why certain elements are to be found in a given work, and it is ​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.