Critic

“ Put on the critic's brow, and sit At Will's, the puny judge of wit. A nod, a shrug, a scornful smile, With caution used, may serve a while. Proceed no further in your part, Before you learn the terms of art; For you can never be too far gone In all our modern critics' jargon: Then talk with more authentic face Of unities, in time and place: Get scraps of Horace from your friends, And have them at your fingers' ends; Learn Aristotle's rules by rote, And at all hazards boldly quote ”

“ By the word critic, at this day so frequent in all conversations, there have sometimes been distinguished three very different species of mortal men, according as I have read in ancient books and pamphlets. For first, by this term were understood such persons as invented or drew up rules for themselves and the world, by observing which a careful reader might be able to pronounce upon the productions of the learned, form his taste to a true relish of the sublime and the admirable, and divide every beauty of matter or of style from the corruption that apes it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You remember that I spoke of the critic as being in his own way as creative as the artist, whose work, indeed, may be merely of value in so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect. ”

“ Nearly all the discussions of criticism that I am acquainted with start off with a false assumption, to wit, that the primary motive of the critic, the impulse which makes a critic of him instead of, say, a politician, or a stockbroker, is pedagogical—that he writes because he is possessed by a passion to advance the enlightenment, to put down error and wrong, to disseminate some specific doctrine: psychological, epistemological, historical, or æsthetic. ”

“ The critic, however, has become a necessity; and has, I fancy, his justification in his own sphere. Every great writer may be regarded in various aspects. He is, of course, an individual, and the critic may endeavour to give a psychological analysis of him; and to describe his intellectual and moral constitution and detect the secrets of his permanent influence without reference to the particular time and place of his appearance. That is an interesting problem when the materials are accessible. But every man is also an organ of the society in which he has been brought up. ”

“ The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. What tongue could speak but to an intelligent ear, and every noble work demands its critic. The richer the work, the more severe should be its critic ”

“ I may of course be a prejudiced critic, but it seems to me to possess in abundance those graces of metre, rhyme, high thought in poetic form, and perfection of finish which the critics unite in demanding. ”

“ And the critic even ventures to prescribe, by the authority of rule, the particular properties and attributes, required to sustain it. And no wonder. Every man, as he can make himself the subject of all passions, so he becomes, in a manner, the aggregate of all characters. ”

“ If all other circumstances be equal, he will undoubtedly be the best critic, who knows best the phenomena of human thought and feeling; and, without this knowledge, criticism can be nothing but a measurement of words, or a repetition of the ever repeated and endless common places of rhetoric. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the critic knew nothing of the general plan I could forgive him, all the more because one can no more hinder criticism than the use of eyes, tongues, and judgment. ”

“ There runs through all his work, as a critic of manners and men, as well as of art, a wisdom of life born of wide and keen observation; put not into the form of aphorisms, but of shrewd comment, of keen criticism, of nice discrimination between the manifold shadings of insincerity, of insight into the action and reaction of conditions, surroundings, social and ethical aims on men and women. ”

“ We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? ”

“ The great stumbling-block of literary criticism, alike for the professional critic and the unprofessional reader, is the tacit assumption that the opinions, preferences, and estimates of to-day are not merely passing opinions, preferences, and estimates, but will be permanent ones ”

“ Some who have used the title "higher critic" have approached their subject in a reverent spirit and laboured earnestly in the vain hope of satisfying intellectual doubts, when the real trouble has been with the hearts of objectors rather than with their heads. ”

“ The philosophic critic, at least, will value, even in works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford. ”

“ It was this which had given poise and penetration to her own work and made her of worth to the world. The serious critic, with the sense of humour and the power of expression, must inevitably command the world’s ear. ”

“ The experienced critic, being on the inside, is in a position to look into the heads of the less experienced, and to see the wheels go round. He is privy to all their monkeyshines, since he is privy to his own. ”

“ all the Nine inspire, [675]
And bless their critic with a poet's fire.
An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust,
With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just:
Whose own example strengthens all his laws;
And is himself that great sublime he draws. ”

“ They reveal truthfully that kind, shy, proud, indolent, indifferent, and intensely conservative nature; a scholar without the prick of ambition, a critic with no desire to be judicial, an unwearied mind turned aside from healthy and normal currents of activity. ”

“ However, I shall conclude with three maxims, which may serve both as characteristics to distinguish a true modern critic from a pretender, and will be also of admirable use to those worthy spirits who engage in so useful and honourable an art. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ Again, a critic in a periodical dashes off, perhaps, his praises of a new work, as “talented, original, replete with intense interest, irresistible in argument, and, in the best sense of the word, a very readable book;”—can we really believe that he cares to attach any definite sense to the words of which he is so lavish? ”

“ Blame where you must, be candid where you can,
And be each critic the Good-natured Man. ”

“ The critic I am supposing reproaches him, naturally, in this critic’s way, with a marked failure ever to challenge, much less to analyse, that conception; with having never, as would appear, so much as put to himself in regard to most of the matters of which he makes his mystery the simple question “Proper to what?” How can any authority, even the most embodied, asks the exponent of other views, decide for us in advance what shall in any case be proper—with the consequent implication of impropriety—to our given subject? ”

“ A critic of a different age or nation, who should peruse this discourse, must have all these circumstances in his eye, and must place himself in the same situation as the audience, in order to form a true judgment of the oration. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And when we reflect that the task of the critic is to see clearly into the subtlest and deepest mind, to measure its hollows and its elevations, to weigh all its individual and its composite powers, and, that from every one of the throbbing aggregates, whom it is his office to analyze and portray, issue lines that run on all sides into the infinite, we must conclude that he who is to be the accomplished interpreter, the trusted judge, should be able swiftly to follow these lines. ”

“ Criticism, considered in its ancient and noblest office of doing justice to the merits of great writers, more especially in works of poetry and invention, demands, to its perfect execution, these two qualities: a philosophic spirit, capable of penetrating the fundamental reasons of excellence in every different species of composition; and a strong imagination, 282 the parent of what we call true taste, enabling the critic to feel the full force of his author’s excellence himself, and to impress a lively sense of it upon others. ”

“ For you in reply ask this critic whence he gets the assurance of the being of his various men, of his diverse experiences, of his many human feelings and points of view. Has he himself experienced immediately, or felt at any one moment what the supposed other real men and women feel? ”

“ If the critic be not in sympathy with the worker,—if he do not, in some measure, behold the work through his eyes,—if he cannot discern what was attempted as well as what is attained,—then his eyes will be partially holden both from the beauties and the faults of the work. ”

“ The thoughtful critic who would be rid of the cheap formulas of fiction-reviewing, and reach some clearer and deeper expression of the sense and limitations of the art, is sure to [135] resent the glib definition of the novel of situation and the novel of character (or manners) as necessarily antithetical and mutually exclusive. The thoughtful critic will be right; and the thoughtful novelist will share his view. ”

“ But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims. "A true allegory of the state of one's own mind in a representative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry." ”

“ The carping critic may sneer at them because they are not philosophical and profound; but to have been read with delight by thousands who would never have reached a second chapter had they been other than they are, may well satisfy their ambition, and make them careless of the opinion of the critic. ”

“ The most essential and edifying business of the critic will always consist in building up "a pile of better thoughts," based for the most part upon the truth resident in the lives of their predecessors and contemporaries, but not without its outlook toward an immediate and even remote future. ”

“ But to enable a critic more fully to execute this undertaking, he must preserve his mind free from all prejudice and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination. ”

“ I am regardless of critics; perhaps some of my lines want a foot; but then, if the critic look sharp out, he will find that loss sufficiently supplied in other places, where they have a foot too much: and besides, men’s works generally resemble themselves ”

“ The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy: that which rises in spite of him he will not see; ”

“ Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. ”

“ The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. ”

“ Between the general inquiry into the nature of the good and the appreciation of particular works of art, there may seem to be a wide gap, and the discussion upon which we are about to embark may appear a roundabout way of approaching our subject. Morals have often been treated, especially in recent times, as a side-issue for criticism, from which the special concern of the critic must be carefully separated. ”

“ I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic. ”

“ If just, he must learn to accept and act upon it; if unjust, he must learn to classify the critic, as unreasonable, thoughtless, or ill-natured, place him in the appropriate mental compartment, throw the criticism into the intellectual waste-basket, and proceed upon his way. ”