Literary controversy

“ The earnest polemical writings of the age must be passed over, as they belong rather to ecclesiastical and political than to literary history. Yet these are the most characteristic productions of the times, and display the effects of controversy in a very unfavorable light. ”

“ These violent fluctuations betray both a public and a criticism utterly unschooled in the elementary principles of literary art, and entitle the humblest author to dispute the censure of the hour, while they ought to render the greatest suspicious of its praise. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But he directly extols the cultivation of style—of that quality which will make any decent judge identify a poet when he has heard three lines of his poem. And he practises what he preaches. Even what the grave and precise (quite truly one must confess) call his moral degradation saves him from confusing the moral with the literary quality of literature—the noble error of most ancient criticism. ”

“ With this parlor-mindedness, we repudiate and condemn in painting, literature, music, drama and the dance, whatever does not conform to the decorum of this shrine, whatsoever is not suitable to ladylike conversation. Be the book bad, it is unsuited to the parlor table. Be the book good—too good, or be it great, then it is equally unsuited. Controversy has no place in parlors, hence no controversial literature. ”

“ The manifestoes of opposing generals, advancing to pillage, to burn, to destroy, contain not a tithe of the ferocity which animates the pages of literary controversialists! No term of reproach is too severe, no vituperation too excessive! the blackest passions, the bitterest, the meanest malice, pour caustic and poison upon every page! It seems as if the greatest talents, the most elaborate knowledge, only sprang from the weakest and worst-regulated mind, as exotics from dung. ”

“ Till the corruption of literary taste, there was no appearance of this moral degradation, made up of meanness towards superiors, of insolence towards equals, and of utter forgetfulness of all respect towards the public; vices unfortunately sufficiently contagious, and which defame and destroy the nobleness of an art, that from the nature of its object, and the means it uses, has in it something superhuman. ”

“ But to compile biographies of living men—mixing up, as in this case, their mere literary effusions with their political lives, and attempting, by distortion and base inuendo, to render them contemptible in the eyes of the public—is an outrage on common decency, and must excite universal scorn and disgust. ”

“ UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. DR. KENRICK.—SCOTT OF AMWELL.
We have witnessed the malignant influence of illiberal criticism, not only on literary men, but over literature itself, since it is the actual cause of suppressing works which lie neglected, though completed by their authors. The arts of literary condemnation, as they may be practised by men of wit and arrogance, are well known ”

“ But every literary movement has been violently opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least, or arrested, by criticism; every author has been condemned for his virtues, but in no wise changed by it. ”

“ The dingy cover that wraps the pages of the Quarterly Review does not contain a concentrated essence of taste and knowledge, but is a receptacle for the scum and sediment of all the prejudice, bigotry, ill-will, ignorance, and rancour, afloat in the kingdom. This the fools and knaves who pin their faith on you know, and it is on this account they pin their faith on you. They come to you for a scale not of literary talent but of political subserviency. They want you to set your mark of approbation on a writer as a thorough-paced tool, or of reprobation as an honest man. ”

“ In noticing the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be called the arrogance of culture, an arrogance that has been emphasized, in these days of reaction from the old attitude of literary obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back by equally emphasized contempt. ”

“ Politically, the change means toleration, for it is assumed that the vulgar can judge for themselves; intellectually, it means rationalism, that is, an appeal to the reason common to all men; and, in literature it means the hatred of pedantry and the acceptance of such literary forms as are thoroughly congenial and intelligible to the common sense of the new audience. The hatred of the pedantic is the characteristic sentiment of the time. ”

“ He means that ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is transferred from fields and castles and town walls to "organs of publicity" ”

“ Possibly this toleration arose from the gradual discovery that the practical consequences of writings seldom keep pace with the aim of the writer or the fears of authority; that, for instance, neither is property endangered by literary demonstrations of its immorality, nor are churches emptied by criticism. At all events, taking the risk of consequences, we have entered on an era of almost complete literary impunity; the bonfire is as extinct as the pillory; the only fiery ordeal is that of criticism, and dread of the reviewer has taken the place of all fear of the hangman. ”

“ It leaves out of sight all that criticism—the criticism of literature and art—has done to throw light upon the dark places of human thought and history, upon the growth and subtle transformations of spiritual belief, upon the power of reason and imagination to mould the shape of outward institutions. ”

“ But the danger exists that in the revulsion of public feeling against literary extravagance not only the absurdities which have obsessed the thoughtless and irritated the sensible will undergo destruction and banishment, but those higher virtues and graces of which they are the distorted reflection will not be discriminated against, but will be demolished along with them. ”

“ Their multiplicity has undoubtedly produced much evil; puerile critics and venal drudges manufacture reviews; hence that shameful discordance of opinion, which is the scorn and scandal of criticism. Passions hostile to the peaceful truths of literature have likewise made tremendous inroads in the republic, and every literary virtue has been lost! In "Calamities of Authors" I have given the history of a literary conspiracy, conducted by a solitary critic, Gilbert Stuart, against the historian Henry. ”

“ They will assume the character of historical studies. The numerous literary products of a highly superficial nature, which are just a proof of bad taste and sometimes are made possible only by a sacrifice of the author’s pride, will be dropped. ”

“ When we add to these gross misrepresentations their meagre and confused accounts of the most important events, their profound ignorance of the hidden motives of human actions, their superstitious prejudices, and their incapacity of appreciating, or even of understanding, the principles of historical criticism, it may readily be perceived how arduous is the task of those who attempt to bring order out of this literary chaos. ”

“ The worst point about them, as already noted, is the stale and commonplace impertinence with which their author, unlike the best breed of young poets and men of letters, attempts to satirise his literary betters; while they are to some extent at any rate tarred with the other two brushes of corrupt imitation of the ancients, and of sham moral indignation. ”

“ Never will literature be judged adequately—seldom will it be, even within limits, judged accurately—as “an expression of national life.” From this and kindred fallacies come, and always have come, a brood of monsters, the folly, almost as great as its opposite, that “a poet must be a good man,” the folly that you can judge literature by remembering that there is much water-meadow in England [375] —hundreds of others. ”

“ Have they forgotten that the literary taste and critical judgment of the mass of the people have been successfully moulded to suit the will of these dictators, and to serve as a good business basis for shrewd literary speculators? ”

“ But these talents were disgraced, and the fruit of them blasted, by a FALSE TASTE OF COMPOSITION: that is, by a raised, laboured, ostentatious style; effort in writing being mistaken, as it commonly is, for energy—by a perpetual affectation of wit, irony, and satire; generally misapplied; and always out of place, being wholly unsuited to the historic character—and, what is worse, by a free-thinking libertine spirit; which spares neither morals nor religion; and must make every honest man regard him as a bad citizen, as well as writer. ”

“ The aspect of the last forty years of the seventeenth century—the age of the Restoration and the Revolution—is far from being encouraging, and some features marking many of their literary works are positively revolting. Of the social evils of the time, none infected literature so deeply as the depravation of morals, into which the court and aristocracy plunged, and many of the people followed. The drama sunk to a frightful grossness, and the tone of all other poetry was lowered. ”

“ In criticism, they have, knowingly and unblushingly, given false characters, both for good and for evil; sticking at no art of misrepresentation, to clear out of the field of literature all who stood in the way of the interests of their own clique. ”

“ Thus the excess of crude and hasty criticism, which has of late prevailed throughout the literary world, and threatened to overrun our country, begins to produce its own antidote. Where there is a multiplicity of contradictory paths, a man must make his choice ”

“ The whole has to be read at one breath. No quotation can render a conception of its rhetorical art. Every word strikes home because every word contains a truth expressed in language of malignant undiluted heartfelt hate. That most difficult of literary triumphs, to render abuse sublime, to sustain a single note of fierce invective without relaxing or weakening the several grades that lead to the catastrophe, has been accom-372-plished. ”

“ One Man finds fault with the plan, Another with the style, a Third with the precept, which it strives to inculcate; and they who cannot succeed in finding fault with the Book, employ themselves in stigmatizing its Author. They maliciously rake out from obscurity every little circumstance which may throw ridicule upon his private character or conduct, and aim at wounding the Man, since They cannot hurt the Writer. In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. ”

“ They will recognise, if they think over it, that the causes of this leaning are bad taste, a kind of naïve vanity, sometimes a disordered mind." Again: "The faults of historic works intended for the general public ... are the results of the insufficient preparation of the bad literary training of the popularisers." ”

“ The wholesale condemnation of works of fiction is consummate absurdity. When all are condemned, people are apt to suppose that any may be read with impunity. Some novelists have sought for their heroes and heroines among thieves and desperadoes; flagitiously indifferent alike to fact and morality, they have laboured with pernicious success to invest these wretched characters with a halo of romantic interest and dignity: but if on this account we give up the principle, then we must give up poetry, fable, allegory, and all kinds of imaginative literature. ”

“ But too much inferior poetry has been poured out as criticism, too much sack and too little bread; confusion between the two activities, on the part of writers and readers alike, is what is primarily responsible for the backwardness of critical studies. What other stultifications of human endeavour it is also responsible for we need not linger here to point out. ”

“ For a long time the want has been seriously felt for something more than mere denunciation to overcome the growing evil of the demoralizing literature—cheap and vile—that has been scattered broadcast over the land. ”

“ But the poems are so "unbalanced," says the literary critic, who, with the caution of his kind, is always on his guard against militant writers who "mean business," who have got something to say, and are determined to say it at whatever hazard to delicate academical proprieties. The poems undoubtedly are unbalanced ”

“ The corruption which has been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and effect. ”

“ This code of morals stigmatizes realistic literature, not because it paints the passions: hatred, vengeance, love—the world sees but the surface and art should paint them—but not paint them without bridle, without limits. ”

“ But since some leading men (whom we have both seen and known) show so great a contempt for literature, that they immediately shut up within their book-cases the excellent works with which they are presented, and thus doom them, as it were, to a perpetual imprisonment ”