TOM PAULIN'S MASTERCLASS

WHO COMES first, the artist or the critic?

Until relatively recently there was no doubt about the answer to that question: artists had precedence, critics were followers and latecomers, the humble if sometimes pretentious servants of the work of art. Writers created beautiful poems, fictions, plays, while critics extracted a few of their favourite quotations, added some prose commentary and called the result, say, Early Modernism or Mrs Oliphant: The Last Phase. So critics were merely opinionated and belated shadows, totally dependent on the works they discussed.

Oscar Wilde disagreed, and in a witty dialogue essay, "The Critic As Artist", he allows Gilbert free rein in a long conversation with his morally serious friend Ernest, who represents the Victorian middle-class's dedication to the gravid and respon-sibleside of Matthew Arnold's critical writings. Ernest follows Arnold in believing that it is the function of the critic to make us see the work of art "as in itself it really is". Gilbert thinks this is boring and foolish - the purpose of the critic is to have fun, to make things up, to invent.

Criticism is about enjoying yourself. As Susan Sontag once remarked, "we need an erotics of art." The great critics communicate the pleasure of art. They do so by becoming the equivalent of actors or musicians, who perform and at the same time interpret a work in performance.

Ernest is worried by Gilbert's stance, and wonders whether criticism really is a creative art. Oh yes, says Gilbert. lt works with materials, and puts them into a form that is "at once new and delightful". And then, pushing his argument to extremes, as the true critic has to on occasion, he argues that the highest criticism is, in its own way, "more creative than creation".

And - with a wink at one section of his audience - Gilbert remarks that criticism, "as the Greeks would put it", is an end in itself.

James Joyce agreed - criticism comes first, is truly and originally creative and classical. This is the inspiration behind Joyce's anti-novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where his steely double Stephen Dedalus cleaves his way through a Dublin childhood and adolescence to find his vocation as an artist. But before he can realise that ambition, he has first to become a critic.

At his boarding school, one summer evening, Stephen Dedalus becomes obsessed with a rhythmic pattern of words - soft grey sky, soft grey air - and with a different pattern of sound that is made by cricket bats hitting cricket balls. He keeps playing withthe sounds, repeating them, until the first section of the novel closes with a reprise of the sounds: The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.

This is a critical moment of vision, an epiphany, for what the young Stephen is realising is that he is enveloped in a style and language that is mannered, precious, dead, secondhand and second-rate. It is, as we now would say, a "discourse" shaped by the prose of Walter Pater and Cardinal Newman, and by Wilde's prose as well.

But how to break out of it into a different form, rhythm, style? Joyce later describes Stephen passing Dublin shop-signs and feeling imaginatively shrivelled as he walks among "heaps of dead language". How can he get out of this staleness? By learning Irish and writing in that language, perhaps? No, that wasn't the road he wanted to take. He must instead revitalise the English language, make Irish English stretch and sing and fly out at the stars.

This is where the sound of the cricket balls comes in. Their consonantal chunkiness, the playful form and elaborate rules they imply, the subtly accurate recognition that they sound exactly like plucked violin strings or water-drops hitting the tight, still surface of a bowl of water - these sounds signal the classical spirit which breaks down soppy, kitsch, self-regarding phrases like "falling softly in the brimming bowl".

This critical perception was equivalent for Joyce to the difference between classicism and romanticism. Romanticism, he wrote, is an "insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper" whose wild figures "lack the gravity of solid bodies". Classicism is a temper of "security and satisfaction and patience". It has a "quick intelligence" and is always aware of limitations.

Hearing the sound of an almost invisible cricket match, Stephen recognises the gravity of solid bodies and the contrasting flimsiness of routine, sentimental, facile rhythm - "and from here and from there through the quiet air". Pick pack pock puck - thecritic seizes on these sounds and prepares the ground for art to grow.

After you, says the artist to the critic.

This is the first in a new weekly series in which the poet, critic and broadcaster Tom Paulin looks at the high - and the low - points of critical writing. Next week: Ambiguity Gilbert: But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.

Ernest: Independent?

Gilbert: Yes; independent. Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose.

Oscar Wilde: `The Critic as Artist'