The Critical Review

“ People read to have something to talk about, and 'to seem to know that which they do not.' Consequently, there cannot be too much dialectics and debatable matter, too much pomp and paradox, in a review. To elevate and surprise is the great rule for producing a dramatic or critical effect. ”

“ A man writes a book of criticisms. A Quarterly Review criticises the critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the critic's critic. A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the critic's critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea “has smaller fleas that on him prey,” even the critic himself cannot escape the common lot of being bitten. ”

“ Criticism, however, in its more comprehensive sense, was the weapon which he most naturally used, but he turned his critical inquiry rather upon men than upon institutions, or even upon political measures. ”

“ A Review is, or is supposed to be, an embodiment of this important element; exercising itself always with reference to the leading interests of the age, holding a middle place between the buzz of the newspapers and the mature judgment of the historian, less subject to the influences of passion or party than the former, and held to less strict account for severe attention to justice than the latter. Our current literary ideas and forms are of English growth. The violence of party spirit, the universal interest in politics, have in England made the great Reviews into political organs. ”

“ Much had no doubt been done within the century to enlarge the basis of our critical views, to exchange the criticism of particulars for that of generals, to contemplate and decide according to the essence rather than the form. ”

“ The book stands a monumental warning to thinkers on society and politics, of what happens when once men lose sight, in their speculations, of the value of Liberty and of Individuality.
To return to myself. The Review engrossed, for some time longer, nearly all the time I could devote to authorship, or to thinking with authorship in view. The articles from the London and Westminster Review which are reprinted in the Dissertations, are scarcely a fourth part of those I wrote. In the conduct of the Review I had two principal objects. ”

“ We have had to reject the idea that a standard of excellence can either be extracted by critical analysis from the practice of accepted models, or that it can be based on the consensus of experts, or upon universal suffrage. ”

“ The appeal to an objective standard slowly but surely forced its lesson on the litigants before the bar of truth. Writing under the eye of vigilant critics one cannot forever suppress or distort inconvenient facts. The critical dagger, at first sharpened only to stab an enemy, became a scalpel to cut away many a foreign growth. ”

“ Whatever favor a radical criticism can obtain, it must win on its merits both as an adequate interpretation of our political past and as an outlook towards the solution of our present and future political and economic problems. ”

“ Above all the literary review—which might be called a review of general ideas, except that such a designation emphasises the intellectual at the expense of the sensational and emotional elements—must protect its disinterestedness, must avoid the temptation ever to appeal to any social, political or theological prejudices. ”

“ The Review, which is the organ of no party, and no sect, and supported by men of all shades of opinion, aims at the collection and production in a popular form of all that is important in the history, the politics, the topography, the statistics, the philology, the manners and customs, the political and domestic economy, &c. ”

“ A literary review should maintain the application, in literature, of principles which have their consequences also in politics and in private conduct; and it should maintain them without tolerating any confusion of the purposes of pure literature with the purposes of politics or ethics.
"In the common mind all interests are confused, and each degraded by the confusion. And where they are confused, they cannot be related; in the common mind any specialized activity is conceived as something isolated from life, an odious task or a pastime of mandarins. ”

“ So what the critic has in view for the present is the scrutiny of the "masses," which he will place before "Man" in order to combat them from the stand-point of Man. "What is now the object of criticism?" "The masses, a spiritual being!" ”

“ Seeking a negative result from them,—personal altercation and wrangling,—one gets no fruit; seeking a positive result,—the elucidation and establishment of one’s ideas,—one may get much. Even bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I declared, in a former lecture on this subject, my conviction that criticism is not the strong point of our national literature. ”

“ And the way in which it does this is by a constant process of weakening or strengthening, as the case may be, the less or more correct generalisations with which the critic starts, or which he forms in the early days of his reading. There has often been brought against some great critics the charge that their critical standards have altered at different times of their career. ”

“ But the critic in question—for some years a main support of the National Review—recognises this avoidance of moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men’s real motives of action. ”

“ But we complain of a growing inclination on the part of our lighter journals to believe, on such grounds, that such is the fact—that because the British Quarterlies, through supineness, and our own, through a degrading imitation, have come to merge all varieties of vague generalization in the one title of “Review,” it therefore results that criticism, being everything in the universe, is, consequently, nothing whatever in fact. ”

“ From the opening of the movement, the propaganda of progressive ideas was a leading aim of journalistic and critical literature, reviews coming to exercise great influence side by side with newspapers, and the leading aim of this literature being to popularise philosophy and new ideas. ”

“ How many of these worthy persons who, as their wont is, read the Quarterly Review, would do other than stand agape, if you asked them whether they had ever reflected what their sensations and perceptions are and why they are?
So that if the Reviewer's new definition of reason be correct, the majority of men, even among the most civilised nations, are devoid of that supreme characteristic of manhood. ”

“ I shall have rescued the understandings of the public from the dominion of a critic, who, relying on the bulk of his labours, and the ponderous mass of his researches, has attempted to give laws on all topics of literature and criticism. ”

“ Criticism, after the pattern of most contemporary leader-writers, is the expression of judgments formed at random in a more or less witty way, just as an advocate pleads in court on the most contradictory briefs. The newspaper critic always finds a subject to work up in the book he is discussing. ”

“ The bias to miscellaneous discussion and criticism is so great, that it is necessary to insert politics in a sort of sandwich of literature, in order to make them at all palatable to the ordinary taste. ”

“ Into this categorical assertion of a concrete experience embodying a plan, our whole series of hypothetically valid assertions of the realm of Critical Rationalism have now resolved themselves. A will concretely embodied in a life, — and these meanings identical with the very purposes that our poor fleeting finite ideas are even now so fragmentarily seeking, amidst all their flickerings and their conflicts, to express, — this, I say, is the reality. ”

“ The very temerity of the Review, sustained by such rare learning, ability, and brilliancy, gave it currency with friends and foes. It was admitted by its enemies that no similar publication displayed so many rich veins of thought, uttered so many acute observations, or arrayed its offspring in such graceful drapery ”

“ The men who, with the compass of criticism in their hands, sailed the uncharted sea of original research proposed a different view. History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions. ”

“ We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one, and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free criticism, without which art, literature, and research alike degenerate into tradition or imposture. ”

“ Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, literature, no more means a lowering of the standard of excellence than it means a lowering of the standards in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering or ship-building, or in the art of living itself. ”

“ If it be a poem, the reviewer’s head already rings with the whole gamut of the world’s metrical music; he can recognize any simile, recall all turns of phrase, match every sentiment; why seek to please him anew with old things? If it concern itself with the philosophy of politics, he can and will set himself to test it by the whole history of its kind41 from Plato down to Benjamin Kidd. How can it but spoil your sincerity to know that your critic will know everything? Will you not be tempted of the devil to anticipate his judgment or his pretensions by pretending to know as much as he? ”

“ The contents of every publication are certainly a fair subject for criticism; and to the fair comments of real critics, however repugnant to the sentiments I entertain, or the doctrine I seek to inculcate, I shall ever submit without murmur or reproach. ”

“ All that boiling rancour which sputters against the thoughts, the style, the taste, the moral character of an author, is often nothing more than practising what, to give it a name, we may call Political Criticism in Literature; where an author’s literary character is attacked solely from the accidental circumstance of his differing in opinion from his critics on subjects unconnected with the topics he treats of. ”

“ In every page of the criticism the sophisms and fallacies of which I have undertaken to expose, there is some fresh proof that the reviewer does not see his own way, and that he is perpetually at contradiction with himself. ”

“ And the accession of the critic in the place of the indefatigable compiler, of the artist in coloured narrative, the skilled limner of character, the persuasive advocate of good, or other, causes, amounts to a transfer of government, to a change of dynasty, in the historic realm. For the critic is one who, when he lights on an interesting statement, begins by suspecting it. ”

“ But, if truth itself is an expanding circle of ideas that grows through criticism and by modification, we need say no more as to the rough and imperfect apprehension of truth which constitutes the dominant opinion of society at any given moment. ”

“ It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,—criticism of writers by readers,—this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. ”

“ In a matter of literary judgment or taste, one may soften one's tone of criticism and opposition to the gentlest breath of dissent; but in a matter of political morality so vital as this, there must be no compromise and no mistake. ”

“ Though the public mind is full of the problems of social reform, it is remarkable how little literature, combining trained observation in the social field with reasonable theory, is available for the general reader. ”

“ It is a rather popular exposition of the chief ideas of the Critique, namely, of the critical realism, which consists in the critical and conscious acceptation of the facts first given to a naïve mind, namely, that the world consists of ‘things’ and ‘ideas,’ in opposition to those idealistic theories, which consider the world as ‘representation’ or ‘will,’ or ‘will and representation,’ etc. ”

“ No school of criticism carried any authority outside its immediate following—not one man nor woman alive in Great Britain at that moment, not one literary journal, weekly, monthly, or daily, carried enough weight behind its literary judgments to shift for a moment the success or failure of a book or a personality. ”

“ And to all this, too, the critics generously agree. A great critic, they say, is the rarest of beings. But should one miraculously appear, how should we maintain him, on what should we feed him? Great critics, if they are not themselves great poets, are bred from the profusion of the age. There is some great man to be vindicated, some school to be founded or destroyed. ”

“ Hence the transcendent importance of criticism next to creation in both spheres: criticism of personalities and criticism of “works.” The mistaking of a little man for a great man, or the reverse, may easily mean the delay of the work of culture for whole generations. And, equally, the confusion of the objects of culture with the objects of civilisation may spell the ruin of a nation. ”

“ In such a profession reform must be brought about by the action of an enlightened public opinion, which, unwarped by prejudice and unfettered by [10] professional trammels, is free to perceive truth, and hold to it when discovered. ”

“ Might I, an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from the ancient or modern literature of Europe, all references to such sentiments or manners as are become the standards of propriety for opinion and action in our own modes, and, equally, all appeals to our revealed tenets of religion and moral duty. ”

“ The other criticisms which had appeared in newspapers, critical journals, and literary gazettes, had been evidently the work of small men; and, feeble and commonplace in their style and thinking, they carried with them no weight—for who cares anything for the judgment, on [Pg 449] one's writings, of men who themselves cannot write? But here, at length, was there a critique eloquently and powerfully written. It was, however, at least as extravagant in its praise as the others in their censure. The friendly critic knew nothing of the author he commended ”