The Local Flavour by T.S. Eliot

In a world which is chiefly occupied with the task of keeping up to date / with itself, it is a satisfaction to know that there is at least one man / who has not only read but enjoyed, and not only enjoyed but read, such / authors as Petronius and Herondas. That is Mr. Charles Whibley, and / there are two statements to make about him: that he is not a critic, and / that he is something which is almost as rare, if not quite as precious. / He has apparently read and enjoyed a great deal of English literature, / and the part of it that he has most enjoyed is the literature of the / great ages, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We may opine that / Mr. Whibley has not uttered a single important original judgment upon / any of this literature. On the other hand, how many have done so? Mr. / Whibley is not a critic of men or of books; but he convinces us that if / we read the books that he has read we should find them as delightful as / he has found them; and if we read them we can form our own opinions. And / if he has not the balance of the critic, he has some other equipoise of / his own. It is partly that his tastes are not puritanical, that he can / talk about Restoration dramatists and others without apologizing for / their "indecency"; it is partly his sense for the best local and / temporal flavours; it is partly his healthy appetite.

A combination of non-critical, rather than uncritical, qualities made / Mr. Whibley the most appropriate person in the world for the work by / which he is best known. We should be more grateful for the "Tudor / Translations Series" if we could find copies to be bought, and if we / could afford to buy them when we found them. But that is not Mr. / Whibley's fault. The introductions which he wrote for some of the / translators are all that such introductions should be. His Urquhart's / _Rabelais_ contains all the irrelevant information about that writer / which is what is wanted to stimulate a taste for him. After reading the / introduction, to read Urquhart was the only pleasure in life. And / therefore, in a country destitute of living criticism, Mr. Whibley is a / useful person: for the first thing is that English literature should be / read at all.