The Roving Critic by Carl Van Doren
The Roving Critic collects short essays and reviews in which Carl Van Doren argues that the test of literature is whether it is alive. In the opening piece he adds a fourth question to the usual three of whether a work is good, true or beautiful: "Is it alive?" Odysseus, Faust and Huckleberry Finn are not good, and Homer, Dante and Shakespeare are not strictly true. Yet they last because they communicate the vividness of life. The measure of the creator is the amount of life put into the work, and the measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there. Several essays then turn to how reputations and the past are made. Following Peacock, "The Revenge of the Bards" argues that bards and biographers decide who is remembered, and that they favor warriors, kings and their own guild. The plain man finds little of his own world in histories. "Creative Reading" says the best reader challenges, disputes and builds as he reads. Such a reader avoids the pedantry of the professor who rejected The Playboy of the Western World for being neither tragedy nor comedy. A group of pieces on American writers follows. "The Poetical Cult of Lincoln" traces how poets such as Stoddard, Lowell, Whitman, Robinson, Markham, Fletcher and Lindsay moved from the folk Lincoln of humor and pardons to a mystic, saintly figure. "Whitman in His Crises" reads the poet's own verses as records of his awakening. "The Lion and the Uniform" examines Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Van Doren calls it brilliant and substantially accurate, but he finds the psychoanalysis strained and the monistic view of the artist too narrow. "Eulogium" praises William Dean Howells as a friend to Mark Twain and Henry James and as the author of memoirs and novels that document American life. "On Hating the Provinces" cautions against the new scorn for village life. "What the Fathers Read" surveys the books of Puritan New England. Other pieces take up the whale Mocha Dick behind Moby Dick, the Kentucky superstitions, Paul Bunyan's move west, and the Saturday Club's table talk. Milo Erwin's The Bloody Vendetta is named the worst American book and quoted at length. Other essays range wider. "The Release of Youth" and "Youth Is Always Right" praise the energy and rightness of the young. "The Silver Age of Our Literature" names the period from about 1870 to 1910 and says its gentle tradition is now charged with being genteel. "Broad House and Narrow House" uses Evelyn Scott's Narcissus to contrast insulated and over-sensitive lives. "Good Names" surveys how English novelists from Defoe to Hardy named their characters. "The Great Laboratory" recommends Greece as the best place to study human life, and "Justice or Melodrama?" calls the postwar peace a melodrama's fifth act. "The Corruption of Comfort" likens the modern age to men grown rich too abruptly. "God Is Not Dead of Old Age" offers the Spanish peasant's proverb as a steadying wisdom. The rest is lighter. It includes the fable "The Cosmic Ironies," the comic sketch "Petit up to Thirty," satirical verse for a royal wedding, and short reviews of Lawrence, Mathers, Van Vechten, Hartmann and Maran. A final essay begins on the false story that Lincoln was illegitimate.
By Carl Van Doren · First published 1923 · Genre: Literary criticism, Essay collection, Cultural criticism · 10 chapters · 56,968 words
First lines
A FOURTH DIMENSION IN CRITICISM
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Genres
- Literary criticism — The book's core work is evaluating authors and their works, including Whitman, Mark Twain, Howells and Lincoln's literary image, using criteria of goodness, truth, beauty and vitality.
- Essay collection — It is a set of titled, self-contained essays, each developing one argument, with no continuous narrative or plot.
- Cultural criticism — It examines how American society, the Gilded Age, the frontier and youth culture shape art, reputation and collective memory.
- Belles-lettres — Its elegant, witty, personal prose values style and the pleasure of writing about books as an art in its own right.
Tags
literary criticism · essays · vitality in literature · theory of criticism · creative reading · reputation and posterity · historiography · bards and biographers · Abraham Lincoln · Lincoln as folk hero · Walt Whitman · Whitman's poetic awakening
What this Textopian page supports
The Roving Critic is listed on Textopian as an essay by Carl Van Doren, dated 1923 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Essay
- Author: Carl Van Doren
- Date: 1923 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Literary criticism, Essay collection, Cultural criticism, Belles-lettres, Literary history
- Length: 56,968 words
- Structure: 10 chapters, 359 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for The Roving Critic by Carl Van Doren
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
- Readability and classroom-planning context
- Passage-specific claims should cite the exact /read/ URL for the relevant chapter or paragraph
Contents
- Toward a Creed
- Three of Our Conquerors
- Two Notes on Youth
- Howells: May 1920
- Nooks and Fringes
- Long Roads
- Short Cuts
- A Casual Shelf
- Poets' Corner
- In the Open