In a bout of pretentiousness yesterday, I spent the evening listening to Mozart, drinking a glass of port and reading about ancient Greece. Eventually I found myself thumbing through Milton’s Paradise Lost instead – it fit in even better with my pretentious mood. I view myself as a person who has a pretty good grasp of the English language, but Paradise Lost is no picnic to read. Seriously! The vocabulary and grammar is archaic, and Milton takes full advantage of poetic adaptations of words. To make things worse: even the foreword takes some concentration to get through!

Either way, in the aforementioned foreword I found an interesting thing. Look at this quote:

DEMPSTER: We have hardly a right to abuse this tragedy; for bad as it is, how vain should either of us be to write one not near so good.
JOHNSON: Why no, Sir; this is not just reasoning. You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

Strangely familiar, is it not? It is the same argument we hear (or at least I have heard) from childhood: “if you can’t do better, then you’ve no right to complain.” All along I thought that this was a modern phenomenon; that due to our plethora of art and simplified means of communication nowadays, this defensive argument arose as a common (and simple) way to dismiss critique. But people have been using this argument for ages – literally! The quote above is probably from the 18th century (I guess).

I could not agree more with Dr. Johnson’s reply; constructive criticism is the key to evolving, and one would be a fool not to offer critique even if one is not capable of performing better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.