[image error] Last week The New York Times Book Review ran a feature in which six contemporary critics attempted at some length to justify their calling in what the TBR called an “age of opinion” that often mistakes “contentious assertion” for criticism. The essays were interesting, some even eloquent. But something seemed missing from their protestations: a clear, concise statement of what criticism is, or should be.

By purest coincidence, later in the week I stumbled on a passage that seemed to be just that -- a quotation (in a book by the English novelist Susan Hill) from David Cecil’s Library Looking Glass: A Personal Anthology.

Cecil -- formally Lord Edward Christian David Gascoigne-Cecil, younger son of the Marquess of Salisbury -- was an English aristocrat and friend of upper-crust glitterati from Cecil Beaton to Dame Edith Sitwell; professor of English Literature at Oxford University, where his pupils included John Bayley and Kingsley Amis; and a critic of wide-ranging tastes and gifts whose many books include studies of Jane Austen, Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and the painters Augustus John and Edward Burne-Jones (talk about strange bedfellows).

Here’s what Cecil says about critics: their “aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and to help readers to appreciate it, by defining and analyzing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of vision from which its beauties are visible.”

However, he says, “many critics do not realize their function. They aim not to appreciate but to judge; they seek first to draw up laws about literature and then to bully readers into accepting these laws...[but] you cannot force a taste on someone else, you cannot argue people into enjoyment.”

That’s it, in an elegant nutshell -- the thing that separates criticism from snark, or tendentious analysis.