Wilson on the hypertrophy of critique

His immediate target is the knowing, sarcastic critique found in biographies inspired by Lytton Strachey (here he’s reviewing a rather arch biography of Byron). But he goes on to make a wider point whose relevance has not yet passed:

“Every age has its complacent failures of intelligence, and we have learned in our own time to laugh at the ‘reasonable’ point of view that was fashionable in the eighteenth century and the moral point of view of the nineteenth, but it looks as if this new sort of ironic belittlement were likely to become characteristic of our own.”