Of Literature's Priesthood

Where literary classics are concerned I have always thought, and still think, that the reader with any real interest should try and form their own judgments. They should do so with as open and informed a mind as possible, and be ready to consider views other than their own, but all the same, the most careful such process of judgment is a very different thing from the sort of mindless deference to received opinion that defines the middlebrow in the term's only really useful sense.

Of course, endeavoring to do that myself I have from the start found myself disagreeing with the received judgments all the time--and noticing how little others try to do what I did. Rather the scholars of literature have tended to act as a priesthood of literature, upholding tradition, respecting authority, telling others what to think just as they are themselves told what to think rather than thinking for themselves and encouraging others to do the same, and accordingly preaching on behalf of respect for some things and disrespect for others (which, frankly, played its part in driving me toward a more questioning attitude in the first place).

Considering the last part, how the priests deal with the "laity," one can see this as a matter of the professional generally to take a condescending view of everyone else in the world as incapable of understanding a really meaningful explanation. However, it seems to me that this is also a matter of the priests not having sought explanation themselves. Critics of art, who have often been practicing artists, and even more often at least been aspiring artists, tend to share the artist's outlook--which tends to be unconscious, intuitive, impressionable, and moved to awe and deference rather than consider what is put before them critically (they become Bardolators because they so easily become idolators), leaving them unequipped to answer those who look at the world a different way, as I did in trying to figure these things out for myself.