文档介绍：2010 Text 1
Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century,
perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage.
It is difficult to the point of impossibility for the average reader under the age of forty to imagine a time when
high-quality arts criticism could be found in most big-city newspapers. Yet a considerable number of the most
significant collections of criticism published in the 20th century consisted in large part of newspaper reviews. To read
such books today is to marvel at the fact that their learned contents were once deemed suitable for publication in
general-circulation dailies.
We are even farther removed from the unfocused newspaper reviews published in England between the turn of
the 20th century and the eve of World War II, at a time when newsprint was dirt-cheap and stylish arts criticism was
considered an ornament to the publications in which it appeared. In those far-off days, it was taken for granted that
the critics of major papers would write in detail and at length about the events they covered. Theirs was a serious
business, and even those reviewers who wore their learning lightly, like e Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman,
could be trusted to know what they were about. These men believed in journalism as a calling, and were proud to be
published in the daily press. “So few authors have brains enough or literary gift enough to keep their own end up in
journalism,” Newman wrote, “that I am tempted to define ‘journalism’ as ‘a term of contempt applied by writers who
are not read to writers who are.’”
Unfortunately, these critics are virtually forgotten. Neville Cardus, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian from
1917 until shortly before his death in 1975, is now known solely as a writer of essays on the game of cricket. During
his lifetime, though, he was also one of England’s foremost